Big test
PERFORMANCE: EXPOSURELATITUDE An exposure bracket of Peterborough Cathedral was taken to help assess exposure latitude of the Raws. The correctly metered exposure was 1/250sec at f/9, ISO 100 and the bracket was shot manually by adjusting shutter speeds. Exposure correction was done in Lightroom. The EOS R6’s overexposed Raws were less flexible
anything more and contrast remained high, highlights were burnt out and there was a colour shift. Much more success was enjoyed from the underexposed Raws and even the -4EV was fully recoverable, with barely any gain in digital noise in the shadows. So if you want to control highlights by underexposing them and then recovering the shadows in processing, the Raws from the EOS R6 respond well to that sort of treatment.
than the underexposed Raws when it came to exposure correction. The +1EV and +2EV shots recovered fully, giving results identical to the correctly exposed shot, but
ABOVE The EOS R6 has dual memory card slots, both SD UHS-II compatible so no need for expensive CFexpress cards here. That said, you’ll need high-performing cards to keep buffering to a minimum if you plan to shoot at 20fps
zooming in. Touch shooting and AF is handy when you want to sneak a few candids and it’s great in video, too, for pulling focus or to select part of the scene instead of what the camera picked out. But then it gets niggly when you find the AF point at the bottom left of the monitor instead of the centre, because you happened to brush the touchscreen, or when you take a few shots of your feet with the touch shutter. For me, it would be great if I could have touch control on for menu setting and playback, but off for everything else. I liked the multifunction lock that lets you turn off six controls at the push of a button – the three control dials, the focus joystick, touch control and lens control ring. I had mine set to lock touch control only, so I could deactivate the touch function without having to dig into the menu system. There is even more set-up versatility and that’s provided by the Canon RF lenses and their Lens Control Ring. The default is exposure compensation with half pressure on the shutter button. In total there are 18 choices, including exposure compensation and ISO that can be brought into play with or without partial depression of the shutter button, depending on your preference. Some lenses – not the one tested here – have an AF stop button and this can be reconfigured from the camera, too. One button that is less frequently seen is the rate button, which lets you quickly star rate your shots, and ratings are carried through to your editing software. Obviously, how useful this is depends on how you like to work and how much credence you give to preview images and, of course, going through a big shoot
consumes battery and takes time. Ratings range from one to five stars, and I had three and five active to match my Lightroom workflow. So, there’s much to like in the handling and design aspects of the EOS R6 and that carries through to its performance and image output. The camera might not have a high pixel count, but what it does have works very well, giving an awesome high ISO performance and images that are full of detail. The autofocus, white-balance and autoexposure systems perform admirably, giving consistent results in a wide variety of lighting situations and the burst shooting rate is quick enough, with plenty of capacity for even the keenest action shooter. With a Lexar 2000x SD card, I got just under 13fps in continuous high setting with the mechanical shutter, and 99 full-size Raw frames at that rate before the camera slowed at all. In CRaw format, the exposure count was 250 shots with no signs of stopping. Canon’s Dual Pixel CMOS AF system has been tried and tested on previous models, so it was no surprise to see how effective it was here. It’s smooth, accurate and very responsive, great for stills and video, where using the touchscreen to pull focus within the scene was effective and slick, better than I could manage manually. There’s a choice of eight AF modes and you can set a function button to go into that AF menu and pick the ones you want to choose from. Other options include case studies for continuous focus and there’s the menu for people or animal subjects. For stills shooting, I mostly kept with single or zone focusing using the focus lever, or touch and drag
-4EV
-3EV
-2EV
-1EV
0
+1EV
+2EV
+3EV
+4EV
I LIKED THEMULTIFUNCTION LOCK THAT LETS YOU TURNOFF SIX CONTROLS AT THE PUSHOF ABUTTON
46 Photography News | Issue 83
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