Well, I found my new favourite camera to manual focus with,
due to a feature that I didn't know existed
and that I haven't heard anyone talk about.
So today, I'm going to tell you about that feature
and a few other things that I feel haven't really been
talked about much when it comes to Canon's new EOS R,
because, you know, positive reinforcement.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What is happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and today is going to be my version of the EOS R review,
but it's not really going to be much of a review at all.
Frankly, most of the important details have already been
extremely well covered by other channels,
and I just don't have that much to add,
but for the sake of being thorough, before we get into
what I actually want to talk about, here's my review
in bullet points. It's a viable option for stills.
It's a little bit of a step down from the 5D Mark IV,
but a decent little bump from the 6D Mark II,
and it's logically priced somewhere between
those two cameras. It's a got a nice build,
really nice textures, great autofocus, good colours,
and a flippy screen. For video, on the other hand,
it's not priced as well and doesn't really present
the best value when compared to the competition.
No IBIS, a crazy crop in 4K, only one card slot,
some wonky controls and button placements,
and underwhelming codecs and frame rates,
but those new lenses are pretty amazing.
So, who's it for? Well, the type of person that would buy
a 6D Mark II, but would rather get into mirrorless,
get the new mount and get some of those new lenses.
If you're heavily reliant on the 5D Mark IV
for your pro work, this might make you feel
a little less confident and you might be better off
waiting for the pro version of this RF system.
But if you want full frame photos and you aren't
shooting clutch moments where you need two card slots
and the absolute fastest gear, this is a nice little camera
for photos, and you can even do some 1080p vlogging,
just like on the 6D Mark II. And, you can also
do 4K vlogging now, if you have a wide enough lens,
and you'll still get the same Canon ease of use
with reliable autofocus, pleasing out of the box colours,
but with a few new features.
But, like I said, you've heard that all before, right?
So let's talk about some things that hopefully
you haven't heard as much. So first up, I mentioned lenses
and using a wider lens if you're planning to shoot video
and something that I think is great and hasn't been
talked about enough from the value perspective
is the cheapest adapter which, in some cases,
you can actually get for free with a promotion
that's going on for buying the camera,
but even if you don't get it for free, it's still,
like, the cheapest adapter that I've ever seen.
It allows you to mount both EF and EFS lenses,
meaning you can mount both full frame
and APSC lenses on your EOS R.
Now, I've heard some people talk about this
when they say you can put a 10-18 on for vlogging,
which of course, is an EFS lens,
but I don't think anybody has ever really hit home
how great of a value this is. It's really great for value,
and it almost makes up for the pricing conundrum
we talked about when it comes to video.
But, more than that, if you remember the video we did
on crop factor, then you'll remember that in some cases,
EFS lenses actually outperform
their more expensive big brothers when using
a crop sensor camera, and this is due to the magnification
of lens faults and also the wasted potency when using
a full frame lens on a smaller sensor camera.
Well, since the EOS R effectively gives you
a much smaller sensor in 4K recording
due to the 1.75x crop, you'd be better off
buying EFS lenses, not only for the cost savings,
but for the potentially better image quality
dramatically increasing your value.
Now, I'm not suggesting that all EFS lenses are going
to be better than full frame lenses for this purpose,
but I am suggesting that quality EFS lenses will probably
be cheaper than quality EF ones.
An example would be the Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 Art
which is an EFS lens, but will give you amazing results
on the EOS R and is only about half the price
of what an equivalent full frame lens would cost.
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But, I should warn you that the 18 to 35,
if you haven't used it, is pretty hefty,
and when you mix in an adapter, it makes it pretty long
and it can be very difficult to get steady, handheld shots,
especially because with this combination,
neither the lens or the body will have image stabilisation.
And, of course, another drawback to this would be
that if you switch over to photo mode,
you're going to want to change lenses
if you want full access to the sensor, but even still,
I think it's important to acknowledge
when a company does something right,
so they continue to do it in the future and so that,
maybe, other manufacturers start to do it too, you know,
positive reinforcement. So, in this case, good job, Canon,
I really like the adapter, and I like its price.
Now, when you're adapting lenses,
you're going to have access to mechanical
manual focusing instead of that focus by wire junk
that we're used to with mirrorless cameras.
Having this type of focus ring already makes
manual focusing so much easier, but as I alluded to
in the intro, there's a new feature in the Canon EOS R
that makes it my favourite mirrorless manual focuser
out there. It's called Focus Guide and it can be found
in the menu under "AF", and then page two,
and here you'll also see the, uh, manual focus peaking
which, is great that that's included
because that's something else that's typically been
absent on Canon cameras so I'm glad that that's included,
but I've turned that off, to use Focus guide instead,
which I think is outstanding, so let me show you
how that works. So basically, all it is this box
that appears and you turn the focusing ring to get
those triangles to converge over the top of the other one,
and when they do, it turns green and you're in focus,
and I love it. And, not only because it's helpful
because it lets you know which way you're out of focus
by you can see if I go this way then the arrows are on
the bottom, and if I go this way, they're on the top.
It lets you know which way you need to turn the ring,
but it's also, it's like this
really satisfying mini game for me,
for some reason, where I just try to nicely put
the triangles together and when I do,
I get the reward of the box turning green.
There's definitely much more satisfaction in getting
that box to light up green than there is for turning
the ring and increasing the amount of blue
or red pixie dust on your subject like you do
with focus peaking. And, it works well
for the macro technique as well,
which usually involves you setting it to be as close focus
as possible and then inching in slowly
until you achieve focus. Well, in this case,
the triangles work the same way,
even if you don't turn the ring, if you just get closer
and closer to the subject, eventually you'll converge
and you'll get a green and then you'll know
you're in focus and you can take the shot.
So, good job, Canon, love your green box, keep doing that.
Now, if autofocus is more your speed,
you'll notice that there's no joystick for moving
your AF point around. Now, the touchscreen is an option
and it works really well. It's very accurate and responsive,
in fact, I love this touchscreen in general.
I think it's great for menus and for changing settings.
So, good job, Canon, on the touchscreen
and for making it a flippy one. Keep doing that.
But, if you prefer to use the EVF and not use the touchpad
or you'd rather move your focus point in steps,
then you're going to have to use the D-pad,
but the way it's set up by default is you have to press
this focusing system button first and then you can use
the D-pad to move the focusing point around,
and I find that tedious. But, because of all
the customisation options that Canon added
to this camera, which is another thing
that I wanted to say "Good job" on.
You can change it in the menu. So, all you've got to do
is you've got to go over to the orange camera icon
and then go to page four, where it says
"customize buttons", choose that and then if you jump
down here, you can see the D-pad directions
for both photo mode and video mode.
And, you only have to change the top one,
from what I found in my experience,
and if you change it to "Direct AF Point Selection",
which is right on the top line here,
then the other three will also match that selection as well,
and now you can just press the D-pad directly to move
the focus point without having to press another button first.
Personally, I'd rather have a joystick,
but I think this is a viable workaround.
If I could, I would probably change the button layout
a little bit. I would get rid of this multi-function
touch bar thing, because I think it's completely useless.
I would take the AF On button off the weird angle
that it's on and I would probably change the D-pad
instead to a wheel. I prefer the ones that are wheels
that also have the option to click them as a D-pad,
that way I can set the wheel to my ISO, but still use it
in the directional tapping if I want to.
But, I'm not trying to get on to too much
of a hate train here. So, let's just move on
to the final feature I want to show you.
So, last thing I want to show you has to do
with the display customisation.
Now, I've seen some similar iterations of this before,
but nothing that gives you this much control.
I think this is the best implementation of this
that I've seen. So, if you jump over to the wrench
and go to page four, you're going to have
"Shooting info display", and you'll have
"Screen info settings", which is for the LCD screen
and then the "VF info/toggle settings" is for the viewfinder.
They both function similarly. So, if you go into one
of these, you'll see that you have five pre-set pages
and these are basically just different things
that set how much of the, how much information
you're going to have on the screen.
Now, other cameras' recent models have this as well,
and I think this is great, cause you can eliminate,
say you don't want three, four, and five.
That way, when you cycle through your display settings,
you're just going through one and two. It's gonna be faster.
But, what Canon did with it that I think is so great
is that for each one of these, you can press 'Info',
which will allow you to go in further
and customise them in a very easy and intuitive way.
So basically, you're going to get these new
check marks now. The first one is "Basic shooting info",
which you can turn on and off,
which is your exposure settings and your storage type,
and then you've got "Detailed shooting info",
which has your focus settings, your white balance,
the optimisation settings, any codecs that you're using,
and then you've got On-screen buttons,
which turns the exposure settings into touch buttons
or not, and then you've got your Histogram display
and your Electronic level. For the Histogram display,
you can even change it even further
for either Brightness or RGB, and for Small or Large.
One unfortunate thing about the histogram though,
is as soon as you start recording, it goes away,
which is frustrating considering how good
the rest of the on-screen implementation was,
but good job Canon, on allowing such
terrific customisation of the display settings.
Keep doing that, but if you can enable the histogram
during recording as well, that would be great.
That's it for the quirky things I was pleasantly surprised
about when I was testing the EOS R.
I don't think that any of these features are going to be make it or break it aspects
when it comes to buying the camera or not, but as I said I do think we should
continue to point out when a company gets something right to
encourage them to give us more of what we want in the future.
But that's going to be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful, or at least entertaining, and if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already,
but if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright! I'm done.
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