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Slow­ly, more infor­ma­tion about the new Canon EOS R3 have been leaked, also two new images of the cam­era are avail­able, reveal­ing some inter­est­ing details. For exam­ple, the R3 will be the first “pro­fes­sion­al” Canon body to fea­ture a rotat­ing and swivel­ing mon­i­tor. The AF-ON but­ton with inte­grat­ed smart con­troller, which was high­ly praised in the 1DX III, also seems to be present.

Oth­er fea­tures have also been revealed:

• The AF sys­tem can track besides peo­ple and ani­mals also in motor­sports (cars / motorcycles).
• The AF should work down to a light val­ue of -7 (only LW -6 on the R5)
• It also has a sta­bi­lized sensor
• It will also be pos­si­ble to use elec­tron­ic shut­ter with a speedlight
• The hot shoe has addi­tion­al con­tacts (for micro­phones / oth­er accessories??)
• The R3 uses the same LP-E19 bat­tery as the 1DX III
• It can record 4K videos inter­nal­ly with over­sam­pling, also in RAW format
• CFex­press and SD cards are like­ly to be sup­port­ed as stor­age media (as with the EOS R5)
• It has an inte­grat­ed Eth­er­net port and WLAN with 2.4 and 5GHz
• The price is sup­posed to be around 6000 US$

Canon empha­sizes that the R3 will not be the “top-of-the-line” body of the EOS-R series, so there is prob­a­bly still room upwards. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is still no fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the sen­sor res­o­lu­tion of the R3. How­ev­er, it is inter­est­ing to read between the lines of the announce­ments so far:

Canon promis­es that the new EOS R3 can record 4K Video with over­sam­pling, but 8K video is not men­tioned. A sen­sor res­o­lu­tion of just under 10 megapix­els is suf­fi­cient for native 4K video, every high­er res­o­lu­tion allows over­sam­pling, so this can already be achieved by the EOS 1DX Mark III or the EOS R6 with their sen­sor res­o­lu­tion of only 20.1 megapix­els. For 8K Video, on the oth­er side, a sen­sor res­o­lu­tion above 40 Megapix­el is needed.

There­fore, it is to be feared that the R3 will have a low­er sen­sor res­o­lu­tion than the R5. That would be very unfor­tu­nate and would be a sig­nif­i­cant dis­ad­van­tage com­pared to the already avail­able Sony A1 and the announced Nikon Z9, which both sup­port 8K video. If this turns out to be true, I guess I would have to keep wait­ing for an EOS R1 😉

Addendum from July 9th, 2021

Rumors are increas­ing that the R3’s sen­sor res­o­lu­tion will “only” be around 30 megapix­els. Fur­ther­more, the cam­era is not expect­ed to be released until Sep­tem­ber of this year, so there is still time for spec­u­la­tion. Who knows, maybe Canon is read­ing this and will increase the sen­sor res­o­lu­tion until then 😉

Addendum from July 7th, 2021

The R3 seems to be used at the Olympic Games, which start­ed today in Tokyo, Japan. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t have any fur­ther infor­ma­tion (espe­cial­ly about the sen­sor res­o­lu­tion), but there is a new pro­mo­tion­al video from Canon:

All in all, the video does not con­tain any new infor­ma­tion, but at least more dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives of the new cam­era. The con­trols seem to be very sim­i­lar to those of the 1 series bod­ies. How­ev­er, the cam­era is explic­it­ly adver­tised as “4k video” capa­ble, 8k video is not men­tioned, so it seems that the sen­sor used will indeed have a low­er res­o­lu­tion than the one used on the R5. I sus­pect it will actu­al­ly con­tain “only” 30 megapixels.