Canon EOS R mount travel camera kits compared: Budget vs Top of the line

 

Noisy miner Canon EOS R10 with RF 100-400mm lens

When travelling with camera gear I dislike carrying any more gear than necessary  and I really hate changing lenses. 

My preferred photographic subjects cover quite a wide range from landscape both urban and natural through street and documentary to wildlife and birds.

In previous years I covered these requirements with a bridge camera. My favourites were the Panasonic FZ1000, Panasonic FZ300 and Sony RX10.4. Unfortunately camera makers appear to have lost interest in the bridge camera genre with no new or updated models appearing in recent times.

The FZ300 dates from 2015, the FZ100 from 2014 with a minor upgrade in 2019 and the RX10.4 from 2017.  I no longer have any bridge or compact cameras.

All my cameras and lenses are now from the Canon RF mount catalogue.

My preferred travel kit consists of one body with a standard zoom mounted and used for most photos, plus a second body with a long zoom mounted for wildlife and birds and some scenics with compressed perspective. I don’t need an ultrawide lens when travelling unless interior architecture is on the menu.

I assembled two travel kits, one from the budget end of the catalogue, the other using all high end components. The table summarises some of the details.

	Bodies	Lens 1	Lens 2	Price AUD *	Mass grams
Budget kit	R10 x 2	RF-S 18-150mm	RF 100-400mm	$4556	1803
Top spec  kit	R5 x 2	RF 24-105mm L	RF 100-500mm L	$17196	3676

 

* Prices for new camera gear in Australia vary greatly from time to time and from one vendor to another. This is the price quoted by one Australian retailer,   GST paid,  on the day of writing this post.

We could buy a new Kia Picanto motor car for about the same price as the more expensive kit.

Here is a photo pf the two kits side by side.  Neither the photos nor the numbers tell the full story. Read on for more details.

 

On the left, R10 with lenses. On the right R5 with lenses.

 So, which kit best meets the requirements of my anticipated use cases when travelling ?

Price   There is an obvious winner here. The top spec kit is 4x the price of the budget kit.  It will need to deliver a lot more performance or image quality or both to justify the cost and mass.

Size/mass  In practice, in the hands,  the top spec kit feels a lot heavier than the budget kit. This applies in particular to the 100-500mm L lens.  The budget kit is an easy winner here.

Performance  The top spec kit wins here but not by a huge margin. The R5 has more reliable autofocus but not greatly so, the R10 is still pretty good. The R5 in general does everything a bit better then the R10. It has a much larger buffer, less risk of shutter shock with the mechanical shutter and less motion distortion with the electronic shutter.

Ergonomics   Everything is better on the R5: the viewfinder, button functions, holding and operating. But the difference is incremental, not dramatic. The R10 is still a very nice camera to use.

Image quality  Again, as you would expect the R5 kit is better. In particular the R5 impresses in low light and difficult conditions. But in sunny or bright overcast daylight the difference between the two kits is less than I expected.

I ran a series of tests to investigate this. I photographed a test chart which provided some information but most of my testing was on the kinds of subjects I usually photograph. For the image quality comparison I used native bush landscapes with masses of fine detail.

The R5+RF 24-105mm L combination delivers only slightly more detailed subject information than the R10 + RF-S 18-150mm when test files are viewed at the same output size and the difference is only visible by pixel peeping at 100% on a large, sharp screen. 

I tested the long lens kits by photographing hand held, a grove of Casuarina trees 700-800 meters from the camera. This is a quite severe test as the Casuarina fronds are only about 1.5mm in diameter and on the morning of the test there was an overcast sky and significant atmospheric haze.  

On this subject the R5 + RF 100-500mm L combination gives a more clearly evident advantage over the R10 + RF 100-400mm kit.

The R5 kit delivers an extremely high level of resolution, sharpness and clarity. The R10 kit although delivering not quite the same level of resolution is nevertheless remarkable for a budget camera/lens combination.

Summary   As expected the R5 kit delivers better performance, ergonomics and image quality than the R10 kit.

Not so expected is that in daylight the difference between them is actually quite subtle and I doubt would be noticed by many people looking at prints and by hardly anybody looking at images on screen, particularly if they have been transmitted via the internet.

For many purposes the budget kit does a fine job. In sunlight or bright overcast,  results from the budget kit are only marginally less impressive than those from the top spec kit.