Photography News issue 18

Camera review

FIRST LOOK

SPECS

Canon EOS 5DS At £3000 for the body, Canon’s latest DSLR isn’t cheap, but after sampling a pre-production model Roger Payne has already got a kidney on eBay

PRICE EOS 5DS £2999.99, EOS 5DS R £3199.99 body only CONTACT www.canon.co.uk SENSOR 50.6 megapixels (total: 53), CMOS, 36x24mm, 8688x5792 pixels PROCESSOR 100-6400 (expandable down to 50 and up to 12,800) SHUTTER 30secs-1/8000sec, plus B MAX FRAME RATE 5fps for up to 510 JPEGs or 14 Raw files METERING SYSTEM 150,000 pixel RGB+IR Dual DIGIC 6 ISORANGE (1.3%), centre-weighted EXPOSUREMODES Scene Intelligent Auto, program AE, shutter- priority AE, aperture- priority AE, manual, Custom x3 EXPOSURE COMPENSATION +/-5EV in 0.3 or 0.5EV stops, AEB 2, 3, 5 or 7 shots, +/-3EV in 0.3 or 0.5EV stops AUTOFOCUSMODES AI focus, one shot, predictive AI servo FOCUSING POINTS 61 MONITOR Fixed 3.2in, 1040k dot resolution VIDEO Full HD at 30p STORAGEMEDIA Dual card slots: CompactFlash (UDMA 7 compatible), SD, SDHC, SDXC DIMENSIONS (WXHXD) 152x116.4x76.4mm WEIGHT 845g (body only) sensor. Evaluative, partial (6.1%), spot

upshot? Even sharper pictures, allegedly. Much like a stripped-out sports car, you pay more for what is effectively less in the 5DS R; approximately £500 more, to be precise. Although a number of pros have been secretly using the new camera, I first got to grips with both models at the UK press announcement last month. While these can often be a bunfight, with only a couple of new models between a room full of journalists, Canon had a sensible allocation, enabling me to build up a proper picture of the camera.

capable 70D, but this was hardly enough to get the blood coursing through the veins of your serious photo enthusiast. But it turns out those Canon guys had been teasing us all along as, hot on the heels of the really rather spectacular 7D Mark II, we’ve got this: the EOS 5DS. Oh, and the 5DS R, of course. The only difference between the two is the fact that the 5DS R features a low-pass cancellation filter. This doesn’t mean that the low-pass filter has been removed from in front of the sensor, just that its effect is cancelled out. The

Words by Roger Payne

Is it just me, or are Canon producing exciting DSLRs again? Maybe the company had become the victim of its own product life cycles, but I can’t help thinking that the prosumer section of their product line-up has been moving a little glacially of late. We’d had the Canon EOS 5D Mark III, of course, but that was in 2012 and we had to wait until late 2014 before the 7D Mark II arrived. In between we’d had the perfectly

A big change over the 5DMark III? EOS 5DS or 5D Mark III? Our at-a-glance guide to key aspects of both models’ specifications should give you some pointers:

5D MARK III

5DS

RESOLUTION

22.3 megapixels

50.6 megapixels

NATIVE ISO RANGE

100-25,600

100-6400

PROCESSOR

DIGIC 5+

Dual DIGIC 6

MAXIMUM FRAME RATE

6fps

5fps

CONTINUOUS BURST CAPABILITY

18 Raw, 16270 JPEGs

14 Raw, 510 JPEGs

METERING

63-zone dual-layer SPC

150k pixel RGB+IR sensor

AF POINTS

MAX. VIDEO FRAME RATE

30p

CARD SLOTS

Photography News | Issue 18