Boom Boom - Two Big New Canons Rolling Into Battery

Today is the launch day for two new Canon cameras - as I write this, senior figures from Camera Electronic ( and others ) are being feted by the Canon company - eating lark's tongue paté and sipping  rare champagne like as not - while we struggle here at the shop counter with a dry crust of bread and a sip of pond water. Cough, cough. It is good to see that priorities are preserved...

Coming away from that, the new cameras are called the Canon EOD 5Ds and the Canon EOS 5Dr. Not surprisingly, the bodies are closely related - but there is a vital difference.

The basic specs are wild:

50.6 Megapixels off the new sensor.

5FPS high-speed shooting.

61-point AF selection.

New Mirror Vibration Control system to make long exposures sharper.

100-6400 ISO with extension to 12800ISO on demand.

The difference in the two bodies revolves around the provision in the EOS 5Ds of a low-pass filter to deal with the tendency of sensors to create moiré patterns when they encounter man-made repeating patterns like fabrics and grids. This filter is deliberately absent from the EOS 5Dr to allow it to have a sharper result - as long as it sees the random patterning of landscape and nature,

Something for everyone, but Boy, are you going to need to work cleanly and with the best lenses to make use of that much resolution. Choose Canon lenses for this.

Don't know when we will get them, but as soon as we find out, we'll let you know.