I have used many camera’s over the years and nearly all have promised excellent autofocus for photography, even the Panasonic GH5’s autofocus is quick and accurate on slow moving subjects when using native lenses! but fast tracking forget it!
Then along came the Canon R5/6 with its quoted super fast animal eye autofocus.
So how good it is in real life or is it all just hype? well the answer is quite simple, its unbelievable!
Rather than just say that and not qualify it I set about doing a little test, lab test are one thing but a real world test on a subject we can all relate too is far better.
Meet Frankie! an 8 month old Border Collie!
Probably one of the happiest dogs you will meet, oh and one of the liveliest as well!!!
To try the autofocus we got Frankie’s favourite toy and threw it for him to chase.
I was armed with the Canon R5 using the Electronic shutter with animal eye tracking enabled, the drive mode was highspeed so that’s 20 FPS in CRAW.
To really see the focus system working at its best you need to use a super fast lens, there aren’t much better or faster lenses than the RF70-200 F2.8 so that’s what we used.
Then to make it as hard as possible the lens was set to 200mm at F2.8 so the depth of field was extremely shallow! (as you can see!)
Below is a set of 20 images (one second in real time).
Amazingly in this set of images only one image is a ‘little’ soft!!!!
Below is a full resolution image (45MP).
This camera truly is outstanding at this kind of photography! If you are used to a DSLR and thinking about jumping to mirrorless you will not be disappointed, these new camera’s are phenomenal!
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