Canon EOS R5 II for photographers: what you need to know

Intro

The EOS R5 II is the successor to Canon’s popular and highly capable enthusiast/pro mirrorless R5 model. It continues with the same pixel count as the existing camera but just about everything else has changed.

The R5 II can trace its lineage back to the EOS 5D series. While the 5D Mark II was a landmark for video capture, the series has also always been significant for stills shooters, as it was Canon’s first full-frame digital camera outside the pro-focused 1 series.

We’re going to look through the major changes and what difference they’ll make for photographers. We’ll look at video features and updates in a separate article.

Fact check

The complexity of the EOS R5 II and its broad feature set, along with some inconsistent specs from Canon, have led to some confusion. We checked directly with Canon US’s technical expert on the camera to clear up some of the misunderstandings we’ve seen.

The EOS R5 II does not have the cross-type autofocus offered by the EOS R1. There are Canon spec sheets that say it does, but these are not correct. The R5 II uses the same left/right pairs of photodiodes to give sensitivity to vertical edges as the original R5.

The EOS R5 II does not use 14-bit readout for its video. Like almost every camera on the market it drops the sensor readout to 12-bit mode to speed up the readout and lower the rolling shutter time (it’s typically around twice as fast). You could still get significantly more than 12 stops of DR, despite this, particularly in the 4K Fine modes where multiple pixels are being combined.

It does not have built-in GPS. Some of the spec sheets we’ve seen made this appear ambiguous but GPS is handled either via a smartphone app or by using an external GPS accessory.

Eye control AF

Almost every specification of the EOS R5 II has been improved by some degree, compared with the previous model, but perhaps the biggest single improvement is the inclusion of Eye Control Autofocus. Canon promises improvements over the system revived in the EOS R3, saying that the system can now monitor the photographer’s eye movements over a greater distance than before and gains a mode to detect whether the user is wearing glasses, so it can adapt accordingly.

The name eye control AF risks creating misunderstanding: your eye movements don’t constantly direct where the camera focuses, they help position an AF target. When you initiate focus by half-pressing the shutter button or hitting AF-On, the camera selects the subject nearest to that target and tracks it. So it doesn’t matter if your eye darts around the frame to check composition or monitor other action in your shot: the only time it plays a role is when you tell the camera to start tracking. At its best it’s probably the fastest, most obvious means of subject selection, and it’ll be a major addition to the R5 II if really does work more reliably for more people.

Speed

Although it has the same pixel count as the Mark 1, the R5 Mark II has a Stacked CMOS design, that reads out 16 lines at a time (in stills mode). This makes its electronic shutter significantly faster than its predecessor (around 6.3ms readout, rather than 16.4ms), even when capturing 14-bit Raws. This means both that it can shoot faster – up to 30 fps, rather than 20 fps – and that it will exhibit significantly less rolling shutter distortion when shooting subjects moving rapidly across the frame.

The EOS R5 II also gains a mode that starts buffering shots when you half-press the shutter and will then save up to 1/2 a second’s worth of these images when you fully press the button. The R5 has no such equivalent mode and the new implementation is more elegant than the one added to the EOS R6 II, in that it saves regular JPEG or HEIFs, with and without Raw files, rather than combining the results into a single, large Raw that needs DPP to extract your chosen frame.

Autofocus

The EOS R5’s autofocus in stills is very good, but from our experience of the R5 II so far, Canon has made significant steps forward.

This is most apparent in the Action Priority AF modes, where the camera has been trained to recognize key moments in Football (Soccer), Basketball and Volleyball matches, meaning it knows what to focus on and when to shift focus between players. It also has a mode letting you teach the camera what a specific person looks like and the camera will try to prioritize them, if they appear in a scene. You can set a hierarchy of recognized people.

But even beyond these modes, the R5 II’s AF seems stickier and more dependable, showing the benefit of a system derived directly from the one developed for pro sports shooters in the EOS R1 (though without the + type autofocus sensitivity). This, and the camera’s faster shooting rate, expands the types of shooting it’s suited to, making it a much more capable sports camera, for instance.

Handling/layout

The EOS R5 II’s handling is relatively unchanged, compared with the existing model. The power switch has been moved to the top right of the camera, in front of the command dial that sits on the shoulder of the camera, while the two-way switch on the left of the viewfinder is now a stills/video switch. This is a change that’s only likely to matter to anyone trying to use both generations of the camera alongside one another.

What’s likely to make a bigger difference is the R5 II’s brighter viewfinder and its receiving the Optical Viewfinder Simulation mode from the EOS R3. This shows a wider dynamic range view of the scene, ignoring the current color or contrast settings that your final image will have, showing brighter brights and more balanced shadows to give a more lifelike view of the world (though it doesn’t show enough DR to fully represent the camera’s HDR PQ shooting mode, designed for viewing on HDR displays).

The menus have also been reworked, with all the R5 II’s customization options now gathered together into an olive-colored tab in the menu structure.

Other features

The EOS R5 II gains two “AI”-powered post-shot processing modes, one to denoise Raw images, the other to double the resolution (quadrupling the pixel count) of JPEGs or HEIF files.

The resolution-boosting mode is especially interesting in the context of an already high-resolution camera. Canon makes clear that it’s not using generative AI (i.e., not synthesizing image elements that weren’t really present), just making guesses about what would have existed between the captured pixels. This is an interesting alternative to the multi-shot high-res modes we’ve seen elsewhere that can capture higher levels of chroma or spatial resolution by shooting and combining multiple images. It’s possible that Canon may add such an option in the future but, for now, a mode that boosts detail to some degree, but without the need for a very stable tripod and near-static subject might prove more useful in more circumstances.

Our early impression of the “neural network” noise reduction are pretty favorable, with the camera doing a good job of working out which areas can be smoothed and which details should be preserved, all with the noise level reduced.

The R5 II is also the first generation of cameras we’ve seen to support the new, faster 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6E) Wi-Fi standard that promises quicker, more dependable communication.

Image quality

The one thing we won’t know for sure until we get hold of a production-spec EOS R5 II is how its image quality compares to that of the existing model.

We’ve not seen enough Stacked CMOS sensors from Canon to be able to predict what, if any impact the change in sensor will have. We’ve seen slight increases in read noise in other fast Stacked CMOS chips, which decreases the peak (i.e., low-ISO) dynamic range measurements but has minimal impact on overall image quality.

And, while it’s perilous to extrapolate from the behavior of these other designs, the image quality and performance of the EOS R3 means we’re not overly concerned that Canon has decided to risk its reputation in order to offer slightly faster video.

As with the EOS R3, the EOS R5 II has a high-frequency flicker mode, which scans the scene to measure the flicker rate of fast-flicking LEDs then tries to find a fractional shutter speed that’s at a harmonic of that flicker rate (i.e., that allows a whole number of flicker cycles during the exposure so that each line of the sensor captures the same number of dark/light cycles and thus minimizes banding).

Summary

The EOS R5 II arrives on the market four years on from the original model. And, after a period of high inflation, is built around a much more expensive Stacked CMOS sensor, both of which help explain a price hike of $400 to $4299. Whether you feel it’s worth the extra, vs. the heavily discounted original R5, is an entirely personal decision.

Purely considered as a stills camera, lots of the R5 II’s specs have been improved. Its faster shooting, faster readout and latest generation autofocus will certainly expand the types of photography it can support. That’s not to say you can’t shoot sports with the Mark 1, of course, but the Mark II will make your life considerably easier.

But the question of what it brings to, say, landscape shooters and even wedding photographers is where we think it gets interesting. Eye control AF is likely to mean a lot to the latter, if it proves to work dependably, and it’s always hard to say no to improved autofocus. But the EOS R5 II is going to have to impress us a lot if it’s to step clear from the shadow of its already capable predecessor, as an all-rounder.