Canon R5

[Michael Clark]

If you go to CanonPriceWatch and look at the price history charts for the 5D series there is a pattern of price drops often beginning as early as one year after introduction and continuing until the introduction of a subsequent model. The surprising thing is not that the R5 price has dropped, it is that the R5 price has held steady for as long as it has, only starting to drop around November of last year. That Canon kept the price high for so long is likely the result of pandemic shortages that keep demand above supply for longer than usual.

If the usual pattern holds, the R5 will remain at or near current prices until shortly before an announcement of the R5 II. Once the R5 II announcement is imminent, we may see another significant drop in price.

CanonPriceWatch is useful if you're looking to buy at a price lower than Canon allows their official dealers to advertise.

The CPW graph shows the 5D Mark IV price for the entire month of June 2019 was $2,799. I just double checked my B&H invoice. I bought mine plus free grip at an advertised price of $2,599 on June 19, 2019. It was an official Canon "instant rebate" and freebie promotion that only lasted for a week or two, but CPW doesn't show it at all.

But I was mainly referring to the "free grip" deal that seems to hit in late spring on the third year after introduction.

 

[Michael Clark]

Memory in general has dropped like a rock because people are not buying or building computers an anywhere near the rate they were a year or two ago.
You can get some pretty sweet deals on hard drives as well. Never hurts to have an extra backup and spinning rust has better data longevity than flash memory in spite of all the mechanicals.

Yes, I was just giving one example. Cutting edge CPUs, on the other hand: not so much.

I'm wondering if the sudden and dramatic drop in flash memory and RAM over the past few months has more to do with the final effects of the Renesas fire back in March 2021?

Most chip makers were already running in overdrive at the time of the fire and global supply issues caused a run on chip orders. Vehicle manufacturers were spooling back up after a big slump in sales in 2020, but the capacity for the chips they needed had already been booked by companies making electronic devices like tablets, monitors, and laptops for the millions of folks who started working from home in 2020. Perhaps everyone stayed in overdrive a bit too long when the demand for those kinds of devices dropped back down to more normal levels, creating a glut of flash memory?

 

[Michael Clark]

Memory in general has dropped like a rock because people are not buying or building computers an anywhere near the rate they were a year or two ago.
You can get some pretty sweet deals on hard drives as well. Never hurts to have an extra backup and spinning rust has better data longevity than flash memory in spite of all the mechanicals.

As far as the falling prices of hard drives go, I think it's a corollary effect of the drop in flash memory. With flash memory getting cheap enough to use not only for boot drives but also for primary storage, consumers and businesses are abandoning spinning drives for flash in droves. My brother-in-law who is a network administrator for a decent sized company says they are transitioning to all solid state on their servers distributed throughout server farms all over the U.S. when current hard drives are due for rolling replacement.

 

[Dragon]

Yes, I was just giving one example. Cutting edge CPUs, on the other hand: not so much.

I'm wondering if the sudden and dramatic drop in flash memory and RAM over the past few months has more to do with the final effects of the Renesas fire back in March 2021?

Most chip makers were already running in overdrive at the time of the fire and global supply issues caused a run on chip orders. Vehicle manufacturers were spooling back up after a big slump in sales in 2020, but the capacity for the chips they needed had already been booked by companies making electronic devices like tablets, monitors, and laptops for the millions of folks who started working from home in 2020. Perhaps everyone stayed in overdrive a bit too long when the demand for those kinds of devices dropped back down to more normal levels, creating a glut of flash memory?

Maybe a piece of the picture, but if you look a PC sales figures, they peaked in 2021 due to Covid and now dropping very fast back to pre-Covid levels and likely well below if the inflation problem doesn't get licked quickly. A chunk of those "free" trillions went into PC sales. Pretty clear that the memory guys didn't anticipate the drop as well as they might have. OTOH, they made a killing for a couple of years.

 

[Michael Clark]

Maybe a piece of the picture, but if you look a PC sales figures, they peaked in 2021 due to Covid and now dropping very fast back to pre-Covid levels and likely well below if the inflation problem doesn't get licked quickly. A chunk of those "free" trillions went into PC sales. Pretty clear that the memory guys didn't anticipate the drop as well as they might have. OTOH, they made a killing for a couple of years.

I guess if you consider Chromebooks and Tablets to be "PCs", then yeah. That's what all of the school teachers and students around here got. Also what a lot of folks who transitioned to work from home got.

 

[Dragon]

I guess if you consider Chromebooks and Tablets to be "PCs", then yeah. That's what all of the school teachers and students around here got. Also what a lot of folks who transitioned to work from home got.

Chromebooks and tablets use memory too, but actual PC sales were subatantially up in 2021 and 2022. Back to 2018 levels now and still dropping.

 

[EOS 4 Life]

Sorry you don't like yours. You may be in the minority. Lots of people seem to like the R5's grip. I haven't bought one myself.

I have one.
I also have an R3 and I do not mind the R5 battery grip at all.
My biggest complaint about the R5 is the battery life which led me to get the grip in the first place.

 

[EOS 4 Life]

CPW doesn't show it at all

CPW only show what they can get affiliate links for.

 

[SwissFrank]

My biggest complaint about the R5 is the battery life

Ditto. As the camera it is, it seems pretty perfect, but even with medium-light amateur use I have to charge batteries every 2-4 weeks. I've never had more than one battery for a digital camera, and for this one I'm not even sure two is enough. I've shot 16 hour days (e.g. at the Zurich Street Parade, like noon to 4am) and I don't think even two batteries would suffice and I can't just duck into a convenience store and get some AA's like I did with the 1N or 1V.

 

[[email protected]]

I have one.
I also have an R3 and I do not mind the R5 battery grip at all.
My biggest complaint about the R5 is the battery life which led me to get the grip in the first place.

I use and like my R5 grips, but it does drive me bananas that they didn't manage to match up the controls more identically as you switch from landscape to portrait orientation.

EVERY time I go portrait aspect ratio, my right thumb has to fumble around to find the wheel and joystick. It's just an extra second, but when I'm swapping from one to the other without taking my eye from the viewfinder, I don't have that second to spare.

Only now in retrospect do I realize that what I've been doing is compensating by keeping my hands on the landscape controls, contorting my arms, as though I weren't using the grip. I didn't find myself doing this back in my 5D IV days, or especially when shooting Panasonic or Sony with grips (although Sony's ergos back then were worse with or without a grip).

I very much liked the R3 ergos for the month I had it, in either orientation. I think that camera is the best existing for hand fit. Had it more resolution, I'd still have it. I'm not sure that you *could* make a gripless R5 that would have that feel when coupled with a removable grip that was designed to complete an R3-like experience. Curious if Neuro and others who are using the R3 think you could launch an R5 II that would have the top two thirds of that camera with those ergos, and then add a grip to match the vertical controls. Not having one in front of me, I can't quite judge whether that's possible or not, but I'm skeptical. -tig

 

[SwissFrank]

I use and like my R5 grips, but it does drive me bananas that they didn't manage to match up the controls more identically as you switch from landscape to portrait orientation.

We carry around these huge lenses that make a 43mm wide image circle. The sensor should also be 43mm square, about twice the current area. It would capture only a circular image of course but still very useful. From that you could get the traditional 36x24mm image, but also without rotating the camera, also a 24x36mm image. You'd also be able to do a wide variety of non-3:2 ratio shots with far higher pixel counts. For instance if you want a 1:1 square, today you throw away 1/3 of your pixels and an R5 only gives you 30MP for a 24x24mm image. You could get 48MP with a 31x31mm image. Granted that not only the sensor, but display, battery, and sensor->storage pipeline would be twice as big, but the rest of the camera needn't be. You could also correct camera roll, and keystone/perspective, in postprocessing/editing without losing pixels.

 

[neuroanatomist]

We carry around these huge lenses that make a 43mm wide image circle. The sensor should also be 43mm square, about twice the current area. It would capture only a circular image of course but still very useful.

You're not the first to propose this. The increased cost makes it very unlikely this will ever happen. Secondarily, many lenses have rectangular baffles at the rear and many lens hoods are petal shaped, both of which would be problematic in that case.

 

[Dragon]

A lot of those who propose this also don't understand simple geometry and think a square pulled from a circle has a larger total image area than a rectangle. But really, if you sketch it out the rectangle is going to have the same amount of square inches as the square because what you gain in height, you lose in width. So, the only way to get more image area is to have circular images. Circular images were okay for the original Kodak, but not many examples since.

I think you need to go back and study geometry again.

 

[neuroanatomist]

I think you need to go back and study geometry again.

Yeah, that's one of the early proofs one must perform in geometry – prove that the rectangle inscribed in a circle that gives the largest area is a square.

Probably some conflation going on here. @unfocused is wrong about the square inscribed in the circle having the same area as a rectangle, the square will give the largest possible area (in the case of FF lenses with a 43mm diameter image circle, the inscribed square has an area of 924.5 mm2, the 3:2 inscribed rectangle (36x24mm) sensor has an area of 864 mm2.

Many people propose a square sensor that fits within the image circle, and in that case the 3:2 crops from such a sensor will be smaller in area than a 36x24mm sensor (they'd be about 30x20mm). I suspect @unfocused is conflating those suggestions with those of @SwissFrank, who is suggesting not a 30.4x30.4mm square sensor but a 43x43mm square sensor.

 

[Dragon]

Yeah, that's one of the early proofs one must perform in geometry – prove that the rectangle inscribed in a circle that gives the largest area is a square.

Probably some conflation going on here. @unfocused is wrong about the square inscribed in the circle having the same area as a rectangle, the square will give the largest possible area (in the case of FF lenses with a 43mm diameter image circle, the inscribed square has an area of 924.5 mm2, the 3:2 inscribed rectangle (36x24mm) sensor has an area of 864 mm2.

Many people propose a square sensor that fits within the image circle, and in that case the 3:2 crops from such a sensor will be smaller in area than a 36x24mm sensor (they'd be about 30x20mm). I suspect @unfocused is conflating those suggestions with those of @SwissFrank, who is suggesting not a 30.4x30.4mm square sensor but a 43x43mm square sensor.

In Swiss Frank's defense, he did mention a 31x31mm 48Mp image so I think he had the right idea, but didn't put it out as clearly as he might have.

 

[unfocused]

I never was very good at geometry. Guess I better scratch that response. (In my defense, our geometry teacher was an alcoholic who wrote the assignment on the board and then disappeared into the teacher's lounge to sneak a drink, reappearing only at the end of the class.)

And, yes, Neuro is right, I was thinking of a square sensor that fits within the image circle and would yield smaller 3:2 crops. At least that's my story.

 

[Michael Clark]

CPW only show what they can get affiliate links for.

B&H?

 

[GarfieldHurlbutt]

Anyone else notice the R5 is now $500 dollars off at both Adorama and B&H? Showbox jiofi.local.html tplinklogin

Money is getting very tight. There are deals showing up on all kinds of stuff (not just cameras) that normally isn't discounted.

 

[SwissFrank]

Money is getting very tight. There are deals showing up on all kinds of stuff (not just cameras) that normally isn't discounted.

Are you in the US? If so it may be a factor of strong dollar. Yen's been around 100-110 for years but now yen is weakened to 146 to the dollar. USD is also like 17% stronger vs CNY etc.

 

[EOS 4 Life]

Money is getting very tight. There are deals showing up on all kinds of stuff (not just cameras) that normally isn't discounted.

The R5 is 3 years old.
It is extremely popular or the price would have dropped by now on its own.