The Canon EOS R5 is an incredible camera. Of course, it’s the closest thing that they have to their 5D lineup from the DSLR days and the EOS 5 from the analog era. The company has continued to refine the camera through firmware updates as time went on. And even though it seems like its close to the end of the product lifecycle, they’ve still continued to issue updates. So we’ve updated our Canon EOS R5 review accordingly.
There are currently reports going around about new updates that should be coming to the Canon EOS R5. Some of those have to do with things like adding in even more machine learning scene detection around horses and more. This would bring it more in line with the Canon EOS R6 Mk II and the Canon EOS R3.
While Canon is issuing these updates, it’s not necessarily where I’d hope that they’d improve the camera. Instead, my complaint has to do with the camera manufacturers in general. Canon cameras are very bad at tracking fast-moving subjects in low light. Specifically, I’m speaking to tracking people of color at live events in very low lighting.
If you’re going to say that there’s not enough contrast, please stop. Canon found ways to recognize trains, planes, automobiles and even track a face while it’s behind glass in a vehicle. I’m sure they could do this.
What’s more, I think that cameras need to get rid of infrared autofocus assistance. It’s invasive and annoying when you’re shooting at an event. Instead, the idea of small sonar units and bringing those back is something I’ve been considering for a while. We wrote about Polaroid doing this many years ago, and since then sonar units have become much smaller. So why can’t modern cameras start to use things like sonar or get better autofocus tracking on POCs in low light?
Perhaps that’s a question for another time.
Here’s the update from our Canon EOS R5 review which you can read here.:
Update March 2023
Canon released firmware update 1.7 a while back which did the following:
- Fixes an issue that, in rare instances, may result in the camera not operating normally when capturing small subjects.
- Fixes minor issues.
I’ve had that issue where it wouldn’t focus properly with small objects. This was really odd, and I had a feeling Canon was trying to purposely make their older camera less useful so that you’d upgrade to a newer camera body. But it’s nice that they fixed it. Where I really saw this issue happen is with Servo AI activated and my hoping that it would focus on one thing while composing the scene in a certain way. Even with tracking turned on, there would be fluctuations when focusing on small subjects. It made product photography really annoying. But since updating the firmware, I haven’t had as many problems here.
While some photographers tell me that there’s no use for single-AF anymore, I don’t fully agree with it. There are lots of instances like with product photography or a subject being completely still here Canon’s autofocus might still try to focus on different subjects from one moment to the next in the full-AF auto area. If you’re using a single focusing point, then things change a bit more.
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