The Canon EOS R3 - A Pro Mirrorless
While sneak peaks, rumors and lite announcements have been floating around for months about the new Canon EOS R3, Canon made the official announcement last night. The new Canon EOS R3 is officially available for pre-order to the masses from B&H and others.
The Canon EOS R3 is the company’s first high-end mirrorless camera designed for sports, wildlife and photojournalism. It’s a full-frame 24MP camera built around the ‘RF’ lens mount.
One of the most talked about features with this camera is the return of Canon’s Eye Control autofocus system, last seen in film SLRs of the late 90s and early 2000s.
Canon EOS R3 Features
- 24MP Stacked CMOS Dual Pixel AF sensor
- 30 fps E-shutter (w/ full 14-bit Raw)
- 5.69M-dot EVF with Eye Control AF
- No EVF blackout in e-shutter mode
- OVF simulation mode that exploits HDR viewfinder
- E-shutter with flash sync up to 1/180 sec
- Truer-to-life PQ HDR capture as 10-bit HEIF files
- Dual Pixel AF with improved subject recognition
- AF rated as working down to -7.5EV (with F1.2 lens)
- CFexpress Type B and UHS-II SD slots
- DCI or UHD 4K video at up to 120p, oversampled up to 60p
- Raw video or 10-bit C-Log3 video capture
- Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication
Canon, Canon, Canon...
One of the key take-aways from this announcement for us is… Canon, why are you still compensating for something size related?
In a world where most manufacturers are decreasing the size of their camera bodies when developing a mirrorless body, Canon seems to still believe that their photographers like big camera bodies.
One other point of note, the Canon EOS R3, while having brought back eye focus tracking, seems to be a bit behind in the times as far as pixel count, and well, just about everything. The major question then becomes, if you are a Canon user, and need to update all of your lenses to run the new ‘RF’ mount natively, why wouldn’t you look at the competition?
It will be interesting to pit this camera against the Sony α1.
Price Point for the R3
B&H has the body listed at $5999–about $400 less than the Sony α1. Will it be worth it? Time will tell.
