Canon 5ds 5ds R

This morning Canon announced the Canon 5ds and Canon 5ds R. Both cameras are pretty similar to the 5d mark III but canon’s added and subtracted a few things. The most significant upgrade is a 50.6 megapixel sensor, which Canon was quick to point out is a proprietary Canon sensor, Dual DIGIC 6 Image Processors, intervalometer, and USB 3.0 support. They’ve subtracted the headphone monitoring, hdmi output, and a microphone port. Update: There does appear to be an HDMI port as well as a mic port, thanks JB for the correction. I spent some time talking about this on Episode 6 of the podcast this morning, but I thought I’d organize my thoughts here.

For $3699, Canon basically seems to be selling you a high megapixel camera. Low light performance wasn’t really mentioned in their promo video which is probably because this goes up to iso 6400 and with the missing video features this seems to be mostly aimed towards specific type of photographers.

The Canon 5ds R seems to be Canon’s opportunity to charge people $200 extra for actually removing something from the Canon 5ds. While I wont argue that there are a few people who actually want and need a 50 megapixel sensor, for the rest of us, this isn’t really an upgrade. It just a 5d mark III with more pixels.

There are rumors of a 5d mark IV coming that might include 4k recording and some upgraded video features. It might even be announced at NAB this year. I hope these rumors materialize, because Canon is really starting to fall behind the competition.

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