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 p.3 #3 · p.3 #3 · R6 vs. R5 vs. R6II EVF stutter/lag/blackout differences when following fast action | |
Follow up for anyone interested: as I may have posted elsewhere, I decided to get the R6II after trying out all the current Canon mirrorless cameras.
I found the R6 was good enough for most of my work and I can probably live with the resulting compromises for areas where the 1D style body UI/UX is superior. But time will tell. I was reassured by the early R6II reviews, such as from DPR, that the newer AF capabilities in the R3 and R7 have also transitioned to it, plus apparently better rolling shutter control, was enough of a tipping point over the older R5 and R6. But I did considerably prefer the R5's EVF quality.
Apparently I will receive the R6II at some point Nov. 29th, or later in the week, and will have some sports events to try it at - youth hockey tournaments and some football.
Going back to the R6, I recently tried it at a youth hockey tournament for about 5000 frames. On the positive side, first frame AF acquisition and precision continued the trend I saw at the football games of being superior to my 1DXII. And because of my aging eyes and onset of presbyopia, it was wonderful to be able to review images on the EVF, rather than struggling to see the rear display on a DSLR.
On the negative side, EVF stutter was more annoying than at the football games for the following reasons: The games were played on a variety of rinks, ranging from very nicely LED illuminated at ISO 6400 1/640 f/4 to dismal mercury vapor at ISO 20000 1/500 f/4. The first problem was that for these tournaments I can't just shoot high fps bursts because I hand off the cards with minimal culling (there's no time) to the computer tech. It would clog up the on-site printing production pipeline and no one wants to wade through 20 nearly identical frames of their kid skating.  So to control things better, and to benefit from anti-flicker control, I had to use EFCS in continuous H (not H+) to keep duplicate frames under control. And I generally tried to do single or two shots per kid whenever possible. The problem was that as soon as I lifted off the shutter release, the camera figured shooting was done and resulted in an extra ~quarter-second glitch/stutter, or whatever, of the EVF before the normal feed resumed. I found this extremely disruptive when trying to continue following the action, or quickly grabbing an additional frame, or moving to the next player (which I do extremely quickly because I only shoot one 10-minute period per game when there are 4 games playing simultaneously). I also found that the slight delay of the EVF feed meant that I had to anticipate peak action slightly sooner than I was used to after years of DSLR use. This might take some time for me to adjust.
I also had the habit of letting off the AF-ON button while just searching for action and this caused the EVF feed, particularly on the dark rinks, to drop to a really low, really un-smooth refresh rate, even though I had it set to 'smooth'. But as soon as I'd press AF-ON again, the EVF feed became smooth. Not deal breaking, but kind of annoying. Something else I hadn't previously experienced with the R6 was lockups. It happened 3 or 4 times that the live view feed froze in the EVF and the camera generally became unresponsive. I did notice though that it would complete writing to the card and I don't think I lost any images. But I never had time to just set it down and see if it would recover. Instead, each time I pulled the battery to reboot the camera because turning it off didn't seem to actually turn it off. I'm not really sure what was so different about shooting the hockey tournament vs. football that would cause the camera to lock up this many times in one day. Sure, the tournament was over the span of a ~10-hour day, whereas a football game is only about 3 hours. It was also colder in the rinks and maybe my use of the camera was more 'stop and go' on an ongoing basis... I used the same 200-400 lens but I have recently added the BG-R10 grip and also a couple Neewer LP-E6NH battery clones. I mixed those with original Canon batteries in the grip, in part because I'm not sure if I trust them yet.
Subject/head/face recognition of kids wearing hockey helmets generally worked. To reiterate my AF setup on the R6: I have AF-ON set to an AF point without subject detection/tracking. I have the * button set up for recognizing people. I start with AF-ON then switch to * when warranted. But I found that it took the camera about a half-second to recognize the subject was a person and to find their head. By this time I was usually moving on to the next shot. I don't think it really messed up or that I lost frames, but it just seemed slow having that additional slight delay before it recognized the subject was a person, plus that of moving my thumb from one button to the other. It meant I ended up just using a regular AF point (single point with four surrounding points) with AF-ON most of the time. Alternatively I might reconsider my use of AF-ON and move AF to the shutter release so that I can then override it with subject detection on the * button simultaneously. I was reluctant to use it in subject detection mode all the time because of some situations, like shooting the goalie with a lot of surrounding action, it would inevitably drift off the intended subject, or not pick it as the starting point. When there was just one kid predominantly in the composition, then subject detection was solid, when I used it.
I'm guessing based on my football experience with the R3 that it would probably be a much smoother EVF experience at hockey games, too. But at this point it's not in the budget...
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