Update: There will be no development or official announcement of the EOS R5 Mark II next week.
The Canon EOS R5 Mark II is coming, that's not a news flash. Everything about the Canon EOS R1 and Canon EOS R5 Mark II will be public by the time July rolls around. We are 100% certain that there are things happening in July that tell us major products are being prepared to hit the market.
We have reported or heard of two announcement dates this month that did come to fruition. We got the EOS R1 on May 15 and the May 21 announcement was the Golf thing, and we didn't know that was coming.
The third date we have been told about will occur later next week. We have not confirmed this 100% at the time of writing, so we'll see on that one. We'll obviously update certainty if we're comfortable to do so.
We have theory (theories are getting annoying)
The Canon EOS R1 received a development announcement as everyone knows. Canon has not officially told us much of anything about it. That's fine, they've done this before. We expect to get nuggets of information in and around the beginning of Euro 2024 in mid-June. The EOS R3 followed a similar timeline. We had the development announcement and about a month later, they started to trickle out specification and the rest was history. It was an effective strategy, and we're not at all being critical about it.
How does the EOS R5 Mark II fit into this?
While it's obvious that the EOS R5 Mark II and EOS R1 won't be as closely related as Nikon's terrific Z8/Z9 brothers, there will be a lot of overlap in technology inside the cameras, most notably the image sensor and its capabilities. All signs point to the sensor being the technological star of the show. To clarify, they won't have the exact same sensor as far as resolution and whatnot, but they will share capabilities.
If Canon isn't ready to tell us about the EOS R1, it makes a bit of sense to us that they wouldn't release everything about the EOS R5 Mark II prior with an official announcement. That would obviously tell us things about the EOS R1, which they don't want to tell us about yet. It just comes down to timing with our little theory.
Could there be a development announcement for the EOS R5 Mark II as well? Sure, why not?
The knowledge from the usual suspects about the EOS R5 Mark II is pretty much on par with how the EOS R1 rolled out earlier this month.
We will say, there is “buzz” about the EOS R5 Mark II behind the scenes at various places that the EOS R1 didn't have. “Buzz” in these sorts of places is always a sign that never fails. While the EOS R1 gets the fanboy blood pumping, the EOS R5 Mark II will be the sales darling.
We don't expect much over this coming weekend with major holidays in North America, but maybe we'll get some drunk texts 🍻.
We do know a few things more about the EOS R5 Mark II that we are unable to publish at this time, but I can assure you, we don't have long to wait and the wait will be worth it.
The R1 will be less than 30mp, The R52 is 45MP
Remember, Canon doesn't care about your or my $20K with 1 series cameras, they care about all of the agencies that will buy hundreds of them and the professionals that earn a living with them, and always have the ear of Canon.
1 series camera sales don't really move the needle financially on their own. It's the after purchase support services that do.
Unlike the R1 (and R3 at the time of its development announcement), the R5 is a current, shipping product. An R52 development announcement months in advance could hurt current R5 sales.
Old camera stock has never really been an issue with 5 series cameras (or any EOS camera), there are lots of people that don't need the latest and greatest.
I have heard this fallacy before, and it's simply not true.
There are plenty of examples of Canon announcing things, not shipping for months (up to 6 months) and old stock being available and still selling just fine. There is no building holding mountains of cameras that they can't sell.
If in the end, if there are a few left over.. they go to service centres and become replacement instead of repair cameras. The accountants handle all of that.
I just hope we're not falling flat on our noses, when these things come to market and underperform, because we built up expectations to the moon.
I personally don't really care about the R1, but I care about not hearing how canon is doomed and will be dominated by everything including the shittiest smartphone camera in the next years, so they better deliver.
When it comes to the R5 it's basically a win win for me incoming
Either it's awesome as hell and I spend a lot of money on the mark 2, or it's meh and I spend less money on a used mark 1.
The 'reach' of the R7 is amazing, but for things like focus stacking I really appreciate having 45MP over 32MP and a deep buffer so it doesn't halt after 40-ish shots. Offloading a bunch of focus stacks and bursts to my computer also makes me appreciate CFExpress, 300MB/s versus 950MB/s makes the difference between a coffee break and a lunch break :)
The faster electronic shutter excites me the most, especially if I can use a flash with it, like the R3 can. Every year I try to formulate a new goal or style, last year I tried to capture insect outlines shining through foliage e.g.
This year I'd like to get shots of insects (dragons/damsels/butterflies/bees) during take-off, which likely means lots of luck and/or masting the pre-shooting feature. I really hope the R5II improves the functionality and workflow for that, my issues with the current implementation are:
- The multi-step process to enable it is tedious, I don't think you can assign the toggle to a button
- After using it, you're locked out of the camera till the buffer was been flushed completely. That can take a full minute.
- The result is a single, huge file that only DPP4 can handle. And worse, DPP4 doesn't have an 'extract all shots', you have do it one-by-one and it's takes waaaay too many actions per frame.
And I'll stop complaining about niche first world problems now :)However I hope they put CFe4 in both models and not just the R1. Even if the R5 mk2 has a smaller (not unlimited) buffer depth, with a CFe4 interface we should benefit from a fast card to flush the buffer somehow fast 'enough' on the R5 mk2 (such as 10-20fps sustained until card full, not unlimited like the R1). I'll carefully check out the actual tests to see how that goes.
First, I'm sorry. I haven't read all comments to all posts here on CR. So this might have been mentioned before. But someone on dpreview saw a possible hint of what to come in the little EOS R1 teaser video.
First look at the R3 teaser video. In hindsight it clearly hints the Eye Control AF feature.
The Canon EOS R3 is Coming Soon
Then look at the red pattern "flashed" over the EOS R1 title in the R1 teaser video:
The EOS R1
"Quad Pixel" sensor design?
Besides for better autofocus, if true, could such a design also be used for the rumoured dual-gain support?
One pair of sub-pixels with "high" gain, and the other pair of sub-pixels with "low" gain?
I don't know much about dual-gain sensor designs, but I assume the advantage would be higher dynamic range.
/Stig
Nikon does it like you describe: write out each shot after it is taken, so you get a nice, even fps that is limited by your CFe card. The Z9 and Z8 are also able to write to CFe at 900-ish MByte/s, the R5 barely reaches 500MByte/s. Both are below the 1500Mbyte/s practical CFe2 limit.
Bring on CFe4!
I love you people!
Yes, it'll be quad. Not sure if it'll be marketed QPAF or not though.
I am pretty certain CFe4 will come to the R1, and offer quite an extension of the buffer due to the demon speed those recent cards are boasting - peaks in the 2000 MB/s range, sustained is another story of course.
I'm just not sure how the implementation will be for the R5 mk2. Pre-capture eats a lot of data, just like an fps increase, especially if they solved the ES rolling shutter, there will be more need for speed.
Still, they need a differentiation with the R1, if they offer 30 fps on the R5 mk2 and that can be (mostly) sustained with a high speed CFe4 card, that would eat into 1 series territory significantly.
Let's just hope for the best.
What say you @Canon Rumors Guy , CFe4 in the R5 mk2 ?
I am no expert but it sounds much more efficient than splitting all the DPAF zones in 4. We'll see, progress is good.
Thanks, Stig, for the very good news! :love: