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A new firmware ver­sion for the Canon EOS R5 and EOS R6 has been released: ver­sion 1.2.0. Espe­cial­ly the viewfind­er behav­iour in con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing mode with mechan­i­cal shut­ter has been changed.

Note: in the mean­time anoth­er new firmware ver­sion (V 1.3) is avail­able, which con­tains sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments again.

New viewfinder behavior

In the phase in which the mechan­i­cal shut­ter of a mir­ror­less dig­i­tal cam­era is closed and the cap­tured image is stored, the sen­sor obvi­ous­ly can­not pro­vide a live image.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, the Canon EOS R5 and R6 dis­played the last image cap­tured dur­ing this phase in the High speed con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing and Low speed con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing modes. Although this avoid­ed the dark phas­es between the images, as is usu­al with SLR mod­els due to the flipped up mir­ror, the dis­play always lagged behind real­i­ty, which often made it dif­fi­cult to fol­low a mov­ing object.

In this update, Canon has fun­da­men­tal­ly changed this behavior.

Instead of dis­play­ing the last image as a con­tin­u­ous image, the viewfind­er image is sim­ply switched off when the shut­ter is closed. It then appears black at this stage. All images that can now be seen in the viewfind­er are there­fore live images with­out any sig­nif­i­cant time delay. You feel as if you have returned to the era of SLR cameras.

The image flick­ers now, but I actu­al­ly have the impres­sion, that the track­ing of mov­ing sub­jects is much eas­i­er now. You can change this behav­ior in the High speed con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing mode by acti­vat­ing the High speed dis­play in the SHOOT7 menu. How­ev­er, I have dis­cov­ered for myself that I can now get along bet­ter by switch­ing off the Hight speed dis­play, which I had pre­vi­ous­ly always activated.

Noth­ing has changed in the new firmware for the elec­tron­ic shut­ter. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the R5 and R6 in this mode can still only shoot either con­tin­u­ous fir­ing at 20 frames/second or sin­gle frames. With the high con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing speed, the viewfind­er does not show any sig­nif­i­cant lag, mak­ing sub­ject track­ing easy.

Other changes

In addi­tion, to adjust the viewfind­er bright­ness (Menu SET UP3 / Viewfind­er Bright­ness), there is now final­ly the option Auto, which con­trols the dis­play bright­ness depend­ing on the ambi­ent light. Often the viewfind­er image was too dark on sun­ny days - but, due to the actu­al lack of sun­ny days 😉 , I can’t test, whether this set­ting con­trols the bright­ness sufficiently.

Any­way, this is a wel­come update, but unfor­tu­nate­ly this option is not avail­able for the back screen.

In addi­tion, coop­er­a­tion with the new EL-1 flash has been improved, the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of HEIF files has been increased, and aut­o­fo­cus and shut­ter release dur­ing zoom­ing is now sup­port­ed on some RF and EF lenses.

Download

The lat­est firmware can be down­loaded here at Canon:

Firmware EOS R5

Firmware EOS R6

The result­ing ZIP file must be unpacked and the enclosed FIR file copied into the root direc­to­ry of a mem­o­ry card. The actu­al update process can then be start­ed in the menu SET UP5 / Firmware. The bat­tery of the cam­era should be ful­ly charged or the cam­era should be oper­at­ed with the exter­nal pow­er sup­ply. Be patient, this will take a while:

For the new firmware, the Canon appli­ca­tions must also be updat­ed, cur­rent­ly the fol­low­ing ver­sions are available:

・Dig­i­tal Pho­to Pro­fes­sion­al 4.13.10
・EOS Util­i­ty 3.13.10
・Cam­era Con­nect 2.7.20
・Dig­i­tal Pho­to Pro­fes­sion­al Express 1.4.0

The cur­rent ver­sions can be down­loaded here at Canon.