Canon have been teasing the new R3 for what seems like forever, but the wait is now finally
over. Its real, we have all of the features, and I have one my hands. There is one caveat
though, this isn’t a production model and so Canon won’t let us share any footage
from the camera. So we will have to revisit this later on to judge the image quality.
But for now, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about the video features of the R3,
as this is obviously a photography first camera. This is without a doubt going to be one of
the best stills cameras in the world for some types of work, anyone working in fast paced
environments like sports or wildlife is going to love this. So a lot of the conversation
at launch will be rightly so about the stills side of the camera. But we have all also had
lots of questions about its video features. We don’t have long with the camera. But
i’m going to answer what I can.
First lets start with the sensor. Its a full frame 24.1 mp stacked CMOS sensor. Now this
is the first time Canon have made a stacked sensor, which is something that Sony have
been doing in quite a few of their cameras now. A stacked sensor is built in layers.
With every CMOS sensor, there is a imaging layer, the actual sensor itself and then an
image processing circuits and D-Ram which takes the information from the sensor for
the cameras processor to work its magic. All a stacked sensor really means, is that those
three things, the imaging surface, processing circuits and D-Ram, are fused together in
three layers of the sensor. So they are as close together as possible. The main advantage
of this is that it lets the camera get information off of the sensor as fast as possible. Great
for high frame rates, great for any auto exposure calculation that has to happen in real time,
great for autofocus, and could potentially really improve things like rolling shutter.
So I am really looking forward to putting the R3 through its paces properly with a final
production camera as this is a whole new sensor technology for Canon.
So lets go over the formats which the R3 can actually record from this new stacked sensor.
You can do 6K but only in their raw formats. You do however get both their full quality
raw, and their new compressed raw format like on the R5. This 6K works out at 6000 by 3164
pixels. Swap over to the MP4 based codec, and you loose the ability to film in 6K instead
you get 4K or full HD with the full sensor. You can then choose between All-I or IPB like
you would expect and both 4K and full HD can go up to 120 frames a second in high frame
rate mode. Just like on the R5, you need a CFExpress card to do either the raw formats
or the high frame rate mode, and just like on the R5, the MP4 modes are in 8 bit H.264
compression, until you turn on Canon Log 3 when the camera forces you into 10 bit H.265.
So all in all, this is very similar to the R5 except with 6K rather than 8K, and no resolutions
higher than 4K in MP4 mode. You also don’t get raw over the HDMI port like you do with
the R5. A big difference to the R5 though, is that the half an hour record time limit
has gone. Canon say the R3 can record for up to 6 hours at a time, but i’m not clear
what stops it after that 6 hour limit. Is it a software limit, or maybe thats the limit
before overheating, its not clear. Either way, this is a big step forward over Canon’s
previous mirrorless cameras for video.
Overheating will be the big question on everyones lips though. We all know the problems the
R5 has had, and the hope is that with the R3’s bigger form factor and lower sensor
resolution, it should perform better. We don’t have this camera anywhere near long enough
to test for overheating properly. But while I was writing this video I had the R5 recording
in 6K compressed raw next to me on the desk, and I got 1 hour & 15 mins of recording & filled
up my 512gb CFExpress card no problem. I then put a new card in and carried on recording
for another 50 minutes before I had to stop the test as I was running out of time to make
the rest of this video. So I don’t know for sure that theres no overheating here,
i’m sure it will at some point and in some warmer environments. But we got over 2 hours
of 6K compressed raw recording, with no issues at all, the camera was warm but not hot to
touch, and we still had two of the 4 blips of battery life remaining. So its pretty obvious
that the R3 certainly handles overheating much better than the R5.
There are however two big new features which the R3 has which the R5 doesn’t. The first
is eye control af. This has been a big part of Canon’s marketing and is a hugely exciting
new technology. You’ll notice that the EVF seems huge on the back of the camera, and
thats because it has sensors inside to measure where your pupil is looking in the frame.
You have to calibrate this to you and your eye, and you can set up calibration profiles
for different people. Its a really exciting technology and has a huge amount of potential
for changing the way professional photographers work, but right now, it doesn’t seem to
work in video mode. The menu option disappears when the cameras set to video, and when you
hit the record button when in stills mode the focus box just defaults back to the middle.
Its a shame, as I love recording video with my eye up to the viewfinder, especially when
you have such fantastic sensor stabilization as the R3 and especially during the sorts
of fast paced work that this camera excels in. But in stills mode it is a really interesting
feature. And its not the only new autofocus improvement. Theres the new vehicle tracking
which will be very useful for anyone doing motorsports work, but my favourite change
is the ability to now enable tracking in whatever autofocus mode you want to be in. At any time
you can hit one of the buttons at the front of the camera and go into object tracking
mode whereas on the R5 you had to be in the face and tracking autofocus mode.
The other brand new addition is the Multi Function accessory shoe on the top of the
camera. This is the same port that we saw on their new Camcorder the XF605, and now
we know the accessories that Canon are releasing alongside this. We get a microphone, the DM-E1D
which looks like a simple shotgun microphone which is always nice to be able to put on
the top of your camera with no cables needed. This will be great for recording audio in
B-roll at an event for example, situations like that. Theres then some stills focused
ones like a tiny speedlite transmitter for firing flashguns and a converter to use flash
units designed for the regular hot shoe mount. And theres then a mount for your smartphone
in either an android or IOS version. This lets you connect your phone without long cables
hanging off your camera so that you can upload files to FTP servers, control your camera
and lots more. Again, great for the kind of fast paced work like journalism that this
camera is going to be perfect for. But perhaps the accessory I am most interested in for
video work is the XLR adapter which Tascam have announced, the CA-XLR2D-C. This is essentially
the same thing as Sony’s K3M unit or Panasonics XLR1, an XLR unit with professional controls
that communicates without extra wires, directly through the accessory shoe. It also should
have better pre-amps than the camera has itself, so audio should just sound better through
it as a whole. What is interesting though, is that this time it is made by tascam, not
by Canon themselves. This means Canon are talking to third party audio manufacturer
and opening up the port to them which enables so much potential. Imagine a wireless receiver
from Rode or Sennheiser that connects and powers itself just through the accessory shoe
for example. Nothing has been announced yet, but I am really hoping thats the way this
is going to go. As that would be fantastic both for the R3 and for the XF605.
But the big difference between this and the R5, or really this and any other mirrorless
camera on the market. Is the build quality. The R3 feels just like using a mini 1DX III
but with an EVF and a flip out screen. It has the vertical handgrip, the larger battery,
the rugged build quality and fantastic weather sealing. The R3 feels professional to hold
and use in every single way, just like the 1DX line always has. Although this time it
is significantly lighter. The R3 weighs only 822 grams, or 1015 with a card and battery
inside. To put this into comparison, the 1DX III weighs 1250g and the r5 is 650 or 738
with a card and a battery. So the R3 sits almost exactly in the middle of the R5 and
1DX III in terms of weight, but losing those 400 grams from the 1DX has made such a huge
difference. This really doesn’t feel like a heavy camera to use. It feels like using
a R5 with a battery grip, rather than using an 1DX. Combine this improved build quality
with the surprisingly low weight design and the fantastic battery life from these larger
LP-E19 batteries, and you end up with a camera that feels like it could handle anything you
throw at it with ease.
So, obviously we need to wait for a final unit so that we can test out the image quality
properly. As thats still a huge unknown here, we don’t know yet how this compares to the
R5 in terms of image quality. But from a practical point of view, i am hugely impressed with
the R3 so far. It takes nearly everything that was great about the R5, well apart from
the fantastic 8K of course, but it has better autofocus performance, the image stabilisation,
the record formats like internal raw, the RF mount, all of those strengths. And adds
the new accessory shoe, the professional build quality, much better battery life, and seems
to go a long way to address the R5’s biggest weakness, the overheating limits. So whether
or not this is going to be worth stepping up to for video work or not, really comes
down to you and the sort of work that you do. If you work professionally in environments
where you need to be incredibly fast paced, and you want a mirrorless camera, not a video
camera like the C70 or XF605, I think the R3 could well be the best camera on the market
for you right now. But what do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if
you want to buy one for your own work then head over to ProAV.co.uk. Thanks for watching,
and i’ll see you in the next one.