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Canon has announced its most significant camera in years: the EOS R1 mirrorless camera. Launched at the same time as the 45-megapixel R5 II, the camera is the company’s new flagship replacement for the 1DX Mark III DSLR, and is designed to help it maintain its leadership in professional sports photography.
The R1 is all about speed, with its stacked sensor allowing 40fps RAW burst shooting with continuous autofocus. Other features are designed to help you get the shots that matter, including pre-capture, eye-tracking AF and dedicated sports settings. At the same time, its support for 6K RAW capture also makes it ideal for videography.
One potential drawback is its 24-megapixel resolution, which is lower than competitors like the Sony A1 and Nikon Z9. To see how this affects image quality and to gather impressions on performance and new features, I was able to get a brief hands-on with the R1 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Though it’s large for a mirrorless camera, the R1 is lighter than it looks, weighing just 2.12 pounds. The magnesium alloy body is dust- and waterproof, and the large, comfortable grip has a new rubber to reduce slippage, providing a stable platform even with a telephoto lens attached, and it’s clearly designed for professional photographers.
The controls are laid out in a similar way to the EOS R3, with two control dials, a rear dial, a joystick, a mode switch, and a host of customizable buttons. The portrait controls are also a match, with the same layout in portrait and landscape modes.
Canon has added touch-sensitive IR buttons, called the Smart Controller, which offer three ways to adjust the autofocus: Overall, the R1 is easy to operate, fast and responsive like an F1 car, but there is a learning curve.
The viewfinder is Canon’s best ever, with 9.44 million dots, 0.9x magnification and 3x brightness – all the best in the EOS series. The rear display is fully articulating, allowing for high and low angle shooting.
Canon has done away with SD cards in favor of two CFexpress Type B slots, which maximizes RAW burst speeds and makes backups faster and more reliable, but it also means you’ll be wasting your SD card collection. In contrast, Sony’s R1 has dual card slots that accept both SD UHS II and CFexpress Type A.
The R1 uses a variant of the EOS R3’s battery, supporting up to 650 shots and 70 minutes of 6K video on a single charge, and connectivity is the best of any Canon camera, with Wi-Fi 6E, Ethernet, and USB-C PD.
The R1 is built for action, and it’s fast, needless to say. In blackout-free electronic shutter mode, you can shoot JPEG and RAW frames at up to 40 fps for extended periods before the massive buffer fills. Canon promises you’ll get “over 1,000” shots when shooting uncompressed RAW and JPEG files. With the mechanical shutter, you can reach 12 fps, a feature that Nikon’s rival Z9 lacks.
However, the latter is usually not necessary, as stack shutters largely eliminate rolling shutter distortion.
Canon has also made a number of improvements to the autofocus: the usual single-point tracking can now be changed using the joystick or Smart Controller, and the R1 has a new eye-tracking system called Eye AF II, which is a more sophisticated version of the R3’s Eye Control AF.
Like the R3, you need to calibrate Eye AF II first. It may not work well with all eye types, but it worked very well for me as the tracking box now follows your gaze with less drift than before. That doesn’t necessarily translate to sharper photos, but then again, I was using a prototype.
Sure, the R1 has face and eye detection for both humans and animals, but what happens when you’re trying to pick out one individual in a crowd of players?
Firstly, there are new AI modes for three specific sports: volleyball, basketball and soccer. The system tracks your movement around the ball to help you make those crucial shots, and it keeps track of your players even in crowded areas. Finally, you can register up to 10 faces to track players across your entire team.
How effective is this? It’s hard to tell in the short time I’ve owned the camera, but I didn’t notice any dramatic improvements in chaotic action or in certain sports – but these features take some time to master, and we’ll know more in our full review.
Another new feature to help pros avoid missing shots is pre-burst, a feature available on many high-end cameras these days: the R1 starts taking photos when you press the shutter button halfway down, and records up to the final 20 frames when you press it all the way down.
Canon has been leading the way in image stabilization since the R5, but the R1 offers 8.5 stops of image stabilization on capable lenses – that’s not necessarily a huge benefit for action photography, but it can be useful for landscapes and low-light photography.
Canon appears to have anticipated complaints about the relatively low 24MP resolution, and in response, the company announced a new feature it calls in-camera upscaling, which uses deep learning to increase image size four times to 96MP in-camera after capture, while preserving the apparent resolution.
This is different from Sony’s pixel-shifting method, which takes several separate photos and stitches them together into one, but it was hard to get a clear answer from Canon about how the upscaling works — apparently it can’t be a true resolution boost without actually capturing extra pixels.
It’s hard to judge image quality on a pre-production camera, and Canon has stated that in-camera RAW processing is currently under development, but the JPEG images that came out of the camera were sharp and showed the company’s typically excellent skin tones.
Low light image quality is a selling point for this camera and it performs well at high ISO, with decent image quality appearing above ISO 12,800. However, it can’t match the Sony A7S III at very high ISOs, so the maximum ISO of 102,400 should only be used in emergencies.
Stacked-sensor cameras tend to sacrifice dynamic range in favor of speed, but there’s no sign of that with the R1, although it takes a bit more time to fully appreciate the quality of the raw images, especially at high ISO.
The R1 is primarily aimed at photographers, but it can be a monster video camera in its own right: it lacks the 8K capability of the R5 II, but it does use the full width of the sensor to provide 6K Canon RAW video at up to 60fps.
Also available is full sensor 4K with full oversampled at up to 60 fps, or pixel binned or cropped 4K at 120 fps. Full HD can be recorded at up to 240 fps with either cropping or pixel binning. In addition to Log 3, Canon’s Log 2 is now supported with 10-bit capture.
Canon has significantly reduced the previous overheating issues, but not completely eliminated them. With proxy recording, you can record 6K 60p RAW for over 120 minutes, and 4K 60p and 4K 30p without limitations. The main limitation is 15 minutes at 4K 120p, but this shouldn’t be an issue for most videographers and content creators.
As expected, the oversampled 4K 60p and 6K 60p RAW video is crisp. Canon’s RAW video is very easy to post-process, and the Log 2 setting gives you even more dynamic range and latitude in post.
It will be interesting to see how professional photographers react to Canon’s new flagship: RAW capture speeds are 10 fps faster than the Sony A1 and Nikon Z9, and the sensor is stable in low light, but the downside is that it only has half the resolution of the competition.
Eye AF II is an interesting gimmick that may give Canon an edge. Other features like face memory, sports-specific AF, and cross action look good in theory, but I wasn’t able to take full advantage of them in the short time I owned the camera, so I’ll need to test them further. The EOS R1 is expected to be available in the fall of 2024, with an estimated price of $6,300.
Canon covered this contributor’s travel and lodging expenses to attend the company’s new camera launch in Phoenix, Ariz. This article was produced independently for Engadget, without Canon’s supervision.
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