R6 to R6 Mark ii. Worthwhile upgrade for portraits?

Twiseldorf wrote:

I'm a career photographer, have been for close to 40 years. I have shot exclusively with Canon products my entire career. In the past few years I've owned a few Canon mirrorless cameras, and I was very eager to purchase the R6 MK II. However I have to say that this is a $2500 waste of money. There are a few pros, like the drive speed, and low light performance, but the cons outweigh everything else.

1) Not compatible with many third party lenses, including Tamron 28-75 F2.8 lenses. Bummer! I have two of these in my kit that are used for sports photography. Had to sell them both, as they won't function.

2) Camera randomly locks up, always at the most inopportune times. It locked up on 3/7/23 and the oddity of it was that when it failed, it displayed the live image that was present in the viewfinder. Not a captured image/photo, but a live image. The unit was unresponsive, nothing worked on the camera. I had to remove the battery and reinstall in order to get the camera back up and running. It has locked up probably 3-4 times in the last month. I'm running the latest firmware v1.1.1, however the lockups happened with the original firmware was well.

3) Custom settings do not keep on this camera at all. I will setup the shooting parameters (including 1/125 shutter speed) that I use, save them as C1-C3 and later when I go to use the setting the shutter speed always drops to 1/40th of a second. An no, I don't have the auto update enabled under this setting. This one is a head scratcher for sure.

4) Painfully slow startup time. I mean like 4-5 seconds before the camera decides it's ready to shoot. Supposedly this was fixed with the firmware v1.1.1, but I haven't noticed a difference. I read on another thread that if bluetooth was disabled, the camera starts up faster. I have experienced that it sometimes starts up sooner, but not all of the time. It's random. If you swap out a battery, and introduce a new battery, expect a 4-5 second lag time before the camera wakes up. I've never experienced this with any other Canon DSLR or mirrorless camera.

My best advice if you are looking to purchase a mirrorless is to go with the Canon RP. This little gem is solid and always ready to go. At under $1000 , you can buy two nice, dependable cameras that won't let you down.

Weird.

1. The incompatibility between the R6II (and other R cameras) and the old Tamron 28-75 is well documented, and easily available information. A career photographer of close to 40 years would have the foresight to check on this in advance, and buy the R6II knowing it wouldn't work with that particular old Tamron lens.

2. Random lockups are occasionally reported on pretty much all modern cameras (the more complex the electronics, the more likely they are to suffer from this sort of thing). If the phenomenon is common and widely reported, Canon will probably address it in a firmware update (as they did with the R5). So far, I haven't experienced this with my R6II, but I've only had it for under two weeks, so who knows? I also haven't read that this is widespread (yet).

3. You definitely have some kind of setting wrong here. I've just assigned a bunch of settings to my C1, including 1/125 shutter speed, and aperture, and focus area, and shutter mode, etc. Going back and forth between other modes on the dial and C1, the camera recalls my registered settings perfectly every time. This is definitely something that we would have heard about from others, if it were actually a feature of the camera. I don't know what's going on with you and your R6II, but it's definitely not something for anyone else to expect if they get this camera. Are you sure that you are completing every step in the process to register settings?

4. My R6II starts up pretty much instantly. I've just tested it several times. With the power switch in the off position, it takes under 1 second to turn the switch, press the shutter button, and take a photo. With the switch in the on position, but the camera powered down, again it takes about 1 second from pressing the shutter button to wake the camera until the first shot is taken.

My best advice to the OP is not to base purchase decisions on anecdotal reports from single users, whose experience seems to be unrepresentative of a particular camera. That applies to my reports too, of course. Just because I haven't experienced these problems doesn't mean that others won't. But, given that 2-4 haven't been widely (or at all) reported by others, on a forum where everything that doesn't work perfectly for someone gets shouted about, it's more likely that my experience is representative than that Twiseldorf's is. And, as I said, 1 has been known and reported on for some time. If you get the R6II, don't expect it to work with the old Tamron 28-75. If you have other third party EF mount lenses you want to adapt to the R6II, do a bit of research to check whether you can. It's not hard.