On the other hand, on a photography trip to Africa after the Olympics, I shot everything on a Canon R5, and it was great to capture wildlife with 45MP and crop where necessary. Plus, the more megapixels you pile on, the more noise you’re introducing into the image. For example, the USA Water Polo team has a large billboard in Southern California using one of my images from the Tokyo Olympics and it was taken with the R3 at 24MP. I’d maybe preferred a bit more resolution – I see 30MP as a sweet spot – but as a sports photographer, I don’t really need 50 or 60 or 70MP.
Jeff Cable: I think 24MP is fine for shooting sports. Q: What do you think about it having 24MP of resolution? I shot with it for almost everything and even though it was pre-production model, I had no issues with it. One thing to note: while I brought two R5s with me to the Olympics as well, I ended up using the R3 98% of the time. The R3 is also slightly less expensive than the 1D X III but you get so much more with it. That’s great for sports photography because when you rotate it into vertical mode you still have the buttons on top. The face detection is even better with the R3 and while it’s bigger than those two cameras, I like that it has the grip built in. It’s funny, when I first shot with the R5 and R6, I said to Canon these are game changers but the R3 takes it up a notch. I actually wish the R3 had two CFexpress card slots rather than one CFexpress and one SD. Faster to download, faster for everything compared to SD. I appreciated that the R3 has a CFexpress card slot. I also liked that I could zoom in on an image and see if it was sharp very easily. It’s way better than looking through the eyepiece on a DSLR and the R3’s EVF is great quality. Specifically, the fact that I could look through the EVF and see what I was getting. The other thing I loved is the mirrorless experience in general. For some events at the Olympics where I was looking for a specific reaction shot, being able to shoot 30 frames per second helped me nail it. It can’t be overstated how key this is to sports photography and to pretty much any type of photography that involves capturing action. The R3 has really fast and accurate focusing and an incredibly fast frame rate. Even though the R3 is more compact than the 1D X III, it uses the same battery as that DSLR so you’re getting excellent battery life.īut even more important to me was the camera’s overall speed. The 1D X III does get heavy so I appreciated how the R3 was much easier to carry from event to event at the Olympics. Jeff Cable: First off, I liked the fact that the Canon R3 is significantly smaller and lighter than the Canon 1D X Mark III. Q: What were your general impressions of using the Canon EOS R3 at the Olympics? You can pre-order the Canon EOS R3 at B&H here and at Amazon here. To read more of Cable’s thoughts and impressions on the R3 and see more of his images, read his review on the camera on his blog. To see all the technical specifications and details about the Canon R3, read our launch story on the camera from last week.
Along with discussing shooting sports with the R3 at the Olympics, Cable addresses how the camera might (or might not) be suitable for wildlife and event photography.
CANON DIGITAL PROFESSIONAL CAMERA FULL
In the below interview with Cable, he gives us the full scoop on the R3 including his early review of its autofocus system, resolving power, and the things he liked and didn’t like about the camera. While we’ve already covered some of Cable’s impressions of the R3 during his early testing in Tokyo, he hasn’t been allowed to say much in-depth about the camera until now. One of those photographers is Jeff Cable who used the 24-megapixel R3 extensively during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics this past summer. The R3, which sits at the top of Canon’s full frame mirrorless line, won’t officially go on sale until November 2021 for $5999, but a few lucky photographers have already been able to shoot with the camera.
Canon made a splash last week when it (finally) announced the full details of its forthcoming EOS R3 camera.