2024-07-17 12:00:44| Engadget
Canon has unveiled its most important camera in years the EOS R1 mirrorless. Launched alongside the 45-megapixel R5 II, its the company's new flagship designed to replace the 1DX Mark III DSLR and help Canon maintain its leadership in the pro sports photography field.
The R1 is all about speed, with the stacked sensor allowing 40 fps RAW bursts with continuous autofocus. Other features are designed to help nail crucial shots, including pre-capture, eye-tracking AF and sports-specific settings. At the same time, it should be great for video, thanks to its support for 6K RAW capture.
One potential downside is the 24-megapixel resolution, which is lower than rivals like Sonys A1 and the Nikon Z9. To see how that affected image quality and gather some impressions on performance and new features, I was able to get a short amount of hands-on time with the R1 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Though massive for a mirrorless camera, the R1 is lighter than it looks it only weighs 2.12 pounds. The magnesium alloy body is dust- and water-resistant and the large, comfortable grip uses new rubber to reduce slippage. Its a stable platform, even with telephoto lenses, and was clearly designed for working photographers.
Controls are laid out much like the EOS R3, with two control dials, a rear dial, joystick, mode switch and many customizable buttons. It has matching vertical controls, with the same layout in portrait and landscape modes.
Canon did add a touch-sensitive IR button called the smart controller, which offers three ways to adjust autofocus. Overall, the R1 handles like an F1 car fast and reactive, but there's a steep learning curve.
The viewfinder is Canons best yet with 9.44 million dots, 0.9 times magnification and 3x brightness, all tops in the EOS series. The rear display fully articulates for high- and low-angle shooting.
Canon decided to ditch SD cards in favor of two CFexpress type B slots. That allows for maximum RAW burst speeds, as well as fast and reliable backups, but you'll end up throwing your SD card collection out the window. By contrast, Sony's R1 has dual card slots for both SD UHS II and CFexpress type A.
The R1 uses a variant of the battery from the EOS R3 that supports up to 650 shots and 70 minutes of 6K video on a charge. Connectivity is the best Ive seen on any Canon camera, with Wi-Fi 6E, ethernet, USB-C PD and more.
The R1 is built for action and suffice to say, its fast. In blackout free electronic shutter mode, you can shoot JPEG and RAW frames at up to 40 fps for a long while before the massive buffer fills with Canon promising "1,000 or more" shots when shooting uncompressed RAW and JPEG files. It hits 12 fps with the mechanical shutter, a feature missing on Nikons rival Z9.
Steve Dent for Engadget
The latter isnt usually necessary, though, as the stacked shutter largely eliminates rolling shutter distortion.
Canon is bringing numerous autofocus improvements as well. With regular single-point tracking, you can change the target with either the joystick or smart controller. In addition, the R1 has a new eye-tracking system called Eye AF II, a more sophisticated version of its Eye Control AF from the R3.
As with the R3, you must calibrate Eye AF II first. And it wont necessarily function well for all eye types, but it worked great for me, as the tracking box followed my gaze with less drift than before. That didnt always translate to sharp photos, but again, I was using a pre-production unit.
Of course the R1 offers face- and eye-detection for both humans and animals. But what happens if youre trying to single out someone in a crowd of players?
Steve Dent for Engadget
First off, there are now AI modes for three specific sports, volleyball, basketball and soccer. The idea is that the system will track action around the ball to help you nail key shots. Its also supposed to stay locked on a player even in traffic. Finally, you can register up to 10 faces to keep track of a whole team of athletes.
How well does this work? Its hard to say in the short time I had the camera, but I didnt notice a dramatic improvement with chaotic action or specific sports. But these features require time to master, so a full review will tell me more.
Another new feature to help pros avoid missing shots is pre-continuous shooting, something that's seen on many high-end cameras these days. The R1 starts taking photos when you half-press the shutter button, recording up to the last 20 frames once its fully pressed.
Canon has led the way in image stabilization since the R5, and the R1 offers a solid 8.5 stops of shake reduction with supported lenses. This isnt necessarily a great benefit for action shooting, but it does help with landscapes or low-light shooting.
Canon likely anticipated complaints about the relatively low 24-megapixel resolution. In response, it unveiled a new feature called in-camera upscaling. It uses deep learning to quadruple image size to 96 megapixels in-camera after shooting, supposedly while maintaining apparent resolution.
This is different from Sony's pixel-shift scheme that takes multiple separate photos and merges them into one. However, it was hard to get a straight answer from Canon as to how exactly the upscaling works. Obviously, it cant be a true resolution increase without actually capturing extra pixels.
Image quality is difficult to judge in pre-production cameras, and Canon specifically said that in-camera RAW processing was a work in progress. Nonetheless, JPEGs looked sharp out of the camera and had the companys typically excellent skin tones.
Low-light image quality is a selling point of this camera, and it did appear to perform well at high ISOs, with decent image quality at ISO 12,800 and beyond. However, its no Sony A7S III at very high ISOs, so the max of ISO 102,400 is for emergency use only.
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