rscheffler
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 p.1 #14 · First hand experience of R3 autofocus vs R5 II, R1 by sports photographers? | |
nanousm wrote:
Interesting, it sounds like you don't use most of the new features, yet you still choose the R5 II anyway, how come? Is the autofocus much better even when used with subject detection and tracking disabled?
IMO if you're not strictly a sports photographer, the R5II is a better all-rounder that can easily hang with the R3 and R1 for sports.
From a sheer 'joy of use' perspective, I think the R1 is best as it has IMO better physical design (size, grip comfort, button size & placement, tactile button/dial response, EVF quality), but you pay a lot more for those very subjective qualities that are difficult to quantify. And compared to the R5II, I think the R1 is better at consistently tracking very high speed subjects, especially when there is only a fraction of a second to acquire and start tracking. For example shooting motorcycle racing with the R1 was sheer joy with very high focus consistency and a great EVF experience. Even with bikes in high speed, head-on situations, the AF was very consistent. With the R5II (on fw 1.0.2) set to 20fps often the first 1-2 frames would be soft (with the RF 600/4) before it would properly figure out the bike's speed. This was more noticeable in situations where the bike was suddenly emerging around a blind corner and I couldn't let the camera track it until it was at an ideal distance. I've also noticed with football, again on 1.0.2, that the R5II is usually very good at holding follow focus of a player running, but it will also seemingly randomly 'blip' focus for a couple frames before returning to near-perfect follow focus. I only updated to fw 1.1.1 a couple days ago and haven't shot anything with it yet, so can't say how much it has affected/improved AF performance.
For multi-player sports like football (I don't shoot much soccer), I rarely use subject detection/tracking/face/eye tracking unless it's a single player in the clear. Having the potential of up to a dozen or so players in the same uniforms and helmets in the scene means that the camera (here I'm referring generically to every Canon mirrorless camera I've used for sports and event coverage) inevitably will either pick the wrong player at the outset, or switch to the wrong player midway through a sequence. I'm a back button focus user and for this reason I have two buttons set up for AF, but one is 'old school' DSLR style single-point (with expansion points) manually positioned AF point without any subject recognition/detection/face/eye tracking. It just focuses on what is under the AF point, which provides certainty about where the focus is. In my case, this is the AF-ON button. The * button next to it, I have set up nearly identically except that subject detection/face/eye tracking is enabled. I've also set the AF parameters here to try to hold the existing subject longer and ignore momentary interference caused by other players crossing through the scene.
I don't really care a lot about high MP but I do kind of like one aspect of it with the R5II and shooting sports. First of all, I'm still skeptical that 45MP actually gives you ~2x the resolution (I know, it's not 2x linear resolution) when in suboptimal situations that include high speed subject motion and marginal shutter speeds at high ISO. That said, I like that I can shoot with somewhat shorter glass and get the similar number of pixels on a subject compared to longer glass on 24MP. Why I like this, for example with football, is that the close action is often the most impactful and I can shoot wider and be closer with the 100-300 (maybe with the 1.4x TC) when instead I'd have the 200-400 on 24MP and risk it being too tight. Sure, I can switch to a second body with a 70-200, but that half-second to switch cameras is potentially costly. With the 100-300 I can hold onto action coming at me for a lot longer and then switch to maybe a 24-105 or a xx-70 zoom. At the long end, 420mm has similar reach on the R5II as the 200-400 with internal TC on 24MP. Plus the 100-300 is sharper. For some sports where I'll shoot only jpeg, like youth hockey tournaments, another advantage of the R5II is shooting in APS-C crop mode and still having 17MP to work with, rather than ~9 with a 24MP sensor. While 9 is still OK for on-site printing of 8x10s, 17 offers more lens flexibility again (being able to bring shorter glass but still get pretty long reach). If I'm shooting the R5II full frame at a tournament, file quality oversampled down to 24MP is very good and for some clients I'm even shooting at 12MP, which is very clean at high ISOs.
I don't know if it's a fluke with my copy of the R5II, but it has fairly poor battery life. To the point where for longer events, or high shot count events, I'll just run it from an external 45W or greater power brick via a cable to the USB port. While the cable is a slight annoyance, the benefit is it eliminates having to keep an eye on the internal battery. My experience with the R1 so far has just been with CPS loaners, but I did manage about 13,000 frames on a single battery down to 30% SOC at a football game. That situation was 40 fps, pre-capture enabled and very minimal image review (chimping) between plays.
If you're not already a CPS member, you should look into qualifying for the Platinum membership level, which will allow you to request equipment test drives. This way you could get any/all of the cameras to compare side by side for firsthand experience. It looks like you're in Toronto and Canon Canada's HQ is nearby in Brampton. The only downside of the Canon Canada CPS test drives is that they're very short. Only 3 days and they'll only give you that product twice. But you can stack the two 3-day periods and stretch it out to a week. Getting opinions here will be helpful for a broader range of user experiences, but IMO only you can really know what you need and what your expectations are, which could be addressed through a CPS test drive.
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NEver touched an R3!