Last week the box I’ve been waiting for arrived from B&H Photo with my new Canon EOS R6 and a Tamron 150-600mm lens.
When I shared the photos of my delivery on social (taken with my iPhone), I had a number of folks asking “Why did you choose the R6 over the R5?” so I thought I’d cover that here today (and why I decided to upgrade from . Here we go:
Lower Noise / Better Sensor
This was probably the biggest thing for me. My main sports camera has been the Canon 1Dx. Not the Mark II. Not the Mark III. Just the original 1Dx, which is a boss when it comes to low noise. Literally the best camera I’ve ever used in low light. Just incredible, and it has a wider dynamic range. It’s an incredible sensor, and somehow the R6 (not the R5) has the same sensor in it as the Canon 1Dx Mark III, at a fraction of the price. The 1Dx Mark III body alone is $6,500. The R6 is $4,000 less at $2,500. This was the main reason I went with it. The rest is just icing on the cake.
The Lower Price
The R5 is pretty expensive at $3,899 ($1,400 more than the R5), and that allowed me to save enough also to get the Tamron lens I’ve been wanting, and still have enough left over to buy…well…lots of stuff!
The lower megapixels (What?!)
For me (and in my opinion, for most photographers out there), more megapixels just mean more hassles. Your cards fill up faster, your drives fill up faster, Photoshop runs slower, and you’re always dealing with huge files. My current high-end camera, my 1Dx, is an 18-megapixel camera, and it’s what so many pro sports shooters — commercial photographers who make their living shooting for magazines and news sites, use day in and day out. The R6 has a couple more at 21-megapixels, which is great, but it’s all I need (even when making huge prints). The R5 is 45-megapixels which, is 50% higher than my old EOS R at 30-megapixels, which was already more than I needed. For me, the lower megapixels are a big plus.
I don’t shoot video. At all.
If I hit the video button on the back of my camera, it’s by accident. I wind up editing a lot of videos, but I don’t shoot any at all. The R5 is a video camera that shoots stills. It’s aimed at the video crowd, and they absolutely love it, but I feel like it’s video first and stills as the sideshow, so none of the video features that make video folks drool over the R5 mean anything to me, so that helped make my choice easier. The R6 is a camera for the still shooter (even though it still has some pretty impressive video features)
I don’t like CFexpress cards
I love that the R6 takes fast SD cards. I hate that one of the card slots on the R5 is a CFexpress slot. I don’t really need two slots in the first place, to be perfectly honest, but if I have two, I don’t want to require really expensive cards that I don’t have. Now I have to carry two types of cards? Nope. I’m going with the R6.
Why Did I Upgrade From My Beloved EOS R?
All the stuff I mentioned above
But especially the better sensor
Built-in Focus Stacking
The EOS R didn’t have it, but weirdly the lower-ed EOS RP does. Canon could have added it in a firmware update, but the just never did.
Built-in Image Stabilization
Most of my lenses already have stabilization, but people are raving about the performance of the built-in version.
Another bonus for me is the physical Mode dial on top
Changing modes through menus on the R was kind of a pain. I love a physical dial.
More Frames Per Second
Way more. I can use this body for sports. The Autofocus is better, too.
Way Better Buffer
The buffer on the R6 is crazy good (and way larger than the one on my EOS R).
More Buttons and a Better Main Dial
Menus are great until you need to change something quickly. There’s a reason so many pros like buttons — they keep you from having to dig through menus when you need to make a quick change. Also, the Main Dial (from the 5D Mark IV) that I loved so much is now on the R6, and man that thing is the best in the business. I’m thrilled to have both of these features.
Better ergonomics
How it feels in your hands matters more than you’d think, and the R6 has a refined body (and did I mention more buttons) and a better feel, and even looks better. How it looks matters.
In short, this is the camera I’ve been dreaming of — with more of the stuff I love and less of the stuff I don’t need. It’s like I just got a Mirrorless 1Dx with way more features at a fraction of the price. I’m thrilled! This is my first week shooting with the new camera, so I’ll have more of a shooting report later on, but for now, I wanted to answer that question that everybody was asking.
One more thing:
Another thing folks were asking me was how does my new Tamron (bought to shoot aviation) compare to the Sigma with similar range. I have no idea. I don’t have the Sigma; they never send me a lens a try — I have no idea. I’m a Tamron guy, and the lenses they have been coming out with in the past few years are just incredible, and an incredible value (the closest Canon lens is their 100-400mm, so it’s not nearly as long a zoom, but it’s still $1,000 more). It was an easy decision to go with the Tamron (especially after I shot an airshow a couple of months ago with a Canon 100-400mm, and 400mm really doesn’t get you close enough. All the pros out there were shooting 500mm or 600mm, or that exact Tamron I bought, so I’m pretty psyched. Now, I just need an airshow I can drive to. LOL!!
OK, There you have it. I hope you found that helpful, and more to come on the camera and lens as I chance to chance to shoot with it. :)
-Scott
