Canon EOS R5 Managing some obscure menu items 10 November 2021

 

Extra terrestrial artefact in the mangroves ? 

One of the mysteries of life, camera menus being another. 

Canon menus are generally  easy enough to navigate.  However even after a year with the R5 I still find some  items difficult to understand.

Here follows my often un-successful attempt to unravel some of the knots.

Can I say at the outset: when in doubt, leave the setting at default. I suspect this is what many users do and in the process avoid a lot of confusion.

One setting which must be changed from default is the thumb stick, called “Multicontrollers” by Canon and “joystick” by others. 

Go to Custom menu (Orange) Screen 3 > Customize buttons > Multicontrollers > Direct AF point selection.

Now the thumb stick will do what you expect it to do which is move the AF area around the frame.

Camera menu (red)

Screen 2, HDR PQ settings. See pages 157-160 of the advanced user guide, where Canon explains what this setting is about:..."PQ Spec ITV-R BT.2100 and SMPTE ST.2084.." and so on.

Did you understand that ? No ? Neither did I.

It reminds me of the old Harry Belafonte song…”it was clear as mud but it cover’ de groun’.

So I tried a range of test shots using a subject with high brightness range, HDR on and HDR off.

Files are output as Raw or HEIF.  Without a means of displaying HEIF files this feature appears to have little benefit for normal photography.

Auto Lighting Optimizer  (ALO)

When ALO is set to high then exposure is reduced when compared to the exposure with ALO off using the same subject, framing and AF point position.

And on my tests with Raw and JPG that’s just about all there is.  I would expect the JPG processor to pull up the shadows to compensate for the reduced exposure but on my tests that was not apparent.

So I am not clear what benefit is to be expected from using ALO.

The User guide says has a description on pages 160-161.

Next in the list on Camera 2 we have

Highlight tone priority (HTP)

Refer to page 163 of the user guide, which unfortunately is notably lacking in explanation about  how this feature works. The minimum ISO setting available is 200

On my tests setting HTP  to D+2 does appear to lower highlight brightness without affecting dark tones  in both Raw and JPG files even though the nominal exposure with HTP on is the same as with HTP off.

Summary: HDR, ALO and HTP.

Unfortunately I feel none the wiser having explored these options in real world tests.

I shoot Raw so I leave all three off all the time.

All three features appear to be designed to enable the camera to capture a wider range of highlight and shadow detail than would be available with normal settings.

I really don’t know what to suggest for JPG shooters. 

For what it is worth HTP seems to have the most evident effect on my tests.

 

Screen 3

White balance

Refer to pages 183-195 of the User Guide which describes the extensive options available. White balance settings apply to Raw and JPG files.

Default is Auto, Ambience Priority. This is very satisfactory for the great majority of subjects and is the setting I always use with adjustments in post processing if required.

For critical applications where color fidelity is essential a custom setting could well be desirable.

Picture style

Pages 197-207 of the User Guide.

The effect of settings under this heading is seen on the preview and playback images on the camera screen and EVF and  JPG files.  Raw files are not affected.

There are presets, labelled Auto, Standard, Portrait….etcetera plus several user defined styles.

Any of the presets can be customised with respect to Sharpness (strength, fineness and threshold) Contrast, Saturation and Color tone.

There is something for everyone here. The plethora of options probably represent gross overkill for most users.

Note that the basic screen/viewfinder display options are found in the wrench (yellow) Menu  screen 3 but Picture Style settings also affect EVF/screen image appearance.

Lens aberration correction

See pages 209-215 of the User Guide.  When the menu item is accessed, the lens mounted is displayed.

These adjustments apply to JPG files.

Options available depend on the lens fitted.  For instance with the RF 16mm f2.8 lens in place [Distortion correction] is greyed out because it is always applied to JPG files. But not Raw files, go figure. As this lens produces massive barrel distortion the matter is not academic.

When all options are available I set Peripheral illum corr, Distortion correction and Chromatic aberr corr ON and  Digital Lens Optimiser and Diffraction correction OFF.

 

Screen 5

HDR Mode

See pages 235-238 of the User Guide.

Just to confuse everybody, HDR mode is different from HDR PQ Mode.

In HDR Mode the camera takes three shots at different exposures and combines them in camera to produce a single JPG with greater detail in highlights and shadows which can be achieved with a single exposure.

This function works as advertised provided the subject and camera are both still for the three exposures.

But to my eye the results are unacceptable with very strange looking tonal rendition. I can get much better pictures with less hassle using a single Raw capture.

AF Menu (Magenta)

Screen 3 Servo AF Cases

User guide page 380.

This is one of the most problematic menu items. It is particularly relevant to sport/action/bird/wildlife shooters.

I have read everything I can find in print and watched every online video I can find about this set of options. Unfortunately I am none the wiser, having encountered a variety of suggestions, all different.

So I have settled on Case 1 (Versatile multipurpose) with Tracking sensitivity and Accel./decel. Tracking both at zero.

AF screen 4 Switching tracked subjects

See page 440 in the User Guide

This is another problematic item. I have not encountered much discussion about this online  and the relationship between this item and the one above is not altogether clear.

The options are Initial priority/On subject/Switch subject.

Having no clear guidance as to the benefit or otherwise of the options I just leave this setting at default which is in the middle (On subject).

AF screen 5  Initial Servo AF pt for face detect/tracking

See User Guide page 445.  I am not the only one to find the distinction between options 1 and 2 difficult to grasp.

The wording of option 2 with its reference to the previously set AF area is puzzling. When I experiment with how the various options appear to work with a real subject in front of the camera My perplexity increases.

Anyway I find option 1 the easiest to work with in practice as the relationship between the on-screen symbols and actual focussing behaviour is reasonably predictable.  I use a center AF area location to commence tracking focus.

Foe birds in flight I set Auto (on C1 Mode) as the bird could enter the frame from any direction.

Wrench (yellow) Screen 1  Record func + card/folder sel.

( Selecting cards for recording/playback)

See pages 729-735 of the User Guide.

This is where we tell the camera where to send images for storage on the memory card(s).

There are so many options in this set that it can get confusing. The two card slots being for different card types with  different speed and capacity doesn’t help either.

The number of options between Raw/JPG, Stills/video, single card/both cards….etcetera makes for many different selection decisions.

All I can suggest is that the new user trial various options until the camera’s behaviour conforms to the way you prefer.

I like to keep it as simple as possible at both record and formatting stages with stills always going to slot [1] which holds the CFEB card.

I have

Line 1: Stills/Movie separate    Disable

Line 2: Stills rec options     Standard

Line 3: Movie rec options    Standard

Line 4: Stills Record/Play [1]

Line 5: Movie Record/play [2]

Line 6: Folder 100Canon

Custom menu (orange)

Screen 1 

Speed from metering/ISO Auto

See page 808 of the Guide.

You can set the camera so that if you meter and take a shot using auto ISO then the ISO speed used for the exposure is retained for the next exposure.

Did someone ask Canon to include this feature ?

It would drive me totally mad.

I set this to Auto and wonder why the option is there at all.

Same expo for new aperture

Page 811 of the Guide.

Invoking this function ensures that the camera maintains the same exposure when a variable aperture lens is zoomed or a different lens or an extender are mounted.

I would be happy if this happened automatically as that is the behaviour I expect of a camera.

I set [ISO speed/Shutter speed] here to be as sure as possible that correct exposure is maintained.

AE Lock meter. mode after focus

Page 812 of the Guide.

I think the usually expected behaviour of a camera would be that autofocus and exposure are locked while the shutter button is held half pressed.

However it is possible with this function to decouple the two.  This could be desirable for people who use the focus-in-the-center-and-recompose strategy, so focus is locked but exposure not set until the shutter button is fully depressed.

You can even set the metering behaviour differently for each of the exposure metering types.

My mantra is always to seek as much simplicity as possible in the operation of what is a really complex tool so I just use one metering mode (evaluative) for everything and I do place a check mark in the evaluative metering box in this submenu.

 

Summary

After a year of use most of the menu items which I initially found problematic are still a puzzle.

I think Canon needs to work on the AF Servo menus especially as the present options seem to produce more questions than answers.

I also would prefer both memory cards to be CFEB type.   Yes I understand that CFEB cars are expensive and a separate reader is required. But I have actually spent less money on memory cards in the year after buying one big fast CFEB card than I did in the previous year upgrading several SD cards.