Canon EOS R5 Review

The R5 is the moment Canon stopped conceding the mirrorless market. Forty five megapixels with twenty frames a second on the electronic shutter was a combination nobody else offered, in body stabilization arrived for the first time in a Canon full frame body and immediately worked better than the competition's, and the dual pixel autofocus with eye and animal detection held onto subjects that rival cameras lost.

Files are excellent, the color science is the reason a lot of photographers stay with the brand at all, and the controls are the familiar Canon arrangement that a professional can operate without looking. Then there is the video. Raw 8K and oversampled 4K on a stills body was a genuine first, and the recording limits that followed became the biggest gear story of the year, with the camera shutting down after roughly twenty minutes of the heaviest modes and taking a long time to become ready again.

Firmware improved the recovery behavior without changing the physics. Judge it as a stills camera and it is one of the great ones, still working professionally years later. Judge it as the video machine the launch promised and the disappointment is real.