More than once around the track with the Canon EOS R5 II’s autofocus

The EOS R5 II faces a major challenge: having to improve on a camera that already did a lot of things very, very well. This was difficult enough for rivals such as Nikon’s Z8, but the EOS R5 II faces a higher hurdle: not just to be good enough to sway would-be buyers away from the original R5, but to convince some established R5 owners that it’s sufficiently better to justify the financial hit of upgrading.

A big part of that will come down to how well the EOS R5 II can shoot action. The R5 II can shoot faster than its predecessor, with less rolling shutter, gains a more powerful autofocus system and Eye Control AF to make subject selection quicker. These should come together to make the R5 II an even better action camera than the Mark 1, making it one of the biggest areas of improvement over the original.

I didn’t want to shoot the camera at one of the sports its Action Priority feature has been specifically trained for, because even if it does prove to be a slam dunk at soccer football or home run for basketball, that’s only going to be useful to the subset of users that shoot those specific sports. This has value, of course (especially if it can put even a fraction of a pro’s experience and understanding of the game into the hands of the so-called Soccer Moms and Dads), but doesn’t tell us much about how well the camera will handle more general action shooting.

Crit(erium) racing is pretty good for autofocus testing because you have a lot of similar-looking subjects moving very quickly, overlapping and moving around one another and, because it’s raced on a circuit, they come back to let you have another attempt, every few minutes.

In practice the EOS R5 II impressed me a lot, but also made me very aware that it’s a camera that still demands a lot of work to get to the stage where you feel you’re getting the most out of it.

Layer upon layer

The experience taught me to think of the EOS R5 II’s autofocus system as having multiple layers. Underpinning it all is the basic ‘Servo-AF’ setup, that defines how and when the camera refocuses to a different distance. Gone are the six presets of three parameters, replaced by a two variable system that you only need use if the main ‘Auto’ system with its three position Locked-On-to-Responsive scale is letting you down.

The Servo AF system has been further simplified, relative to the EOS R3 or EOS-1D X cameras.

The second layer of complexity is the subject recognition system, designed to identify specific subject types so that it can track them more accurately, prioritise them over other subjects and, in some instances, focus on a particular part of the subject (the subject’s eye or a motoracing helmet).

Finally, there’s the Eye Control system, that can be used for selecting a subject to focus on.

Eye Control

The R5 II’s Eye Control system is supposed to be more advanced than the system on the EOS R3. As before, it works best with the subject recognition modes, where its job becomes to select from the recognized subjects, rather than to pick from the array of thousands of selectable AF points.

As a glasses wearer, it was good to be able to configure one calibration set for my specs and another for my contact lenses. Unexpectedly I had more success with the system when wearing glasses.

I’ve tried using the EOS R5 II both with glasses and with contact lenses, configuring a separate profile for each, and adding calibration after calibration to each profile, in the hope of improving its performance. The good news is that, when it works for me, it’s extremely effective: letting you forget about having to select a subject because the camera will initiate focus on whatever you’re looking at, with a half-press of the shutter button.

However, even with multiple calibrations, I would still find that the camera would sometimes place the Eye Control target just to the left of where I was looking. This could usually be resolved by conducting an additional calibration, but this proved to be stressful when you can already hear the sound of the riders approaching.

Interestingly, I found Eye Control worked better for me with glasses than with contact lenses, which leads me to wonder whether I position my eye more centrally, relative to the viewfinder when wearing my glasses and have more freedom to move, and hence take up a different position, when wearing contacts.

I found I had to peel through the layers of the EOS R5 II’s AF system to try to maintain focus on a specific subject when others were passing in front.

The EOS R5 II’s AF system is undoubtedly very impressive. Given how closely related it is to the one in the EOS R1, which was in use at the recent Olympics, I don’t think I’m going to earn myself a medal for recognizing this.

Rather than just take photos of bike racing, which the R5 II can do without any effort at all, my aim was to take photos of specific riders, as they emerged and disappeared within the peloton. It was this experience that led me to think of the AF system as being layered, because I found myself having to remove one layer at a time, to try to get the results I wanted.

I found that the Eye Control AF wasn’t quite precise enough to pick the subject I wanted in the midst of a throng of moving riders: it was great when everyone was lined up on the start line, but when approaching and cornering as speed, I’d often find I couldn’t always pick out the rider I wanted. It did well, but I came away convinced that I was getting a better hit-rate without it.

Dependable AF and 30fps shooting made it trivial to catch a chosen rider as they passed through the slightest patch of fading sunshine.

It was a similar story with subject detection. It did a great job of locking onto a rider in isolation and staying with them, but in a bunch, the camera would tend to prioritize any rider that crossed in front of the target I’d set it to track.

Ultimately, even with subject selection recognition turned off, I wasn’t able to get the camera to remain focused on my chosen subject, even if I dialed the AF behavior to ‘Locked-On’, rather than ‘Responsive.’

That said, while I couldn’t always get precisely the shot I wanted, the camera is ludicrously good at delivering in-focus images. For all its sophistication, the EOS R5 II can’t always simply deliver precisely the image you want. But now, instead of worrying about what proportion of your shots will be in focus, all the work of setting up the camera, anticipating the action and telling the camera what to do in the right way, at the right moment becomes a question of ensuring that exactly the correct part of the correct subject is in focus.

It’s a definite step forward from the original EOS R5, and even perhaps from the current Nikons and Sonys (I’d want to shoot them side-by-side at the same sport before saying that with certainty), but it’s not quite at the stage where it’ll unfailingly do precisely what you want it to. But that day does seem tantalizingly close.