84 Canon EOS R5
It bridges the gap between the Fujifilm’s basic and more advanced cameras – but is there room for it?
This full-frame mirrorless is the brand’s most hyped camera launch for a decade. Here’s our in-depth verdict on it
The R5’s chassis is near-identical to the EOS R, but it’s slightly thicker and 70g heavier, in order to accommodate the new IBIS system.
Canon claims that the EOS R5’s 45MP image sensor is the highest resolving of any EOS camera – including the 50.6MP 5DS R.
The R5’s electronic viewfinder boasts an impressive 5.69 million dots and 120fps refresh rate – ideal for keeping up with the action.
The fully articulating 3.15-inch touchscreen is just brilliant for composing and reviewing, as well as touch control over settings.
Like Canon’s 5-series DSLRs, the EOS R5 possesses both a joystick (replacing the EOS R’s touchbar) and a rear control wheel.
With twin card slots for CFexpress and UHS-II SD cards, the R5 enables you to upgrade your camera without investing in new memory cards.
Like the Canon EOS R, the R5 possesses a top OLED screen to display your camera settings and exposure information for easy viewing.
Again like the EOS R, the traditional mode dial has been replaced by a hybrid mode selector set within the rear exposure control dial.
Sony has long held the reputation of having the best autofocus in the industry, but the R5 – with its remarkable ability to track the eyes of birds in flight – is the new champion.
on the EOS R and the EOS RP, all of which makes the R5 feel much more like using a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV.
The camera retains the articulating touchscreen seen on the EOS R and RP, which is obviously important for recording video (as well as taking stills from elevated or low angles).
Being a 5-series camera, you can expect the robust weather sealing – although invariably, given that the mirrorless model is daintier (and also features an articulating screen), it doesn’t feel as sturdy as the 5D. It will withstand some knocks, but unlike the DSLR you really wouldn’t want to drop it or leave it in the hands of children.
Performance
OK, let’s deal with the thing everyone’s talking about right away: yes, shooting
Rival cameras
Canon EOS 5D Mk IV £2,789/$2,499
Its DSLR sibling fares better in terms of ISO and dynamic range, but the R5 is a far superior camera overall. Reviewed: issue 183
Nikon Z 7 £2,499/$2,799 The Z 7 resolves finer detail and also boasts better dynamic range, but video features and AF are nowhere close. Reviewed: issue 208
anything above standard 4K 30p video will cause the Canon EOS R5 to heat up internally, thus requiring recording limits to prevent overheating. Shooting 4K 30p causes no overheating issues, though, so you can shoot as much video as you like. (All recordings are subject to the usual 30-minute limit per single file, but you can record multiple 30-minute files.) However, limitations will be incurred as your video settings become more demanding. Shooting 4K 60p will cause the camera to overheat in about 35 minutes, while shooting 8K 30p will result in overheating in about 20 minutes – after which you need to allow the camera to cool down before recording again.
If you regularly shoot video above 4K 30p, this is definitely an issue.
While it’s unusual for any production to shoot single 20-minute takes, the overheating issue is cumulative – so if you shoot a series of shorter videos, or if you shoot a lot of stills, the camera innards will already start to heat up, making it very difficult to gauge how much time you can actually record for.
Again, none of this applies to 4K 30p – and we happily spent days on end shooting both 8K 30p and 4K 60p clips in-between stills without a single issue. However, if your interest is video first and stills second, we don’t think the R5 will be fit for purpose – and we strongly recommend taking it for a test drive to make your own decision.
If you don’t fall foul of the recording limitations, though, you will behold 8K video that is astoundingly rich and detailed, and the oversampled 4K modes produce some of the best footage we’ve ever seen. The standard 4K modes feel quite pedestrian, however, and early word is that regular 4K is actually superior on the Canon EOS R6.
Are there any other stings in the tail, though? In short, no – everything else behaves exactly as we all hoped and expected it would. The 45MP photographs are stunning, with crisp detail that may or may not match the 5DS in pure lab tests, but taken side by side they certainly pass the eyeball test and look every bit as good.
Almost as impressive are the 35MP Frame Grabs you can extract from 8K video. This is technology that has been in other cameras before, but never with the level of detail and fidelity seen here. Simply scrub through your 8K footage on the back of the camera, pinpoint the frame you want as a still,
and push a button to produce a 35MP image – and it isn’t the kind of blurry, low-res still you get when you screenshot a YouTube video; it’s a pristine high-resolution file that looks like it was taken as a photograph on a camera with a decent 35MP sensor.
Of course, being that it is a JPEG taken from a video, you get virtually zero dynamic range to play with – the video exposure is baked in, so you can’t recover anything from blown-out highlights (although there is still data to recover in the shadows). Still, provided that your lighting is right in the first place, yes – you can literally now film your photoshoot as a video, and simply pull the still frames you want from it afterwards. Cheating or not, it works and it’s brilliant.
Speaking of cheating, that’s what the new Animal AF is: a cheat code for wildlife photography. Canon’s new Deep Learning algorithm is so good that all you have to do is point your camera at an animal, and the R5 will recognise, track it and even focus on the eyes. Canon only certifies it for dogs, cats and birds, but we successfully tested it on lions, monkeys, turtles, iguanas, fish, meerkats… if it’s got eyes and a face, the R5 should recognise it.
The AF is even better when it comes to shooting human subjects, with a witchcraft-like ability to find and focus on faces and eyes in an instant – even when features are obscured or your tracking gets interrupted by hands, objects or passers-by. You can safely tell your Sony-owning friends that
Canon now has the best autofocus in town – it really is black magic.
Best of all, these autofocus functions are all 100% available and effective when you shoot video. So whether you’re filming videos of the bride and groom at a wedding, or footage of wild animals chasing each other across the Serengeti, the EOS R5 will find your subjects and focus on them. The AF is spookily good – it’s just a shame that the R5 is haunted by the spectre of its video.
James Artaius
Fujifilm is perhaps best known for its classically designed X-series cameras, with external exposure controls and traditional handling. It also makes entry-level mirrorless cameras in its X-A range, designed for first-time users and smartphone upgraders. The X-T200 sits right in the middle between these two camera ranges, with simplified controls for novices but providing an electronic viewfinder like the more advanced models.
The X-T200 follows on from the Fujifilm X-T100 that was released in 2018, with a (much) better rear screen, faster processing, proper 4K video plus a ‘digital gimbal’ feature, and improved autofocus. It’s so much better that Fujifilm might want to watch out that it doesn’t start cannibalising sales from its more upmarket cameras – although after spending a bit of time with this camera we think the differences are pretty clear. On paper, the X-T200 looks like it could be a match for the X-T30, but in your hands it’s quite obviously a cheaper, simpler camera. If you like the X-A7 but wish it had a viewfinder, get this. If you want an X-T30 but don’t have quite enough money, on the other hand, we’d suggest saving up for a bit longer – the X-T200 is not a lot cheaper and might prove a disappointment.
The Fujifilm X-T200 would make an ideal camera for beginners, however, and it looks like the perfect camera for Instagram or vlogging.
Features
Fujifilm has been careful to keep the lower-end X-T200 one step behind its best X-series cameras. It does not have the 26.1-megapixel X-Trans sensor in the X-T3, the X-T30, the X-Pro3 or
the new X100V compact, making do with a regular 24.2-megapixel CMOS sensor. This has proved a very good performer in its own right, so it’s not the disadvantage it might sound.
Fujifilm has upgraded both the sensor and the processor in this camera to support 4K video at up to 30fps (compared with the inadequate 15fps in the X-T100), with 3.5x faster processing that’s claimed to reduce any ‘rolling shutter’ effect. This camera can also shoot ‘HDR video’, which combines videos at different exposures, and a ‘digital gimbal’ that uses an in-camera gyro and an electronic stabilisation algorithm to smooth out your footage. Choosing this option reduces the field of view, however – presumably because the camera needs space to be able to adjust the framing.
The X-T200 can shoot continuously at eight frames per second, and has an improved hybrid AF system covering the whole frame, together with updated face and eye detection. Despite the new 3.5-inch 16:9 variangle rear screen, the X-T200 is 80g lighter than the old X-T100, which was itself hardly a heavyweight. It will come in a choice of Silver, Dark Silver and Champagne finishes, and will typically be bundlled with the Fujinon XC1545mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS PZ kit lens.
Build and handling
There are some physical differences between the X-T200 and more advanced Fujifilm cameras like the X-T30 and the X-T3, which become obvious straight away. It’s a lot lighter for a start, with a more plasticky feel, and lacks the external shutter speed and lens aperture controls. Instead, it’s laid out more like regular digital cameras – a deliberate decision, we’re told, to make it more easily understood for novices.
The X-T200 is a bit more than just a simple ‘novice’ camera, though. It has twin control dials, customisable function buttons and a ‘Q’ quick menu for common camera settings. It’s part of Fujifilm’s more basic mirrorless camera series, but it has features and controls to match most mid-range cameras.
The lightweight build and plastic construction feel a little cheap against higher-end X-series cameras, like the X-T30 upwards, but the X-T200 nevertheless feels like a well put-together camera that’s had a bit of thought put into its design.
Interestingly, there’s no four-way controller on the back; instead Fujifilm has added a small joystick for