The Canon EOS R3 will be 24mp, confirmed by EXIF data

And the expectations for an R1 are suddenly lower...
I don't know, part of me wonders if expectations should be higher for the R1 now. For all we know, the R3 could have been intended as an R1 but got rebranded late in development because it wasn't seen as completely filling the 1D niche in testing. Re starting development of a camera body late in the game isn't really feasible, but giving it a "lower tier" name and creating something above it later could be a reasonably quick way to pivot.
 
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Why? Largely because there's no option, if you're in the Canon system and need a truly rugged camera then the 1DX line is your option.

Remember how they used to split the 1D and 1Ds lines? That was a great way to leverage R&D and production cost whilst catering to the needs of photographers. Sadly the 'merged' 1DX was a step back in many ways.
Not really. The people who wanted the higher resolution rarely needed the durability of the 1D, and Canon put out the 5DS R (which itself is hardly flimsy) for that crowd. As much as the 1Ds mk II will always have a special place in my heart, ultimately they were all work tools and when they effectively scrapped the 1Ds line and moved that function over to the 5D body, it was quite a relief. Having the 1D X set-up ready for action and the 5DSR sat in the studio tethered was a perfect working pairing.

In my opinion this camera is not for someone currently shooting with a 1DX 1DXMKII or 1DXMKIII
Canon literally said this was not a 1D replacement. They have always, from the first second they publicly acknowledged the development of this camera, been very explicit about what it was intended for (sports, i.e. low resolution) and where it would fit in the product line (i.e. below the 1D and eventual R1). They've even said they called it the R3 specifically because it was not worthy of the '1' designation and that they didn't feel RF tech was far enough along for anything to be called '1' yet.



In any case, 24mp is high for a sports camera.

I know several full-time sports pros in this area who use the 1D X mark III exclusively in the medium jpg setting (12.7mp) because even 'just' 20mp jpgs is overkill and pointlessly inconvenient for fast turnaround. Moving up to native 24mp isn't going to help them; at a certain point oyu're just paying for parts you're not actually using and adding on to the CPU's processing load for no benefit. I'm moving to sports full-time soon myself and I was not anticipating using anything above the 24mp mark myself; I always like 24mp for the neat 6000x4000 which satisfies my brain's fixation on having everything rounded off to clean values, but realistically I know that it might be too much at times and I was dreading the rumoured 30mp.
Sometimes I do want higher pixel density. For wildlife I've already got the 7D2 (I don't hold out much hope an R7 will actually be up to the task, but we'll meet that when we come to it) and for anything closer or moving slower I've got the R5 and R. The R3 was never going to be taking the place of any of those, it was never designed to be as per Canon's own statements, and I was never hoping it would. They said it'd be a sports body, I wanted it to be a sports body, and sure enough it's turning out to be a sports body. Brilliant.

If someone wants very high resolution (I'm loathe to say "need" because approximately 0.00001% of shooters actually ever need such high resolution), the R5 is right there and cheaper than this R3 will be. The 5DS R is already there, too, for even more detail than the R5, at least at low to medium ISOs. There's also the Nikon D850, the Sony a7R line, and the Fuji GFX cameras, all ready and waiting. If someone is the kind of person who insists on always buying the most expensive camera no matter what then they can go drop their platinum cards on the 150mp Phase One.

Not every product is designed to meet every requirement or desire. Let the stills cameras be stills cameras, the video cameras be video cameras, the studio cameras be studio cameras, and the sports cameras be sports cameras. I am looking forward to the R3 more now that it seems they are indeed keeping it as optimised for sports as they first promised.
 
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Stig Nygaard

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I have never seen that happen before. Anything is possible, but I don't think you hand these cameras out to people under NDAs with an announcement around the corner and gimp them.

When I edit in Photoshop those data is updated to the size I have scaled the image to. F.ex. this which shows 1380x920, but originally was much larger.
But if the image is not the same dimensions as the exif-data suggests, it is of course a realistic guess it is the original dimensions we see there.
 
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Not all hope is lost for those hoping for more. Sports photographers are one of the few that use Small and Medium JPEGs almost exclusively. On the R5, I can output a file that will show the 22MP dimensions with the click of a few buttons. Additionally, that screen shot mentioned 3 bits per channel which is odd, as I thought JPEGs were 8... maybe someone knows why that is? But most importantly its odd that the dimensions don't have a normal over pixel count. The fact that is cuts off exactly at 24MP suggests that it could be a setting (but note, Canon Rebel bodies in the past have the same size). Don't jump to conclusions yet. All that said, I do believe it will be 30MP and under, so I'm quite happily holding on to my R5 and likely letting this one fall in to obscurity like the last three 1Dx's.
 
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In my opinion this camera is not for someone currently shooting with a 1DX 1DXMKII or 1DXMKIII as a professional to transition your kit from EF to RF at a $50K to $80K+ investment.

1. The loss of OVF
2. Two Different Format Cards
3. No significant jump in resolution
4. Transition to RF Glass

These four factors will make us wait until the R1 is released. Also 30fps is no inducement we know all that is required is 15fps RAW for stills for any sport.

This does leave one to wonder if Canon will double the resolution of the 1DXMKIII for the R1. We are seeing people shoot sports with the Fuji GFX100s and the work is amazing, stunning, beautiful, sharp, crisp with exceptional detail and resolution.
 
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