Few people may have had this opportunity, so I thought I should share some observations from the comparative testing I conducted over the past week or so: I extensively tested and compared my trusted wildlife and birding setup, a Nikon D850 DSLR with Nikon’s 500mm/f5.6 PF lens on it, with Canon’s R5 mirrorless body plus the RF 100-500 1/4.5-7.1. Both setups deliver about 45MP, weigh about the same, and relieve you of similar dough, though the Canon rig runs about $500 more in the U.S. (and, for some strange reason, commands a significantly higher price premium in Europe).
On the assumption that bird shooters on both sides may find it interesting but react differently, I am posting this same loooong report on the Nikon FX DSLR and Canon R forums, with an additional link on the Nikon SLR lens forum.
Intro
Having shot with Nikon cameras almost exclusively for about 25 years, and having owned the D850 for three years and the 500 PF literally from the day it came out, I entered into this comparison with these questions in my mind:
- Is the R5 significantly more capable than the D850 for wildlife, given that it is newer and more expensive, and is its IBIS good enough to compensate for the lens’ relatively small maximum aperture?
- Is the RF 100-500 f/4.5-7.1 close enough to the 500 f/5.6 PF’s performance, especially in image sharpness, to make the combo worth considering? After all, the 500 PF is an outstanding lens and the reigning champion when it comes to light-weight options for wildlife.
My expectation was that the R5 would slightly out-perform the D850, but not by enough to compensate for the 500 PF’s sharpness and IQ advantages over the Canon zoom lens, not to mention the Nikon lens aperture advantage where it counts, at 500mm.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: zoom vs prime is almost always an apples-to-oranges comparison, with the prime being sharper and the zoom offering the flexibility of, well, the zoom range. In this case, the 100-500mm range means you are ready for all birds and other wildlife, whereas the fixed 500mm FL can be a limitation when shooting larger animals. An additional advantage of the Canon lens in this context is its close focusing distance of 3-4ft (0.9-1.2m), depending on the FL. Combined with a magnification of 0.33 at 500mm, the Canon can be used for near-macro shots of insects or other close subjects, whereas the Nikon’s minimum focusing distance of 9.8ft / 3m can be a challenge in some situations. With birds, though, those situations are quite rare, as you’ll be at 500mm most of the time anyway and birds rarely come close unless you are shooting at a feeder, though I have lost a few shots because I was too close. In any case, all of my below observations apply to an FL of 500mm only. From other reviews, I understand that the RF 100-500 may be at its best at the wider end, which applies to most if not all tele zooms. That is not all that relevant for bird shots.
I realize that many bird photographers shoot primarily with 600 and 800mm primes. That comparison will likely look different. For my part, I usually hike or walk around when shooting birds and rarely use a tripod. Accordingly, weight matters a great deal to me, so I stay away from the super-heavies even though I could afford them.
A caveat: as a novice to Canon who over the years owned around ten Nikon DSLRs and two Nikon MLs, I could be somewhat biased here, plus I may be overlooking aspects on the Canon side, good or bad, that I have yet to discover. Nobody’s perfect...
Next, let me get a few nags out of the way before comparing the systems.
What’s not to like about this Nikon combo?
Cannot think of much, to be honest. My biggest heartburn with the D850, and my only significant one, is its shutter sound. This body is LOUD. On a recent trip with extensive bird shooting, I lost quite a few shots because the bird fled when hearing the first ‘clonk’ coming from my camera. Switching to Quiet mode alleviates this some but severely affects the FPS rate. This may sound parochial but is a real issue for me. My biggest heartburn with the 500 PF is its minimum focusing distance of 10ft/3m (the Canon’s is a mere 4ft/1.2m at 500mm!). With the 500 PF, I’ve had quite a few situations where I had to move backwards so as to increase the distance between me and the bird. In fact, I once fell pretty badly on an island off the coast of New Zealand when stepping backwards and not considering the edge of the uphill trail I was on, hurting myself, damaging the lens hood (and my pants), though not the camera or lens itself, which was fortunately protected by a neoprene coat.
What’s not to like about this Canon combo?
The two things I noticed so far that are not merely inconveniences caused by me being more familiar with Nikon are that the lens has to be kept extended to 300mm if you use an extender (= Canonese for teleconverter), which is true even when transporting the rig, and the Canon body’s very inconveniently placed On switch. Come on, Canon, seriously? Before using a Canon body (as in: any Canon ILC, AFAIK), you need to use both hands: turn the camera on at the left top, then focus/shoot with your right hand. Even with practice, this takes considerable time. In Nikon’s case, both functions are essentially served by the same button, as the On switch is integrated into the shutter release button. With some practice, turning a Nikon on and starting to shoot takes but a fraction of a second, a valuable time advantage over Canon when you just spotted a bird. Nikon’s is a MUCH better arrangement.
Balance and handling
Not a whole lot to report here. Both combos feel well balanced and laid out, though each of them has its small quirks and inconsistencies. The Canon is quite a bit shorter overall when the lens is at 100mm, which is helpful when transporting the rig, while longer than the Nikon when extended to 500mm. The rear displays are both good. The Canon’s 5.7MP EVF is excellent and almost makes you forget it is not optical. The top OLED display IMO is a little inferior to those on Nikon’s Z series but still very good. The R5’s fully articulated screen works well but makes little difference to me as I mostly shoot hand-held.
I configured both bodies as most bird photographers seem to be doing it: D850 set up for BBF with Single AF on the AF-On button, switchable to Group when pressing the Pv or Fn1 button on the front; R5 set up for dual BBF, with the AF-On button set to Spot and the ‘*’ button set to Animal Eye AF. The Canon’s configuration is somewhat more intuitive, though I wish it had the slightly larger buttons of the D850, which my fingers struggle less to find and operate.
Battery life is worse on the R5, as is expectable from all ML bodies. I did not test this but rely on reports from others, where I saw anything from ~400-900 shots per charge. Taking a few extra batteries along is a no-brainer, so this isn’t a concern for me.
Image quality
While it is not the only lens characteristic that counts, image sharpness or, more precisely, actual image resolution matters most when shooting birds. Given that these little guys are often far away and sometimes require considerable cropping, how sharp the resulting image is translates directly to how much feather detail you can still see. I expected Canon’s lens to be slightly softer than the Nikon 200-500, where a good copy is strong in the center and somewhat soft in the corners.
The RF 100-500 took me by surprise: while a little softer than the 500 PF, it performed amazingly well, especially at the medium distances that matter most for birds. Corner performance was also good, definitely better than the Nikon 200-500’s. Unsurprisingly, the Canon zoom showed more focus breathing than the Nikon prime. At 10ft/3m, the 100-500’s longest FL is less than 450mm. To me, this is not a concern whatsoever. More noteworthy, however, is that the Canon lens seems less sharp at close distances, where it proved clearly inferior. Shooting a test chart at 10ft/3m, I found the Nikon images to be notably sharper than the Canon ones (if interested, pixel-peep the first comparison image below to see the exact differences). This was not terrible and the resulting images still looked good, but the Nikon rig definitely produced sharper results at close distance. Again, not much of a concern for birds since they are usually much farther away, but the difference might matter for close-ups of insects, for example. Minimum focusing distance may therefore be less of an advantage for Canon than it appears on paper. (Like everything else, I only tested this at 500mm. The Canon might perform better at shorter FLs.)
The above notwithstanding, Canon exceeded my expectations. In my view, the RF 100-500 performs close enough to the 500 PF sharpness-wise to make it an acceptable alternative. Don’t want to clutter this post with too many images, but I guess many of you want to see for yourself, so here are a few to illustrate the differences (Nikon on the left, Canon on the right):
Distance about 10ft/3m, center crops to 2000x2000px. Focus breathing is obvious.
Distance about 30ft/9m, center crops to 1000x1000px
Distance about 80ft/25m, extreme center crops to 780x552px
Distance about 240-320ft/75-100m, center crops to 1775x450px
500+ft/150+m, extreme center crops to 595x445px
SIDE NOTE: An irritating phenomenon with both bodies is that they write arbitrary focal distance values into the EXIF data with distant objects: above around 330ft/100m or so, the D850 apparently shows everything at 75m, the R5 at 665m, regardless of how far away the object in focus really was.
In manual mode with Auto ISO and both bodies set to matrix metering, the Canon produced slightly brighter images than the Nikon, which took some adjusting via exposure compensation to get to a true apples-to-apples comparison. I initially thought this was owing to the cameras’ monitor brightness settings, but careful comparisons confirmed it to be about one-quarter to one-third of a stop. Slightly irritating. A possible explanation is that the R5’s display consistently showed me an aperture of f/6.7 when extending the lens to 500mm, whereas the lens itself is spec’d at 1/7.1. Assuming the lens is at 1/7.1 and the body indeed assumes f/6.7, this would explain the exposure being slightly off. Weird, though hardly relevant for my shooting.
Among other lens characteristics that influence how the image looks, I consider only one relevant: bokeh. Lens distortion is all but irrelevant for wildlife, given the small degree of it found in modern lenses. Chromatic aberration, which the RF 100-500 shows quite a bit in the corners, can be a nuisance but is so easily and automatically corrected in post that I hardly care. Lens vignetting is almost an advantage: I often add some of it in post to make the bird stand out more. An exception to the latter is when shooting birds against the sky, but here again, correcting a little bit of vignetting is easy in post, so for me it’s a don’t-care, and neither lens showed excessive amounts.
Bokeh is expectably better on an f/5.6 lens compared to an f/7.1 one, so the Nikon lens has another edge here, though only a small one. I shot a twig with a bunch of leaves and some bright spots in the back, and while the Nikon shots were slightly more pleasing overall, the difference was small.
Autofocus and low-light performance
Switching back and forth between high-contrast subjects, the Canon combo re-focused notably faster. At the same time, it occasionally hunted a bit more in Spot AF mode when the subject lacked contrast, such as when switching back and forth between a well-defined background and a bunch of green leaves in the foreground. This is typical of sensor-based AF techniques and can make a bird harder to find in low-contrast situations. It is easy to circumvent with proper pre-focusing, though. Once the animal is in reasonable focus, switching to the R5’s Animal Eye AF keeps the focus on the bird pretty much all the time, whereas following it in the viewfinder with the D850 and making sure it remains in focus is a trickier undertaking. In most situations, the Canon’s focus felt faster and more steady. It took me significantly less time to complete a large number of test shots of house sparrows with the Canon than with the Nikon, which is further evidence to the ease with which it can be used to shoot birds that won’t sit still most of the time.
Nikon claims 4 to 4.5 steps, Canon a mind-boggling 6-step improvement with their respective VR/IS technologies, the latter being the result of Canon’s R system combining IBIS and in-lens image stabilization for maximal effect. Both claims seem credible to me and give the edge to Canon. Let’s not forget, though, that VR/IS helps little with birds as you usually want your shutter speed to be somewhere between 1/250s (if the bird sits still) and 1/4000s (fast BIF).
A bit more relevant is the Canon’s low-light AF advantage. The respective claims are -6EV for the R5 and -4EV for the D850. Indeed, the Canon focused notably better in dimly lit situations, sometimes long after the Nikon had to give up. Again, this does not matter much for bird shooting as you won’t get a usable image at these limits. For other types of shooting, however, Canon clearly comes out ahead when the light is poor.
To me, low-light shooting is a toss-up: the Nikon lens has the wider aperture, meaning I’ll have less noise on the bird in poor light, whereas the Canon body focuses better, meaning there is a higher chance of getting the shot with birds that move around. Which represents the bigger argument depends on the exact shooting situation and subject.
PhotonsToPhotos shows the R5 ahead of the D850 in dynamic range by about a third of a stop at ISO800 and above. I took a number of test shots from ISO1600 to ISO25600 and could not find much of a difference, to be honest. Both bodies essentially showed the same amounts of noise, which was a bit of bad news for me as I was hoping the Canon body could compensate some for its slower lens. Because of this, the resulting images will need to be shot at higher ISOs. However, this is not much of a concern for me. With ever-improving noise reduction algorithms, shooting at ISO12800 has become very feasible, and the difference between the two lenses is only two-thirds of a stop anyway.
Overall, how do the Nikon D850 and Canon R5 compare?
Many threads on the Nikon forums ask when we are going to see a mirrorless D850 replacement. In all fairness, if it weren’t for the different mount, the Canon R5 would be exactly that: it offers D850-like versatility and performance across the board, besting the D850’s capabilities in areas that matter to many, from AF speed to frames per second, 5-axis IBIS resulting in a 6-stop IS/VR gain with this lens, the articulated screen with its well-implemented touch options, and more. The R5’s few deficiencies are easily forgiven once you experience what the Animal AF does to your keeper rate: it is not 100% perfect but very close to that. Getting perfectly sharp shots with it takes less skill than achieving the same with the D850 does. The excellent EVF greatly simplifies low-light bird shooting, where the bird is sometimes hard to find in the D850’s viewfinder. The option to shoot at 20 FPS further adds to the Canon’s appeal. Oh, and did I mention that silent shooting is fabulous for birds, while even the mechanical shutter sound is way less intrusive than the Nikon’s? Yes, this body costs quite a bit more than the D850 does, but it is absolutely worth it. For a long time, I thought significant improvements over the D850 would not be possible, but the R5 has taught me differently. It is better in many ways.
What I did not mention so far, since it was not subject of my specific comparison, is that from the spec sheets and my handling of these bodies, it is clear that both are all-rounders that will handle almost every kind of shooting situation well. Not much of a consideration for me since I prefer to have one dedicated wildlife setup and another one for all other subjects, but if you are looking for a great do-it-all body, neither will disappoint, though the R5 will have a clear edge. For those shooting video, which I do not, it won’t even be a contest as the R5 does that better by leaps and bounds.
Overall, how do the Nikon 500 PF and Canon RF 100-500 compare?
The 500 PF is one of Nikon’s best lenses, and by far its best one when it comes to portable teles. It was in short supply for more than two years, and there are still almost no used ones to be had, testimony to how good this lens is. The Canon lens being almost at par sharpness-wise is amazing and great news for Canon shooters.
Overall, I see the two lenses as near-even performance-wise: the small lead in sharpness and bokeh advantage of the Nikon are easily offset by the convenience of the Canon zoom and its focusing speed. Given that it is a zoom, the Canon’s performance is remarkable. The build quality of the two lenses seems about the same: both are solid, sturdy lenses, though I nevertheless prefer to protect both with a neoprene cover.
My personal bottom line
I will continue to be a Nikon user, happily shooting landscapes, travel, architecture, etc. with my Z7 II and the Z lenses I own so far or may buy next. It is a great body and I love the results this camera produces together with the mostly exceptional Z lenses.
For wildlife and birds, I am going to keep the Canon R5 and 100-500mm lens, so my gear will be split between the two makes. (Wondering if this make me “That Canikon Guy”?) This does not mean that the Canon gear is great and the Nikon set sucks. It simply means that I believe the R5 with the RF 100-500 lens will serve my needs better. Changing my wildlife/birding rig comes with some apprehension, as the Canon lens’ smaller aperture keeps me a little uneasy in spite of my test results. On the other hand, the big Canon benefits for my shooting style are silent shooting, the general focusing performance and especially the extremely impressive Animal Eye AF, plus the EVF which makes it a snap to find and track birds in low light. These aspects make the Canon rig an amazingly effective set for bird shooting. In addition, there are quite a few other things to like, though these are less substantial.
Other thoughts
You may have been looking for comments on each combo’s BIF performance in this post. Actually, sharing any at this point would be unfair. You need a lot of experience with a body/lens combo to get decent BIF results, and I do not have that level of experience with the Canon combo just yet. I have no reason to believe I would arrive at a different conclusion, though.
Lastly, did I consider Sony? The answer is that while the a1 looks interesting, Sony does not offer a lens that would work as well for me. I much prefer to shoot without teleconverters/extenders, since I have yet to see one that performs better than the alternative of carefully up-scaling an image shot without one. Sony’s 100-400, as good as it may be, therefore does not hold much appeal for me. The 200-600 receives lots of praise, but at 2.2kg or almost a-pound-and-a-half more than the Canon and Nikon lenses, it is too heavy to take along on long hikes.
