R10 with RF 100-400mm lens |
The Canon EOS R7 and R10 were announced together in May 2022 and became available soon afterwards.
When it was introduced the R10 was the entry model into the
Canon RF mount system. Since then two lower spec models have been released, the
R50, probably representing an RF mount
replacement for the popular EF-M 50, and
the R100 which is a low spec model stripped out to achieve the lowest possible
price point.
The R10 now occupies an upper entry level position in the
catalogue.
At the product announcement Canon representatives said that
the R10 uses a new sensor, not seen on any previous camera. Measurements at
PhotonstoPhotos do indicate a slight improvement in technical characteristics
such as dynamic range and noise for the R10 sensor over that used in the M50
and 80D. I will discuss image quality later in this post as I think there are
elements of image quality not captured by standard tests but revealed by long
term real world use.
In Canon-world, cameras designated with high numbers have
the lowest specification. Those with low numbers have the highest
specification. Go figure.
Thus the top camera model is, or will be when it eventually
appears, the much rumored but
not-yet-seen R1.
Trawling through the Canon Camera Museum, I find no camera
with the number 2 as primary designation. 20 yes, 2, no.
Models with a 3 designation are common but I see no models
with a 4 designation. 40 yes, 4, no. The
top level R mount camera at the time of writing is the R3, a specialised high
performance model.
Canon likes the number 5 which designates one of their best
and most popular high spec models of recent years, the EOS R5.
6 is also popular, giving us the R6 and R6.2.
At 7 we have the R7 acting as the RF mount equivalent to the
EOS 7D APSC DSLR models of several years ago.
The R8 has the same imaging capability as the R6.2 in a less
expensive body.
The 9 slot is empty at present.
The R10 is the subject of this post.
And below the R10 we have the R50 and R100.
R10 with RF-S 18-150mm hand held. This has been downsized and compressed for the internet. The original file contains a great amount of clearly rendered detail, sufficient for a poster size print. |
One of the advantages of a long term user review like this one is that over time we come to understand a camera’s limitations, capabilities, strengths and weaknesses and figure out how to make best use of the strengths and find workarounds for the weaknesses.
What are the limitations ?
The R7 has two card slots, IBIS, the large LP-E6NH battery,
weather sealing, 32Mpx, 30 frames per second for stills with the electronic
shutter, a deep buffer, higher spec touch screen and advanced video capability.
R10 has a lower specification all round. It has 24 Mpx, the smaller LP-E17 battery, one slot for a
UHS-II SCXC card adjacent to the battery, body sealing is not specified, the
buffer is smaller, performance is slightly down at 23 fps with the E-Shutter
and there is no in body image stabiliser.
These limitations enable Canon to market the R10 at a
substantially lower price point than the R7. It is still a very capable and
versatile device however as we shall see.
Now let us delve into the weaknesses. In my judgement there
are three which require a thoughtful management strategy.
These are the mechanical focal plane shutter, the E-shutter
scan speed and the buffer.
When the shutter of the R10 is released it makes a sharp
snapping sound. At full speed using [H+] drive mode it sounds like a little jack-hammer. Compare this to the sound of the shutter in
the R5 which is more a soft shuffle, even when running at the maximum frame
rate. The difference is not merely
aesthetic.
In the R5, as the shutter blades approach the end of their
travel a damping mechanism slows them down so they hit their stops gently. The
R10 (and R7) lack this damping so their shutter blades bang hard into their
stops.
This produces a shock wave in the form of vibration which
passes through the camera and lens. We can easily feel this when operating the
camera. This shock wave can in some circumstances cause blurring of the image.
The R5 is not prone to this problem.
There are a series of strategies which we can utilise to
prevent shutter shock from adversely affecting sharpness.
With single shot operation simply setting the shutter menu
to electronic first curtain operation (EFCS) solves the problem. In this mode
the exposure is initiated electronically on the sensor and terminated
mechanically with the focal plane shutter. This produces a shock wave after the
exposure is finished so it has no deleterious effect on the image.
When we use continuous [H+] or [H] drive mode the vibrations
produced by the first shutter activation can still be present when the shutter
is opened for the second exposure of the series, and the third….and so on. We
can demonstrate this by observing the first exposure of a sequence to be sharp,
and all subsequent exposures not-sharp.
To eliminate this problem we can switch to full electronic
shutter BUT this brings its own set of
problems to the capture experience, see below.
Fortunately we can avoid shutter shock with EFCS by using a
fast enough shutter speed. Just exactly how fast has to be determined for each
lens and each end of the zoom range.
After systematic tests, I find that with the RF-S 55-210mm lens at 210mm
on the R10 a shutter speed of 1/200 second or faster gives consistently sharp
pictures.
What about the fully electronic shutter ?
In this case the mechanical focal plane shutter is not used
at all. Some cameras with stacked sensors enable a very fast E-Shutter scan
speed which makes the mechanical shutter redundant. So most EOS R3 users report
using the E-Shutter 99% of the time as this camera has an E-Shutter scan time
of about 1/200 second. The Nikon Z8 and Z9
do not even have a mechanical focal plane shutter. Those cameras have a sensor
scan time of about 1/280 second.
But the R10 has a much slower E-shutter sensor scan time of
about 1/25 second.
As a result if we pan (move the camera side-to-side) quickly
to follow a moving subject, any static structures in the frame will appear to
be slanted diagonally across the frame.
This is because what the camera sees at the beginning of the exposure is
different from what it sees at the end of the exposure.
This phenomenon is often called “rolling shutter”.
In addition the E-Shutter operates at 12 bits (the M-shutter
and EFCS operate at 14 bits) so there is some loss of dynamic range with the
E-Shutter.
So with the R10 the E-Shutter can be used for perched birds
but can be problematic with birds in flight because of the rolling shutter
which can distort static subject elements and also cause severe distortion and
fragmentation in the rendition of the fast beating wings of small birds.
All this is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that with
the R10 there is no set-and-forget shutter mode which will give satisfactory
results in any situation.
My practice is to use EFCS for single shot work, handheld or
on tripod. There are some technical issues affecting image rendition with EFCS
when used at fast shutter speeds with very wide aperture lenses, but this is
unlikely to be an issue with the R10.
I never use the standard mechanical shutter which utilises
the shutter blades to start and end the exposure as this can cause loss of
sharpness due to shutter shock from the impact of the first curtain.
The situation gets more complex when we are using one of the
high speed drive modes, particularly
[H+] and possibly [H].
My practice is to use EFCS with a shutter speed 1/200 second
or preferably faster unless the situation requires quiet operation when I
switch to E-Shutter. This is actually silent although by default the camera
adds a little electronic ticka-ticka sound to confirm that the camera is
actually taking pictures.
E-Shutter works well when we want a fast drive mode and a
quiet camera with a subject which is not moving anywhere quickly. Perched birds
are a common example of this situation.
E-Shutter can also work well with medium to large birds in
flight provided the background is the sky and not trees or other fixed objects.
The R10 has a rather small buffer. This is the electronic
place to which the sensor sends picture files and from which those files are
loaded onto the memory card. Files do not go direct from the sensor to the
card. The process of loading files from the buffer to the card is a performance
roadblock. Thus the larger the buffer the more shots we can fire before that
roadblock brings the capture process to a sudden crawl.
We can capture image files as RAW (full size), CRAW (Canon
proprietary lossy compressed Raw) or JPG at several levels.
My tests and the tests of others show no significant loss of
image quality with CRAW when compared to uncompressed RAW. I do not work with
or recommend JPG capture, we lose too much image data that way.
So the first strategy for managing the small buffer on the
R10 is to use CRAW capture, all the time, for everything.
My tests show that using CRAW I can capture on average about
25 frames in [H+] drive mode before the frame rate slows abruptly. This gives
us one second capture time with the E-Shutter at full speed and 2 seconds with
EFCS.
My second strategy is to fire the shutter in short bursts
about 0.3-0.5 seconds each. This gives the camera time to clear some of the
buffer between bursts thus prolonging the duration of an action sequence which
we can capture.
Clearly the R10 is not intended to be anybody’s primary
sport/action camera but for occasional use it can do a pretty good job if
thoughtful capture management strategies are used.
Noisy miner. R10 with RF 100-400mm plus RF 1.4x extender |
I like to evaluate a camera in terms of availability, versatility, capability and likeability.
The R10 rates highly on each of these dimensions.
The R10 is very versatile. It is a jack of all trades so to
speak. With the 18-45mm kit lens it is very compact and light, effectively
rendering many dedicated compact cameras obsolete. It can be used for high
quality portraiture, landscape, documentary and street work. It can produce
good, sometimes very good, results for
amateur sport/action/wildlife and bird
photography.
This post is about still photography but the R10 is also a
very competent video camera suitable for professional use.
It has some features not seen on high end models such as
in-camera auto-panorama generation, auto focus bracketing with in-camera
compositing and Raw burst mode.
The R10 is very capable.
It has a very advanced autofocus system able to identify and
track people, animals including birds and vehicles. In either single or servo
mode the autofocus is very capable. With a telephoto lens it can identify and track a birds eye 50
meters away even when the bird is in shade or backlit, surrounded by branches
and leaves and the eye is not prominent. This is so good it is a bit spooky,
like something we don’t believe could happen but it does. Having said that I
should also say that not every frame is sharp. Sometimes focus wanders off the
eye causing blurry frames. The
technology is amazing but not perfect.
It also has very good image quality which on my careful
side-by-side tests is only slightly less impressive than the IQ delivered by
the EOS R5, a camera costing five times as much. One of the reasons I have been
using the R10 quite often lately is just this matter of image quality which I
think is better than we might infer from DXOMark and PhotonsToPhotos published
technical data for color depth, dynamic range and high ISO noise levels.
Right from my early experiences using the R10 I had the
impression that it delivers image files with better than average sharpness and
micro-contrast (which approximately equates to Adobe Clarity in Camera Raw and
Lightroom) compared to other APSC cameras. With any of the RF-S lenses
currently available the R10 can reproduce remarkable levels of detailed subject
information in files able to be greatly enlarged. The R10 does this with “only”
24 Million pixels on the sensor.
I find that if I start with a properly focussed and exposed
image it can be enlarged in Photoshop to 9000x6000 (54 million) pixels using
[Retain details.2] followed by a little sharpness tweak using [Smart
Sharpen]. With the right image the
results can be quite remarkable.
Adobe also comes to the game with high ISO files in the form
of Adobe Denoise AI via the Enhance tab. This can remove even very intrusive
levels of high ISO noise while preserving and even enhancing details. This AI feature
opens the door to the creation of high quality, low light images from crop
sensor cameras which was not previously possible.
One issue with crop sensor cameras is that they are less
able than cameras with a larger sensor to render backgrounds which are soft and
smoothly out of focus. This can be a blessing, for instance with street and
documentary work when we generally want everything sharp, or a curse as with
sport or wildlife photography which often requires us to manage intrusively
busy backgrounds.
Fortunately Adobe offers a workable solution to this
problem. In Camera Raw or Lightroom, if we have a suitable image, we can select
the subject and background separately. Then we can sharpen and brighten the
subject and soften the background.
For a camera to endear itself to us over the term of a long
acquaintance it must be likeable. I have at various times over the years made
the mistake of buying a camera which may have attracted much praise for its
image quality or some other characteristic only to find that the more I used
this thing, the less I liked it.
The likeability factor devolves to ergonomic considerations
and various irritations.
The R10 offers a very well considered ergonomic realisation.
It has a well shaped handle which is comfortable to hold. The shutter button,
Fn button and front control dial are just where my right index finger wants to
find them. The rear control dial, thumb stick, AF-On button * button and
magnify button are all well located for easy operation by my thumb. The thumb
support is well located and is just the right shape.
The fully articulated touch screen is a pleasure to use from
the front or the back of the camera..
All the controls have been thoughtfully located and
configured with good haptics.
The strap lugs are the usual recessed Canon handlebar type.
I wish every camera maker would copy these.
All this adds up to a camera which is a pleasure to use and
one which remains so over a long time acquaintance.
The positive user experience is a composite of large and
small factors, many too numerous to mention. But for instance, even without the
focal plane shutter acting as a blind over the sensor when the lens is removed,
I have never had to do a wet clean of the sensor which appears to have a dust
repellent characteristic unlike some other cameras I have used which attract
dust to their sensor like meat attracts flies.
I should also mention availability. This includes the
obvious such as is it available for sale in my location. It also includes the
price. Expensive gear is not as available to many of us as moderately priced
kit. Another aspect of availability is the immediate one. We cannot take
pictures with a camera which is at home in the drawer. The camera most likely
to accompany us when out and about is compact, light and easy to carry. Just
like the R10.
An interchangeable lens camera must have a range of lenses
to fulfil its purpose.
All RF and RF-S lenses designed for the RF mount can be
mounted onto and will work on any RF mount camera body, full frame or crop
sensor. The camera will recognise which lens is mounted and adjust the field of
view to match the lens.
In addition most EF and EF-S lenses can be mounted and will
function properly on the R10 using one of the EF to RF mount adapters from
Canon and other makers.
However some lenses are more in keeping with the “small is
beautiful” theme of the RF-S subsystem than others.
At the time of writing (December 2023) Canon offers four
RF-S stabilised zooms specifically designed for RF mount crop sensor bodies.
These are
The ultrawide RF-S 10-18mm f4.5-6.3 [FF equivalent 16-29mm]
Basic kit zoom RF-S 18-45mm f4.5-6.3 [FF equivalent 29-72mm]
Advanced kit zoom
RF-S 18-150mm f3.5-6.3 [FF equivalent 29-240mm]
Compact medium tele-zoom RF-S 55-210mm f5-7.1 [FF equivalent 88-336mm]
I have each of these and find that in practice they give
very good results on the R10.
Each offers very good sharpness and contrast, very good
autofocus and very good stabiliser function.
The only real downside of these lenses is the limited
aperture range which can be used for best quality output. None of them has a
very wide aperture at the short end of the zoom and all have a narrow f6.3-7.1
aperture at the long end of the zoom.
The camera sensor starts to show loss of sharpness due to
diffraction from around f8 so we are for most photographic purposes wanting to
operate in the f4.5-f8 aperture range. For close-ups I find f11 gives the best
balance between sharpness and depth of focus.
The full frame RF 100-400mm f5.6-8 is a budget superzoom
which works very well on crop sensor cameras. This lens is very light and
compact giving an equivalent full frame focal length range of 160-640mm on the
R10, with very good autofocus, image quality and stabiliser effectiveness. This
lens is suitable for many kinds of sport/action/wildlife and bird photography.
It is compatible with the RF 1.4x extender giving a FF equivalent focal length
range of 224-896mm at f8-11. The camera will autofocus at those apertures even
in low light when ISO 12800 is required. Not every shot will be sharp, but many
are.
What about some fast primes ?
The RF 16mm f2.8 (FF
equivalent 25.6mm) is not stabilised and on my tests is soft around the edges
on crop sensor bodies.
The RF 28mm f2.8 (FF equivalent 45mm) is very sharp but not
stabilised.
The RF 50mm f1.8 (FF equivalent 80mm) is sharp from f2.8 but
not stabilised.
The RF 85mm f2 (FF equivalent 136mm), RF 35mm f1.8 (FF equivalent 56mm) and RF 24mm
f1.8 (FF equivalent 38.4mm) are stabilised, very sharp and work well on the
R10. In addition they are able to focus very close for macro work.
These lenses might be thought a bit large for the R10. Many
Canon crop sensor users have asked on forums if or when Canon might release one
or two fast primes specifically matched to the crop sensor cameras.
We already have the EF-M 23mm f2 and EF-M 32mm f1.4 lenses
for the now-defunct EF-M system. These could readily be re-mounted for the RF
system and many have asked if that will happen. Which it might but I wonder if
that would be such a great idea. Neither is stabilised and the EF-M 32mm f1.4
while fantastically sharp is horribly slow to focus due to the design which
requires all 14 elements (!!) to move back and forth when focussing.
Canon does not release an official product development road
map so we shall just have to wait and see.
In the meantime there are plenty of very good lenses for
RF-S crop sensor cameras giving coverage from ultra wide to super telephoto and
everything in between, so there is not really much about which we might
reasonably complain.
While talking about the R10 we might look at alternatives
within the Canon RF system.
The first thing to consider if we might prefer to go full
frame. This is more expensive but Canon offers some very appealing full frame
gear which is compact and delivers very good image quality. The R8 body can
form the basis of a nice compact, moderately priced full frame kit.
The R7 is the sport/action/wildlife performance oriented
crop sensor model but is quite a bit more expensive than the R10 and arguably
not quite as easy to live with given some ergonomic issues.
The R50 is a bit smaller, lighter and a bit less expensive
than the R10 but also offers a lower specification. The R10 offers greater
specification and capability and I think is better value.
The R100 is a real cut price job with many of the desirable
features of the R10 stripped out to meet a price point. I do not recommend this
camera.
Assembling kits
One zoom
The best, most capable and versatile lens for a one-zoom kit
is the RF-S 18-150mm.
Second best is the RF-S 18-45mm, which has a smaller zoom
range and aperture range. It is otherwise a perfectly good and very compact
lens though so don’t ignore it.
Two zooms
My pick for a two zoom kit is the RF-S 10-18mm plus the RF-S
18-150mm.
A more compact choice with smaller zoom range would be the
RF-S 10-18mm plus RF-S 18-45mm.
Three zooms
The compact, medium tele option uses the RF-S 10-18mm, RF-S
18-45mm and RF-S 55-210mm.
A substantially larger and more expensive option uses the
RF-S 10-18mm, RF-S 18-150mm and RF 100-400mm f5.6-8. To this we can add the RF
1.4x extender giving a combined full frame equivalent focal length range of
16-896mm. The extender is fun to use but autofocus is more reliable without it
particularly in low light.
With primes
We have no dedicated RF-S crop sensor primes yet so I suggest
two stabilised RF full frame options.
These are the RF 24mm f1.8 IS (FF equivalent 38.4mm) a handy
all purpose focal length and the RF 35mm
f1.8 IS (FF equivalent 56mm) which is also a handy general purpose focal
length. These lenses work well on the
R10 although they might be considered a bit large and expensive for a crop
sensor kit.
Summary
The R10 manages to strike an appealing and capable balance
between the (slightly) less expensive R50 and R100 below it on the hierarchy
and the more performance oriented and considerably more expensive R7 which
occupies the next level above the R10.
To put the R10 into historical perspective, it offers slightly
better image quality and very much better autofocus and performance than the
full frame EOS 5D, 5D.2 and 5D.3 models of just a few years ago.
At low ISO settings it offers image quality almost equal to
the EOS 5D.4 of 2016, with much better performance and autofocus
Bear in mind that these EOS 5D series cameras were near
top-of-the-range in the Canon catalogue and were, and probably still are, routinely used by professional photographers
around the world.
Not only does the R10 deliver better performance than these
former high end models but it is very much less expensive to buy and use.
In fact the EOS 5D.4 is still available new at three times
the price of an R10.
The R10 offers a lot of bang for your buck and I rate it highly
recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment