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On July the 17th, 2024, the suc­ces­sor to the Canon EOS R5, the EOS R5 Mark II, was final­ly unveiled along­side the EOS R1, the new flag­ship of the EOS sys­tem. The R1, which was high­ly praised by Canon dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion, is of lit­tle inter­est to me per­son­al­ly; in par­tic­u­lar, I no longer con­sid­er its sen­sor res­o­lu­tion of just 24 megapix­els to be in keep­ing with the times. Both Sony and Nikon prove that more is pos­si­ble nowa­days, even with high-speed cameras.

At this point, I will there­fore focus sole­ly on the new edi­tion of the EOS R5. The rumor mill has been churn­ing for months, and many of the leaked spec­i­fi­ca­tions have actu­al­ly been imple­ment­ed. The new fea­tures are more of an evo­lu­tion than a rev­o­lu­tion. And that’s a good thing, because the EOS R5 was already an excel­lent cam­era that I worked with for a long time and was very sat­is­fied with.

My reviews and tips on the EOS R5 can be found here. The improve­ments in the updat­ed ver­sion are so inter­est­ing for me that I imme­di­ate­ly pre-ordered the new Canon EOS R5 Mark II. I hope that it will be deliv­ered in August so that I can test it exten­sive­ly dur­ing my vaca­tion in September.

This is new with the EOS R5 Mk II:

45 megapixel back-illuminated stacked CMOS full-format sensor

Although the sen­sor offers the same res­o­lu­tion as its pre­de­ces­sor, its read­out is much faster, which sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces the “rolling shut­ter” effect. It also offers a res­o­lu­tion of 14 bits with the elec­tron­ic shut­ter, where­as the pre­vi­ous ver­sion reduced this to 13 or even 12 bits in some cas­es. Flash pho­tog­ra­phy is now also pos­si­ble with the elec­tron­ic shut­ter (sync speed then 1/160). All in all, there are only a few restric­tions with the elec­tron­ic shut­ter, so that this will prob­a­bly be my stan­dard set­ting in future.

In-body stabilization rated at up to 8.5EV correction, coordinated with lens

This is a slight improve­ment com­pared to the pre­vi­ous ver­sion with a spec­i­fi­ca­tion of 8 f-stops.

New significantly improved autofocus system

The EOS R5 Mark II has a com­plete­ly new aut­o­fo­cus sys­tem, which has large­ly been adopt­ed from the new flag­ship R1. It promis­es to be much more pow­er­ful than that of its pre­de­ces­sor, which I already great­ly appre­ci­at­ed. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for sub­ject selec­tion is now sup­port­ed by a ded­i­cat­ed proces­sor, which should boost per­for­mance. There is an “Action” mode, which has already been pre-trained for some ball sports (soc­cer, bas­ket­ball and vol­ley­ball) and then auto­mat­i­cal­ly pri­or­i­tizes play­ers in pos­ses­sion of the ball, for exam­ple. It is also pos­si­ble to define peo­ple who should be pri­or­i­tized. The whole thing is sup­port­ed by an eye-con­trolled aut­o­fo­cus sys­tem, a refined ver­sion of the EOS R3. I’m already look­ing for­ward to try­ing every­thing out.

Continuous shooting at up to 30 frames per second and blackout-free viewfinder

That’s what I wished I had dur­ing our vaca­tion in Cos­ta Rica in March to pho­to­graph the hum­ming­birds: I pur­chased a Canon R7 espe­cial­ly for this pur­pose. Although it also takes 30 frames per sec­ond, the shots were often unus­able due to the very notice­able rolling shut­ter effect with the fast wing beats of the hum­ming­birds. I hope that the fast sen­sor of the R5 Mk II will man­age this much bet­ter. And the

Pre-burst capture (up to 0.5 sec in stills, 3 or 5 sec in video)

will help, too. This fea­ture allows the cam­era shoots con­tin­u­ous­ly while the shut­ter release but­ton is pressed halfway. As soon as the shut­ter release but­ton is pressed ful­ly, the cur­rent shot and the shots of the last 1/2 sec­ond will be saved. This is a game chang­er for action and ani­mal shots, e.g. to cap­ture birds tak­ing off. Oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers have been offer­ing this func­tion for some time (e.g. OM sys­tem / Olym­pus). The R7 also offers it, but it is imple­ment­ed in a very cum­ber­some way as the images have to be extract­ed indi­vid­u­al­ly from a large file. As far as I can see so far, this is no longer nec­es­sary with the R5 Mark II.

Expanded video options

The EOS R5 was the first sys­tem cam­era that could record 8k video. The Mk II adds to this: 8k video can now also be record­ed at 60P as RAW. The C-Log2 pro­file, which was pre­vi­ous­ly reserved for Canon’s Cin­e­ma cam­eras, is now also sup­port­ed and offers a sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er dynam­ic range. In addi­tion, wave­forms and false col­ors can now be dis­played when record­ing video, which again was pre­vi­ous­ly only pos­si­ble with the Cin­e­ma models.

More

• With ven­ti­la­tion vents, which should not affect weath­er resis­tance, the sen­sor is bet­ter cooled, which should allow longer video record­ings. A sep­a­rate­ly avail­able bat­tery grip with built-in fan can extend this time even further.
  
• Images can be post-processed in cam­era using AI algo­rithms (denois­ing / enlarg­ing) - I think this is more of a gim­mick, I would always pre­fer to do both in post-pro­cess­ing, e.g. in Lightroom.
  
• There is a new bat­tery (LP-E6P) that sup­ports high­er cur­rents while main­tain­ing the same capac­i­ty. The old bat­ter­ies will prob­a­bly also work, but some impor­tant func­tions will not be sup­port­ed: “When using the LP-E6NH/LP-E6N bat­ter­ies, the net­work func­tions (WLAN/LAN) and the acces­sories for the mul­ti­func­tion acces­so­ry shoe, which require a high pow­er sup­ply from the cam­era, can­not be used. Pre-shoot­ing Brack­et­ing, HDMI RAW out­put, and Dual Shoot­ing (Pho­to & Video) are not avail­able. The speed of con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing may be reduced. Dur­ing video record­ing, res­o­lu­tion, image qual­i­ty and frame rate are limited”
  
• The on/off switch is now locat­ed on the right-hand side of the cam­era, which final­ly allows the cam­era to be switched on or off with one hand. A sep­a­rate switch on the left switch­es between pho­to and video mode

For more details: you can find the Enhanced User Guide for the Canon EOS R5 Mark II here.

Resumée

There are many oth­er evo­lu­tion­ary improve­ments that I don’t want to list explic­it­ly here. I there­fore rec­om­mend you to vis­it the Canon prod­uct page and the test report on dpRe­view. The Canon R5 is cer­tain­ly still an excel­lent cam­era. How­ev­er, as already men­tioned above, the over­all pack­age of the Mark II seems so inter­est­ing to me that I have already pre-ordered one. A detailed test report will fol­low when I have the camera.