Canon EOS R review

Canon EOS R Review: Image quality

The EOS R’s sensor doesn’t throw up any great surprises and behaves similarly to the 30.4-million-pixel sensor as used within the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. Although it doesn’t resolve the same level of super fine detail as Sony’s A7R III and Nikon’s Z7, both of which feature 42MP and 45MP sensors, there’s nothing to say Canon won’t release a high resolution model in the future. Who knows, this might be the next release in the EOS R series.

Users will find the EOS R’s raw files provide excellent latitude when it comes to returning detail to shadowed regions and can confidently push high into the ISO range before noise severely degrades image quality. Adobe didn’t support the EOS R’s raw files at the time of testing so we used Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software (v4.9.0) to convert our files before analysing them.

Canon EOS R Review: Resolution

The EOS R’s 30.3-million pixel sensor resolves a maximum of 3,600l/ph between ISO 100 and ISO 400, which drops to 3,400l/ph by the time ISO 800 is reached. Detail remains high when you encroach ISO 1600 and ISO 3200, with 3,000l/ph being resolved right up to ISO 6400. As the sensitivity is pushed higher, fine detail starts to get lost with the introduction of noise, though the sensor shows it’s still more than capable of resolving 2,800l/ph up to its sensitivity ceiling of ISO 40,000 before expansion. Pushing to its H1 (ISO 51,200) and H2 (ISO 102,400) settings sees the level of detail drop to 2,600l/ph and 2,400l/ph respectively.

Below we show details from our resolution chart. Multiply the number beneath the lines by 400 to give the resolution in lines per picture height (l/ph).

Canon EOS R Review: Noise

The noise performance from the EOS R is very good and our detailed inspection of raw files captured through the sensitivity range displayed clean noise-free results between ISO 100 and 800. When you push to ISO 1,600 and inspect images closely you’ll start to see luminance noise appearing, which becomes more obvious when you push to ISO 3,200 and ISO 6,400.

ISO 3200 is very useable and so is ISO 6400 with a little noise reduction applied in post. Users will find that they can shoot at ISO 12,800 too, but this is the upper limit we’d want to push the sensitivity to on a regular basis. Colour saturation remains high up to ISO 25,600 and beyond this point you’ll notice that colours become slightly muted. The extended H1 (ISO 51,200) and H2 (ISO 102,400) settings should be avoided at all costs.

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