Canon EOS R5 Full-Frame Mirrorless Camera – 8K Video, 45 Megapixel Full-Frame CMOS Sensor, DIGIC X Image Processor, Up to 12 fps Mechanical Shutter…

This is my initial review for the Canon EOS R5 having owned it for three months now. Currently I have a love/hate relationship with the camera when comparing it with my EOS 5D IV. For the first 1.5 months the weather here in the NW was very rainy and windy and I did not get much of a chance to run it through its paces so I missed the Amazon return window. I have now recently shot around 5000 photos primarily using long lenses. I shoot primarily wildlife, with a focus on Humming Birds, but also quite a few ducks on water, herons, eagles, Etc. both sitting and flying. This is a very complex camera, especially in the area of focusing options. My problem is that the camera just does not produce an acceptable number of “keepers” when using telephoto lenses. On any given shoot I am lucky to get 5% really crisp photos. Fifty percent of the time the focus is just plain bad (not totally blurry, the camera did focus on the area of the subject but it is like the focus point was 4 to 5 feet in front of, or behind the subject), and around 45% of the time the photo is in focus, but it is a soft focus which goes fuzzy when enlarged to 50%. The 5% keepers are really great shots, with great color and are still very crisp when enlarged to 100%. So, I know that the camera and the two long lenses I used (EF 100-400 zoom and the RF800 mm) are capable of producing very excellent photos. I love the options that allows the camera to lock onto a flying bird and continue to track it. This tracking feature works quite well. However, the photos of flying birds have about the same number of crisp keepers as sitting subjects.
I do shoot in some difficult conditions. The water is usually glass smooth for swimming ducks. Herons are usually on shore with reeds around them and complex brush a few feet back. And of course, humming birds are very small and can be surrounded by tree branches. Lighting has not generally been a problem as I have generally been able to shoot at 1/500 for sitting shots and 1/1000 for flying shots without taking the ISO over 2000. While these conditions can be difficult, my 5D Mk IV had no problems and produced 75% to 80% keepers. I did do a series of 100 shots on a humming bird in the top of a small tree late in the evening. The bird was about 30 feet away. Light was dim but I had gotten good results in similar light, in the same tree with my 5D Mk IV and same lens in the past. I used the EF 100-400mm zoom at f5.6, 1/125 shutter speed and ISO 2500. In all photos I verified that the camera placed a single focus point on the humming bird, but not eye lock. None of the 100 shots was a useful keeper although some were better than others depending on the orientation of the bird. I would not say that the EOS R5 is a good low light camera based on these results.
My results have gotten a tiny bit better with the R5 as I gain experience with it so I have started to build a data base for each photo taken to include lighting conditions, shutter, speed, ISO, servo, focus options, subject, and the number, size and location of actual focus points in the resulting photo to find trends. What I have seen so far is that when the camera is using only a single focus point on an eye the photo generally turned out in sharp focus. When the camera produced multiple focus points, both on and outside of the subject the photo was generally blurry. By the way multiple focus points where sometimes generated even when I was using spot focusing. Spot focusing generally produced a single focus box either containing the subjects head or entire body. These large focus boxes generally produced soft focus in the resulting photo.
I have only done a few test shots with a short lens. I have not noticed any short lens focusing issues with these few photos and the photos looked great so I did give the R5 a rating of 3 instead of 1. I will update this review again in a few months.
I want to add another strange focusing result when using the R5 with the RF800. I was in a woodsy setting when I spotted a squirrel sitting in the open on a limb extracting seeds from a pine cone about 30 yds away. I had to shoot through a hole in the branches of a nearby tree between us. Several small branches on the tree were in the camera window but none were directly in line with, or even near the line-of-sight to the squirrel. I shot using spot focus at 1/500. Reviewing the shots showed a single small focus point squarely on the squirrel’s body and the images looked fine on the camera’s screen at max magnification. However, on the computer at 50% both the squirrel, and the branch it was on, were quite fuzzy in every photo. I went back the next day under similar lighting and walked around the intervening tree and focused on the limb, where the squirrel had been, at the same distance. I took several photos of the limb again using spot focus at 1/500 with no branches anywhere in the window between me and the subject branch. On the computer all of the photos of the subject branch were still tack sharp at 200%. It was as if the intervening branches in the window, but close to the camera, not the subject, still had some effect on the algorithm’s selection of the final focus range gate.