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AaronT · Mar 13, 2026

My 5DsR still takes great photos.

mb66energy · Mar 13, 2026

Malm said:
And when will Canon start again to make proper lenses for photographers?
To be honest; I'm sick of these hyped VCM lenses for videographers - so called 'creators'. All I need are just excellent optical lenses without much 'digital correction' and also without this strict size and weight limits as for VCM lenses.
Canon already has an extended line of these light and good video lenses, so what about the very good lenses for photographers?

Same here - I hoped for an 18mm f/1.4 with very good optical correction but image height shows that this lens is meant to be used with digital correction.
So I will use my older EF glass if required which is IMO often overall well corrected and has the convenience factor of the use of variable ND filter adapters for both, video and photo and is ... available. Thankfully the IBIS of modern Canon cameras does a good job for photo with old lenses incl. the 180mm LAOWA which is great!

m4ndr4ke · Mar 13, 2026

It's surprising to me how they discontinued the original R5 before this one.

Brown · Mar 13, 2026

What does this mean for the 2000D/T7?

Brown · Mar 13, 2026

el peso said:
Is R5 Mark II any worse? Would you cry about original R5? So why all this funeral wailing?

It's the end of (D)SLRs, aside from Pentax, provided they release the K-1 Mark III.
No one will cry for the R5, just as no one did for the 10D.

Del Paso · Mar 13, 2026

A truly great camera has gone…
Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

Del Paso · Mar 13, 2026

Richard-CN said:
The Canon EOS 5D series has been at the core of innovation in digital photography for two decades, with each successive model in the lineup raising the bar for innovation in photography equipment, starting with the original EOS 5D in 2005, which was a game-changer in photography, being the first full-frame DSLR that provided unparalleled […]

See full article...

SnowMiku · Mar 13, 2026

I predict in 10-20 years time the used value of DSLRs like the 5D IV will go up, just like some point and shoots. The next generation will want to know what it's like using an OVF.

Michael Clark · Mar 13, 2026

neuroanatomist said:
Indeed. Here’s another post from Roger Cicala on the topic:

Front Element Lens Protection Revisited

The internet is an interesting resource. Once you've put a reference up, it's there forever. Over time, things may change, but that 10-year-old article doesn't. A few weeks ago someone used some old articles I'd written (1, 2, 3) as a reason why he doesn't use protective UV filters. They claimed...

www.lensrentals.com

I’m firmly in the use filters camp, but I’ve always tempered that with the same approach Roger describes. For example, there’s no front filter on my RF 28/2.8. A few months ago when cleaning the filter on my RF 24-105/2.8L Z, the wisdom of my choice was reaffirmed. Replacing the front element would have been much more costly than the $100 for a new B+W 82mm clear filter to replace this one.

View attachment 228335

I’ve never had a filter get stuck on a lens. I have had stacked filters get stuck together (ND and CPL), and I learned to keep a set of $8 filter wrenches in the bag when I bring filters.

When Roger first starting writing those articles about whether or not UV/protective filters made sense for most shooting scenarios he pointed out that a front element could often be replaced cheaper than what a B+W or other high end filter cost at the time. By the time he wrote the last one several years later, that was not so much the case for many newer lenses introduced in the intervening decade or so.

Part of Roger's consideration is that even though he knows a minor scratch won't affect photos in any real way, such a scratch does affect many who would rent a lens from his business that arrives with such a scratch. It's the same thing with internal dust. He knows it doesn't really affect photos taken with the lens unless it's really full of dust, but they still clean them regularly at lensrentals because their customers won't tolerate lenses with very much dust in them.

I've had the same EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS since 2011. Sometime around 2014 it got a single tiny chip on the front surface about 1/3 of the way from the center to the edge of the front element. It's pretty easy to see when looking at the front of the lens in bright light. I've continued using it and have never seen any effect from it in any of the tens of thousands of photos I've used it to take since.

One of Roger's most well know blogs was about just how bad front element "scratches" have to be before they make any real difference in photos taken with the lens. He posted some slightly blurry photos of a dumpster behind his lensrentals warehouse and a legible but obviously blurry test chart image before revealing the lens with which he'd made the photos:

Michael Clark · Mar 13, 2026

DocInfoSci said:
My 24-70 f/4 with its zoom barrel has survived torrential west coast rain, quantities of reindeer snot and mud, and other such nuisance. For years. I use a high quality UV filter on the front.

I think that all progress is progress, so bravo Canon by making an even more sealed lens, but with appropriate respect and post-event care a solid EF lens is more than capable in the elements.

I also have the 16-35 f/4 lens. With an appropriate front filter I don’t even blink getting it outdoors in all kinds of conditions. And hey, its barrel doesn’t move unlike my still very reliable 24-70.

And yes: the warranty doesn’t cover water. Enjoy your equipment responsibly. Or at least yell with enthusiasm as you swing your lens up in the sky while stepping over fallen Sony and Nikon photographers as you head unto the breach!

I quit using UV filters when I started shooting in stadiums with bright overhead light sources inside the frame or other similar situations. Flat filters cause ghosting under such lighting conditions. I've never had an issue with "non weather-sealed" lenses in light rain even with no filter on the lens.

The only spin-on filter I currently use very much at all is a circular polarizer. I have Cokin square GND and color correction filters (for shooting tungsten film in daylight, or vice-versa, or shooting daylight film under traditional fluorescent lights). But these days with raw digital the only color correction I do is to gel flashes to match ambient light. I do carry a spin-on UV filter that I use only if I am near salt-water spray, in a sandstorm/dust storm, or an industrial environment with hot metallic particles flying off of grinders, welders, etc.

From way back in the dark ages two decades ago:

Canon Rebel XTi with kit EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-56 II (non-IS) and UV filter.

Michael Clark · Mar 13, 2026

riker said:
Sorry, I don't get it, what are you actually saying?
Are you trying to say, that my statement of the Sigma 135/1.8 being superior is false, and the Canon is rendering subjects sharper and has smoother foreground and background than the Sigma, despite such a destroying test result for example?

https://www.the-digital-picture.com...meraComp=979&SampleComp=0&FLIComp=0&APIComp=0

Is that what you want to say?

What I am saying is that acutance measured using a two-dimensional test chart parallel to the camera's sensor tells you nothing about bokeh. Absolutely nothing.

Words from the mouth of Roger Cicala in an article titled Why I Don't Use An MTF Bench To Test My Own Lenses:

That's because all lab tests have some major limitations. The biggest one is this: real images are 3-dimensional, they are focused at a variety of distances, and almost always contain foregrounds and backgrounds. Optical tests are two-dimensional slices taken at a fixed focusing distance with no background or foreground. The focusing distance is infinity for an optical bench. It’s a single, close distance for Imatest / DxO / and other computer image analysis methods.

So, the lab tests tell me everything I want to know about the plane of exact best focus at one focusing distance. That’s really useful information, especially if you want to find out if a lens is optically maladjusted, want to know what kind of aberrations it has, or are interested in its maximum resolution. And it gives people numbers – the ammunition of choice in many a Forum War.

Another of Roger's articles at his lensrentals blog: Everything but the Sharpness

In reality, though, we get so fixated on sharpness results from MTF charts and bench lab tests that we hardly ever talk about all the other things that can be of critical importance in a lens. Critically important, but often ignored or forgotten, partly because we get so fixated about sharpness, and partly because they’re disguised in a flurry of initials, abbreviations, and marketing hype. My point is that we fixate on absolute sharpness which is measured in a lab, on a tripod, focusing on a static target under controlled lighting, often using live-view focus bracketing to get the very best image a lens is capable of delivering. Such tests show how sharp a lens can be under ideal conditions. But there are a lot of other factors that go into determining how good the images will be under real-world shooting conditions, where subjects move, lighting changes, the shots are handheld, etc.

All lens design is compromise. The flat field correction needed to make a flat test chart look sharper on the edges very often makes out of focus objects harsher and busier than designs that are not made for potential buyers who are obsessed with how well a lens reproduces flat test charts above all else.

Michael Clark · Mar 13, 2026

becceric said:
I enjoyed my FS-1 and FT-1, and found them both quick to adjust while shooting. I really liked the FT-1's more rounded contours. Yep. They were 1 fps. And the shutter/advance mech didn't freak out and open the blades while advancing the film like my T-3n and T-4 did.

In the mirror box, both had an unpainted metal strip right below the shutter blades. This caused a flare on the film during very bright days. Unbelievable that two generations had this issue. Some flat black paint solved it.

I think the FS-1 I bought used had been traded in for an FT-1 not long after the FT-1 came out. It's been 40 years but I'm pretty sure that is what the salesman at Camera World in Charlotte, NC told me. The building they were in is long gone and the U.S. 74 freeway passes over where it was. Back in the 1980s U.S. 74 was a street level road that passed a block or two from the camera store. My FS-1 still had a nice form-fitting cloth-lined leather case on it, the lower half of which stayed on when you shot with the camera. I guess the case for the FS-1 wouldn't fit the FT-1 so the previous owner left it on when they traded it in?

I never noticed a flare issue. I did tend to shoot in more subdued lighting most of the time when I used the 40mm prime, though. The length of the 28-210mm lens I used on daylight probably eliminated most off axis light long before it reached the light box. It could vignette pretty heavily in the frame at wider angles of view.

erader · Mar 13, 2026

DocInfoSci said:
Fair, but the price I quoted is from today. Regardless, the R&D for both have been spent and actualized. It’s really just a matter of putting it together. Not unlike the first gen RF great whites.

$1700 in 2017 = $2300 today

erader · Mar 13, 2026

Malm said:
If you mean the wide selection of different lenses as in the 'EF-era' I agree. But I strongly disagree with any narrowing of the discussion to video OR photography. What we have is a video AND photography! What I see is that new lenses are a little bit heavy-sided for video at the moment.

Concerning the lens market: Canon knows that much better than us. I can only speak for myself.

how does that make VCM lenses less capable for photography?

erader · Mar 13, 2026

chrysoberyl said:
'Move a few steps back for 18mm?' Markedly ineffective when photographing the Milky Way Core.

and let's face it, these wide VCM primes are perhaps the best MW lenses made

erader · Mar 13, 2026

DocInfoSci said:
Haha — I was just thinking that this morning in the shower.

Building on what you said...

While acknowledging that lenses can be used in many ways, let's look at this from the concept of matched perspective:

Let's say I have a 45mm or 50mm lens equivalent and I find my friend standing.

First, I decide to plant my tripod, mount my camera, and then take a 2/3rds body photo that nicely captures my friend, with a very minimal hint of where they are or what they are up to. I then swap my 50mm for a 100mm and, without moving the tripod, take a tight shot of their face: great eyes, nice hair, good looking person all-around. I then, again without moving my tripod, place my 24mm lens and take another photo — now we see they're at a park with trees and path. I repeat with my 20mm to emphasize the context a little more. I've now told a small story about my friend. Interestingly, because I didn't move at all, my lenses simply served to crop the scene to focus on one aspect or the other; the relative position of everything remains the same as they come into the picture. If I digitally crop my 20mm to be like the 24, or the 24 to be like the 50 then the placement of trees relative to the person and any other object remains generally the same but the amount of scene included does change. My perspective never changed from where my tripod was planted relative to the person — I simply showed more less of the world relative to that person.

Second, I instead decide to zoom with my feet and whether the 24mm or 50mm or 100mm I frame my friend to fill the sensor approximately the same: how the person looked and how objects around them appeared in relative position would change significantly. Trees would seem very close or very far away, as an example, regardless of how I might digitally crop the photos later.

So for people who shoot with primes the options matter if they are attempting to tell a story with the same perspective but different amounts of the world included in the scene. And approximately doubling the mm's from one prime to the next allows for meaningful jumps in scene crop factor to allow for different meaningful reflections on the subject without distorting the scene or subject from one photo to the next.

The Milky Way is a great extreme example because no matter where you walk to on your chosen continent your relative position to the galactic core is effectively the same: choose a 14mm, 20mm, 24mm, 35mm, etc. and you can digitally crop from wider to longer and achieve the same relative content with less scene.

You can reproduce this example with a zoom, such as 16-35 or 24-105: plant a tripod, choose a subject, take photos at different lengths, and then crop the widest to match something tighter and observe that the relative position of objects in the scene does not change.

"The Milky Way is a great extreme example because no matter where you walk to on your chosen continent your relative position to the galactic core is effectively the same: choose a 14mm, 20mm, 24mm, 35mm, etc. and you can digitally crop from wider to longer and achieve the same relative content with less scene."

yeah not that simple

yeahright · Mar 13, 2026

Richard CR said:
No.

fair

Richard-CN · Mar 13, 2026

The Canon EOS 5D series has been at the core of innovation in digital photography for two decades, with each successive model in the lineup raising the bar for innovation in photography equipment, starting with the original EOS 5D in 2005, which was a game-changer in photography, being the first full-frame DSLR that provided unparalleled […]

See full article...

Richard-CN · Mar 13, 2026

davidespinosa said:
Richard -- WHY would Canon release an 18mm when they already have the 20mm ?
You must have SOME idea, but I couldn't understand it from your post.

as the lenses get wider, the difference between 1 or 2mm become quite a bit more significant.

hardly a difference between say, 50 and 52mm, but there's a world of difference between 20 and 18.

Richard-CN · Mar 13, 2026

DocInfoSci said:
I'd go for mechanically linked focus with full time manual override and an external distance / depth of field gauge. Everything else can remain the same that would be compatible with those requirements.

Larger optics on the exit would also be nice. If you take the 24mm f/1.4 ii USM lens and compare it to, say, the EF 24-70 f/4 IS USM lens you'll notice something interesting at 24mm for each when digital corrections are applied: more scene is displayed in the final TIFF or JPEG with the prime than with the zoom. The pixel dimensions are the same, but more scene is presented. If you turn off corrections the scene is the same. The correction for zoom requires some crop, apparently, to gets things right — but the prime, with its huge exit optics, gets by with less adjustment. I suspect that for the VCMs either Canon has oversized the intake glass or made the real mm count a tag shorter (23 vs 24, 13 vs 14) to compensate for the small exit glass or there truly is less scene captured with the VCM for the stated length and with a lack of good comparisons no one is the wiser — and hey, "good enough" is "good enough."

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't buy the VCM lenses — I think they're a great idea and serve multiple audiences at once. I have no doubt that a collection of VCMs will make someone smile for years to come.

But mechanically linked focus (no power required) and external aids (no need to chimp in the EVF or back screen) with big exit optics covering the sensor are worth something. Apparently they cost less, too, given the price of a 24mm EF prime and a 24mm VCM prime:

EF 24mm f/1.4 II USM at BH Photo - $1,549 regular price

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/590449-USA/Canon_2750B002_EF_24mm_f_1_4L_II.html

RF 24mm f/1.4 VCM - $1,649 regular price

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1859145-REG/canon_6907c002_rf_24mm_f_1_4_l.html

So I don't think it's in the realm of crazy for Canon to do the best of both for many people at a reasonable price. Canon's made "big glass and fast" for years before RF with world winning results.

Not that I think Canon is under any pressure to do so at this time. The EF lens stock for the most recent generation of quality EF glass remains large, as is the installed base. Canon has the luxury at this time of pushing as hard in innovation as they can on the RF mount without insulting too many people in this regard, and later they can bring forward some classic elements or let a third party do so. Right now solutions like VCM make good sense, with small optics and digital corrections achieving size and weight reductions; as do sports lenses that can auto-AF track with superman like ability — even if at the cost of no-mechanical linking, power-on-only, etc.

you aren't seriously comparing the EF 24mm f1.4 vs the RF 24mm f1.4 and completely ignoring the fact that the RF 24mm takes the EF version out to the woodshed in terms of image quality?

mechnical linking with no power on is a weird hill to die on when the entire view finder optical path for mirrorless.. requires power.

Richard-CN · Mar 13, 2026

Malm said:
And when will Canon start again to make proper lenses for photographers?
To be honest; I'm sick of these hyped VCM lenses for videographers - so called 'creators'. All I need are just excellent optical lenses without much 'digital correction' and also without this strict size and weight limits as for VCM lenses.
Canon already has an extended line of these light and good video lenses, so what about the very good lenses for photographers?

we've been through this.

Richard-CN · Mar 13, 2026

yeahright said:
Will there be a canonrumors headline without a question mark anytime soon?

No.

CanonGrunt · Mar 12, 2026

Well, technically Canon did make an 18mm prime, the legendary Canon K35 18mm cinema lens. 18mm is a well liked focal length in cinema, and these vcm lenses are well liked on the c70/ c80 / r50v & r5c as gimbal flyers. I would absolutely love an 18mm vcm lens. More useful in cinema than the 14mm, a touch wider where you need it than the 20mm. I would love seeing a 28mm vcm lenses, and a prime in the 60-75 mm range, and the 100mm. Would give the widest array of options for cinematographers looking for lightweight versatility and range.

DocInfoSci · Mar 12, 2026

neuroanatomist said:
The EF 24/1.4 II launched at $1700 in 2008. The RF 24 launched at $1500, before the tariff increases.

Fair, but the price I quoted is from today. Regardless, the R&D for both have been spent and actualized. It’s really just a matter of putting it together. Not unlike the first gen RF great whites.

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