CANON EOS R
£1999/$1799
Nearly all of the goodness of a premium full-frame DSLR, in a delightfully low-fat body and at an amazing price now
The EOS R hit the ground running last year, as Canon’s first mirrorless full-frame camera. As you’d expect, it’s slimmer and lighter than the 5D Mk IV, which has a similar Dual Pixel AF image sensor with an almost identical Mp. The most major difference between the two cameras is that the EOS R has Canon’s new RF lens mount, which enables a larger flange to be positioned closer to the sensor. As with the EOS RP, an adapter is also provided in retail kits, for using EF and EF-S lenses.
As usual, the Dual Pixel AF system enables phase-detection autofocus points across most of the frame, in this case 5,565 of them. Autofocus is rapid and works well even in near-darkness, but still loses out to the 5D Mk IV’S viewfinder-based performance on both counts. The electronic viewfinder fitted in the EOS R is the best of any Canon mirrorless camera in the group. It’s a particularly high-resolution OLED display with an increased 3,690k dots and a greater 0.76x magnification factor. Even so, the 5D Mk IV’S optical viewfinder is still preferable when panning or tracking moving objects.
Performance
There’s no lack of speed for stills, with a top burst rate of 8fps. That’s 1fps faster than the 5D Mk IV but, the EOS R drops to only 5fps when using continuous autofocus. Image quality is virtually identical from both cameras, with sumptuous colour rendition, great retention of fine detail and minimal noise at high ISO settings. The EOS R is less than two grand these days too!