R6 to R6 Mark ii. Worthwhile upgrade for portraits?

Hello Everybody

i currently have had the R6 for the last year and a half. I really have enjoyed it and it has gotten great results. I have never handled yhe R6 mark ii but have the opportunity to upgrade it for about a $400 difference after I sell my R6. I usually shoot portraits and heavily rely on the eye AF. I don’t crop very much more so I print larger than 20”x30”. I shoot the occasional video and do some sports but have found the R6 ok for that.

For those of y’all who have had both, do you honestly think the upgrade will or will not be worth it?  Is the stickiness of the eye AF much better?   I usually shoot JPG and I heard the mark 2 has less of an orange cast. Anyway any info would be helpful. Thank you!

For your purposes I think the only benefit you would see is that you have a new camera. That is it :-).

How many of your shots is misfocused because of the error of the AF system? I guess close to zero - at least that is my success rate with the R6.

20 vs 24 Mpix makes zero difference on prints.

If you feel your photos from the R6 have orange cast (all of them?) you can tweak the color output. Before doing that make sure your monitor and printer are properly calibrated.

But of course, if you feel you want to make yourself happy with the new toy, you will not loose any of the R6 assets and get couple of them a little bit better. Is it worth $400? To me not at all but that is highly individual.

Joseph Chuan wrote:

Hello Everybody

i currently have had the R6 for the last year and a half. I really have enjoyed it and it has gotten great results. I have never handled yhe R6 mark ii but have the opportunity to upgrade it for about a $400 difference after I sell my R6. I usually shoot portraits and heavily rely on the eye AF. I don’t crop very much more so I print larger than 20”x30”. I shoot the occasional video and do some sports but have found the R6 ok for that.

For those of y’all who have had both, do you honestly think the upgrade will or will not be worth it? Is the stickiness of the eye AF much better? I usually shoot JPG and I heard the mark 2 has less of an orange cast. Anyway any info would be helpful. Thank you!

I only have the R6MKII. Here the price difference between the two was $300 so I went with the newer technology.

I shoot a lot of portraits too. Normally I shoot RAW + jpeg and favour the jpegs because I like them. I didn't know until I read a review and from your comment too that R6 exhibits an orange cast. Ummmm I think I prefer that the magenta-ish tint I used to have with my Canon DSLRs. Anyway, below are jpegs from the R6MKII in various lighting. No PP here except straightening the horizon and maybe a bit of cropping.

If I remember my settings correctly the first one is Fine Details, the second is Faithful and the last one is Portrait. Set to AWB-W.

Good luck in whatever decision you make.

Joseph Chuan wrote:

Jose,

Those are really nice pics. The eye AF hit it right on. Which lenses were you using, if you don't mind me asking?

Joe

Hi Joe,

Thanks.

The eye-AF technology is awesome. I set it to auto. It's only just a handful of times where the blue box will go to the farthest eye which is ok. As you know it has the option to pick which eye but I just leave it on auto.

I used the EF 85/1.2 L II which is rejuvenated LOL with the R6MKII. Shooting wide open with this lens had been tricky with my past DSLRs. However with the new camera it's been spot on! I couldn't be happier with the AF performance.

I also shot with my EF 35/1.4 L.

Cheers,

José

Joseph Chuan wrote:

Canon Guy,

Thanks for the comment. I do believe you hit the nail right on the head. $400 is a lot, relative to the entire price of the camera and I think that the mark 2 although better, may not be that much better for MY needs. I'm just really curious to know the difference in the eye AF. That feature as been a revolution for my photography and I never thought I'd be so dependent on it. I guess I can't really see it being that much stickier to the subject in what I do, but that's why I wanted to see what other people had experienced.

Joe

I have the R6II (for about ten days now), and am very impressed with the AF. However, for portrait photography, I found my EOS R to work really well with eye detect too. And the AF in the R6 is a considerable step up from the original R, even with the firmware update that improved the eye AF on the R by quite a lot. Where the improvements in AF with the R5/6, and now the R3/7/6II really show up is in tracking for fast action. I would think that the AF on the R6 would be more than good enough for portraits. Unless your models are constantly running towards you, zig-zagging, turning around, running away, and back again, you probably won't notice any difference. The reviews I've seen comparing the R6 and R6II AF emphasize the stickiness in situations that involve a lot of movement, and turning away and back again.

I was ready to sell my R recently. But then I had to shoot a small event, mostly groups and portraits. I used the R with my Canon flash, and set the white balance to manual 3700. I was startled at how well the JPEG’s turned out and the group that I shot was very pleased as well. For now I’m keeping the R, it’s a very underrated camera I think.

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.

this is painful,

hopefully it gets fixed

and my R8 arrives without these issues

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.

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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.

Yeah for some reason custom settings do not stick. In my case it's the recording to the individual cards i.e. let's say I have record separately (Slot 1 RAW, slot 2 Jpeg) on C1 then on C3 I might have it as Auto Switch jpeg. When I return to C1 it could be record separately in RAW or something like that. I just complained to Canon Canada. They told me to reset my camera but the problem remains. Anyway, I hope it gets solved via firmware update.

José B wrote:

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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.

Yeah for some reason custom settings do not stick. In my case it's the recording to the individual cards i.e. let's say I have record separately (Slot 1 RAW, slot 2 Jpeg) on C1 then on C3 I might have it as Auto Switch jpeg. When I return to C1 it could be record separately in RAW or something like that. I just complained to Canon Canada. They told me to reset my camera but the problem remains. Anyway, I hope it gets solved via firmware update.

Well, in your case, it seems to be just that one setting (record to card). As you say on the other thread, all your other settings stick. The person you are replying to seems to be claiming that the problem is more widespread. Are you sure that absolutely all the settings are even supposed to register with custom settings?

I just checked the user's manual. It says "You can register current camera settings such as shooting, menu, and Custom Function settings as Custom shooting modes." It doesn't say that you can register all settings. But it doesn't say you can't, either.

Plus the higher second hand value …..

Alastair Norcross wrote:

José B wrote:

[text snipped]

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.

Yeah for some reason custom settings do not stick. In my case it's the recording to the individual cards i.e. let's say I have record separately (Slot 1 RAW, slot 2 Jpeg) on C1 then on C3 I might have it as Auto Switch jpeg. When I return to C1 it could be record separately in RAW or something like that. I just complained to Canon Canada. They told me to reset my camera but the problem remains. Anyway, I hope it gets solved via firmware update.

Well, in your case, it seems to be just that one setting (record to card). As you say on the other thread, all your other settings stick. The person you are replying to seems to be claiming that the problem is more widespread. Are you sure that absolutely all the settings are even supposed to register with custom settings?

I just checked the user's manual. It says "You can register current camera settings such as shooting, menu, and Custom Function settings as Custom shooting modes." It doesn't say that you can register all settings. But it doesn't say you can't, either.

Here's my issue here:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66922980