MIRRORLESS GEAR.
CANON EOS R5C £4499/$4799
“The RF mount has the huge plus of accommodating all the world’s pre-existing EF lenses, with full AF compatibility”
started it all. Canon’s EOS R5 C might reasonably be described as a somewhat transitional design – chunky for a stills camera but still laid out principally like one. At £4499, we’d expect to see some fairly big numbers, and the R5 delivers, with 45-megapixel stills and several varieties of Raw. The R5 C has enough pixels on its sensor to achieve 3K over even the tiny Super 16mm image area, 5.9K in Super 35, and 8K over the whole full-frame image. The RF mount provides most of the advantages of short mounts with the huge plus of accommodating all the world’s pre-existing EF lenses, with full autofocus compatibility via the company’s own adaptor. If the R5 tells us anything about the future of the compact mirrorless camera world, it’s a matter of not so much a quart into
expensive for APS-C. However, if we like lens compatibility and the extra look-around of 6K seems worthwhile, the price starts to look almost modest for what it can do. Incidentally, Fujifilm does have a very big chip with a mirrorless mount and video capabilities – the absolutely enormous GFX-100, with its utterly titanic 102-megapixel, 44x33mm sensor – and an equally staggering almost five-figure price tag. While it’s certainly possible to shoot 4K video on that sensor and force the focus puller to do desperate breathing exercises between takes, the GFX range is intended for accept-no-substitute stills work, and lacks the spec of its modestly-sized stablemates in moving picture mode. A piece like this wouldn’t seem complete without talking about the company which arguably
a pint pot, as several thousand gallons into a thimble. Rigging them for single-camera drama might appeal, depending on the circumstances, but the options for mobile production, or for beginners who want technical issues out of the way of success, have never been more encouraging.
SPOILT FOR CHOICE Canon’s RF mount standard grants access to a huge number of existing optics
FUJIFILM GFX100 £9999/$9999
Lenses We don’t need an hour’s lecture on how refractive indices work to notice that shallow lens mounts make cheaper, better lenses more easily. Mounts common on mirrorless cameras often put the reference surface of the lens around 20mm from the sensor, or sometimes even less. For deeper mounts maintaining distances around 50mm, which includes popular options like PL and EF, things like high- range zooms for documentary get complicated and expensive fast. It’s debatable if it’s even possible to mount something like a Canon CN7x17 zoom on a mirrorless stills camera, and whether it’s more valid to say that the camera mounts to the lens. Still, anyone coming to mirrorless documentary work from a broadcast background might hope in vain for a fast,
small, wide-ranging zoom – which doesn’t really exist in a format that sits well on a pocket-sized body. Lenses such as the E-mount full-frame zooms we’ve mentioned from Sony get around the issue by implementing at least some functions of the zoom electronically. That gets away from some of the most expensive precision engineering required for more conventional designs, and while the result can feel fractionally laggy in specific situations, the price-to-performance ratio is huge. Doing this still depends on the short lens mount, as do popular options like Fujifilm’s MK zooms, and the question in 2023 is perhaps why anyone still builds cameras with deeper mounts.
75. MARCH 2023
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