Get R now, wait, pass, or switch?

Ed Rizk wrote:

MayaTlab0 wrote:

Ed Rizk wrote:

Great Bustard wrote:

Ed Rizk wrote:

...as they are in DSLR ultra wide lenses. Wider is better.

Wide is better still with lots of pixels. Thus, the Z7.

I like more pixels. I don't need more than I have that often, but better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. I like big prints and I like to crop heavily in some cases, particularly when I don't want to a wider lens in the middle of a shoot.

A 5Dsr equivalent is probably in the near future for the R lineup.

I'm not convinced about that, unless you mean that the "RsR" body would be to the 5DSR what the R is to the 5DIV. In other words : an extremely slow camera (think 1-2fps with AF in focus priority mode, maybe 3 in release priority mode), without 4K.

Canon right now is hampered by their inability to manufacture sensors with a faster readout speed at a low enough cost. Scaling up the APSC DPAF sensors would instantly mean very slow performances.

Interesting. I never thought of the sensor as the limiting factor in speed. If that is true, how does Canon make DSLRs with high FPS? It seems like the same sensor without the mirror would allow at least as fast operation.

As you note, the R, without AF, AE, or liveview feed in between frames, is able to produce 8 pictures per second, which is quite similar to the 5DIV (both sensors have much in common). In both cases the sensor does just one thing : it simply pumps out exposures.

The problem is that nowadays cameras, and particularly mirrorless cameras, do so much more with their sensors than just pump out exposures.

Video requires a sensor that can be read fast to enable full sensor readout without tricks such as binning or line skipping, while avoiding excessive rolling shutter (the phenomenon where vertical lines are skewed because the shutter scan time isn't fast enough). The reason the 5DIV (and the R) crop video in 4K is that their sensor is excessively slow (as demonstrated by the 5DIV's rolling shutter in cropped 4K). If Canon had read the entire sensor without skipping lines, rolling shutter would turn the image into jello. Same applies to 1080p / 120fps.

With mirrorless things start to get really serious. Mirrorless cameras rely on their sensor to perform AF, AE, liveview, etc. The reason the fps drops when performing AF on most of them is that the sensor needs to be read to perform AF operations, in addition to plenty of other operations on top of it. It's also why some of them drop the file depth to 12 bits in continuous mode : it's faster to read the sensor for 12bits than for 14. Think of readout speed as a finite resource that needs to be wisely allocated to different aspects of operating a mirrorless camera. Will you allocate that resource to AF ? AE ? Liveview feed in between frames ? Fps ? Bit depth ? At the design stage a balance of specifications is reached depending on what the designers want to achieve, within the limit set by the sensor's readout speed.

And finally, the future for mirrorless cameras is to get rid of the mechanical shutter to provide a fully silent shutter. There's a reason why most of the cameras that have that feature have yet to abandon the mechanical shutter so far : readout speed ! The R has a silent shutter mode, but just like rolling shutter in video, it will severely distort the picture if you pan too rapidly or if the subject is moving. This is Sony's remarkable achievement with the A9 : the first fully electronic shutter in a FF or APSC camera that's fast enough to replace the mechanical shutter in a lot of situations (but not all - it still isn't fast enough for that).

Canon's difficulty moving forward will be to improve readout speed. They have plenty of patents around to do just that, but so far nothing has come out of their factory to show for it. It took Sony several years of iterative development to go from the readout speed of Canon's current sensors to where they're at today. So I wouldn't expect a sudden turnaround from Canon, particularly when it seems that they can't produce a DPAF sensor with good DR for a $2000 6DII, or a faster sensor for a $2400 mirrorless camera.