The Canon EOS R5 Mark II is the second version of their enormously popular camera aimed at demanding enthusiasts. It features a new stacked 45 Megapixel sensor, internal upscaling options, a viewfinder with eye control, enhanced autofocus, faster bursts, 8k video up to 60p in RAW, improved heat management, and a choice of three optional grips including one designed to keep it cool. There’s a lot to talk about.

Launched in July 2024, the Mark II comes four years after the original model and is only priced a little higher at launch; check the links above for the latest pricing. Canon brought me to the European press event in Munich Germany, where I got to try out the R5 II and flagship R1 launched alongside it, and if you’re interested, check out my Canon EOS R1 review.

In the video below I’ll show you what’s new, what features are shared between the two bodies, along with some results from these pre-production cameras. I’ll follow-up with my full in-depth reviews once final production models are available, and will link to them here when they’re ready. So while this video is a first-looks report, I’ve still got loads to show you. PS – if you prefer to read the written highlights, keep scrolling!

In terms of design, the R5 Mark II shares a similar size and shape to the original, but with a higher and more rounded head to accommodate the new viewfinder housing. This also protrudes further from the rear. At 746g including card and battery, it’s also essentially the same weight as its predecessor, with both models feeling similar in your hands. So you’re getting a robust magnesium alloy chassis with sealing from dust and moisture.

Look around the body though and you’ll spot a number of key differences. Starting on the top surface, the old power switch on the left side has been reassigned to stills and movie selection. Unsurprisingly the hotshoe has been updated to a Multi Function shoe first seen on the R3, but there’s now a new cap that covers the entire thing, with a button to unlock it. The fastest flash sync is 1/250 with the EFC shutter or 1/160 with the fully electronic.

On the upper right side, there’s still a detailed LCD information screen alongside a thumb dial with a mode button in the middle, but now around it is a new power collar with a locking position for the dial. The collar control provides a nicer snap on and off action for the power, and I’m glad the mode options are reduced to either stills or movies depending on the switch on the left. As before there’s also a red movie record button, finger dial, M.Fn button for adjusting the AF areas, and a soft-touch shutter release.

Oh and as teased, the R5 Mark II and R1 become Canon’s first bodies that can use the aperture ring on hybrid Z lenses for photos as well as video. I believe this will also come to future bodies, but I’m unsure about older ones.

Round the back, the controls remain much the same as before, including a thumb wheel, although the joystick has been updated to a stubbier design, that’s less prone to unintentional adjustments in my time with it so far.

The literally big change from the back though is the viewfinder, now with a much larger housing to accommodate the eye-control first seen on the EOS R3.

But first the panel itself which I’ve recorded for you here, employing the same 5.76 million dots and 0.76x magnification as its predecessor, delivering a nice large image with plenty of detail. It’s now brighter than the original R5’s viewfinder, there’s an option for blackout-free shooting, and the larger eyecup is better at blocking stray light, but the big upgrade is optional eye-control, which uses infra-red LEDs and sensors in the housing to track the position of your actual eye and know where you’re looking.

The idea is not to position an actual AF area by eye-control alone, but to select between subjects that have already been recognised by the AF system by simply glancing at them. This was first intro’d on the EOS R3 and worked really well for me then, and now on the R5 Mark II, Canon has improved the accuracy. You can refine the system by repeating the calibration process, and can store results for multiple people.

Like the R3, I found it surprisingly effective at quickly selecting a target for the AF system to subsequently track, which makes it ideal whether you’re photographing sports teams, groups of birds or animals, or people at an event or even in a street scenario. It may not work in video, but remains a valuable and unique feature in the Canon system. And as I’ll show you in a moment, further AF advances make it even easier to drill down to the desired target.

Moving onto the screen, the R5 II employs a 3.2in panel with 2.1 million dots that’s side-hinged, allowing it to flip out and twist to any angle including forward to face you or back on itself for protection.

Behind a door on the grip side you’ll find the same slots as before, giving you the choice of SD with UHS-II support or CF Express Type B cards. You can shoot or record with most formats on SD, but for internal RAW video you’ll need CF Express, and those cards will also clear the buffer much faster when shooting large bursts at the top speeds.

Behind a series of flaps on the left side are 3.5mm microphone and headphone jacks, a PC Sync port for external lighting, USB C and, yes, your eyes aren’t lying, a full-size HDMI Type-A port, hallelujah! The USB port has been updated to 3.2 but sadly won’t talk to external SSDs, although the R5 II does support UVC to work as a standard webcam, and the HDMI port will also output ProRes RAW video to compatible Atomos recorders. Meanwhile the Wifi has been subtly upgraded to support 6E, allowing it to also work on less crowded 6GHz channels.

Eagle-eyed Canon watchers will have also noticed the vents to the side of the ports, along with a longer one running along the base of the camera. Both are part of a number of strategies to reduce the overheating issues which plagued the original R5. First of all, inside the camera are separate graphite sheets for the sensor and card slot, along with an aluminium plate to better dissipate the heat externally.

Air is brought into the camera from below, before exiting through the exhaust alongside the ports. This system is passive without any fans inside the body itself, but with Auto Power Off Temp set to High, Canon claims it should allow video recording times of 18 minutes in 8k RAW 60p, 37 minutes of 8k 30p, 22 minutes of 4k 120 or two hours of 4k 60.

For longer times or hotter surroundings, you can attach the new active cooling grip, which includes a fan to draw air from the front, before pushing it out through the camera body. 

When this grip is attached, a menu appears which allows you to choose different speeds and whether the fan should be active while recording video or not. For example you could have the fan running at the top speed while in standby, during which it is quite audible, but then slow down or turn off entirely during recording.

When the fan is active and running at the top speed, Canon quotes two hours or longer of 8k 30p, or no restrictions in 4k 60. These are substantial improvements over the body alone, but Canon wisely tempers our expectations by also noting the most demanding modes like 8k RAW and 4k 120 may only record for a few minutes longer than without the grip.

I’ll be thoroughly testing the R5 Mark II for overheating with and without the grip accessory in my final review, as I’m sure will many more channels, so we’ll soon find out if Canon’s laid those particular demons to rest. Or more likely with what caveats.

But as I mentioned at the start, there’s actually three grip accessories. First up is the basic BG-R20 battery grip, which employs a stalk to replace the battery in the body, but allows you to fit two in the grip, thereby doubling your life. It also includes the usual duplicate controls when shooting in the portrait orientation.

Second is a more advanced version, called the BG-R20EP again taking two batteries and providing portrait controls, but now also featuring the 2.5Gbit ethernet port of the EOS R1 for fast networking.

And third is the CF-R20EP cooling grip which impressively manages to squeeze a battery on either side of the fan, as well as the ethernet port. But this doesn’t necessarily make it the best of the three grips, as by turning the batteries by 90 degrees, the portrait grip itself becomes less comfortable to hold, and sadly there’s none of the portrait controls either. By now it should be apparent this particular grip is designed for long-form video recording in the traditional landscape shape, perhaps also unattended with file transfer over ethernet.

Speaking of batteries, the R5 II’s more hungry features have demanded an upgraded pack, now called the LP-E6P. I believe this will work on older models, but older E6NH packs don’t have the required power to support the full R5 II feature-set.

Canon claims the new pack is good for 620 shots with the screen or roughly half that with the bright viewfinder under CIPA conditions, although if you’re shooting bursts with the electronic shutter, expect a lot more. I fired-off over 4000 shots one day using the viewfinder, along with filming several high-speed video clips, on a single charge with roughly 25% remaining. I’ll be doing video life tests in my final review.

Moving on, the R5 II may share the same 45 Megapixel resolution as its predecessor, but using a new stacked sensor that claims to have a 60% reduction in rolling shutter. This in turn should reduce the undesirable skewing effect on electronic shutter photos or any video.

Here’s a quick panning test with the electronic shutter at 30fps where there’s a little skewing visible, but it’s definitely a lot less than its predecessor. I’ll be doing more tests in my final review as well as comparing it against rivals.

The R5 II of course also features IBIS, now claiming up to 8.5 stops of compensation in the center under CIPA conditions, and at this point you’d also assume it inherits the pixel shift composite mode of its firmware-updated predecessor, not to mention most rivals.

But for the Mark II, Canon’s instead opted to implement AI Upscaling in playback on any JPEG or HEIF file you’ve captured. This doubles the pixel-count in each axis, generating a file with 180 Megapixels in-camera. It took about 5 seconds to process a JPEG in my tests. Canon’s opted to exclude in-camera upscaling of RAW files as it would take too long, but I believe this will be offered in an upcoming plugin for Lightroom.

So let’s have a look at some examples, which I took with a pre-production camera, first zooming-in on the original 45 Megapixel file before comparing it to the upscaled version on the right.

As you can see, the upscaling is delivering what looks like an intelligently sharpened image with the appearance of more detail in some areas. I believe the process may be recognising certain elements and enhancing them differently to others, and when looking closely at my samples, with varying effectiveness.

Facial details looked improved, as did text and patterns, but some foliage varied. Ultimately your mileage will vary depending on the subject but none of this is baked-into a pixel-shift file, nor subject to the motion issues that plagues that particular process. You take your photos as normal, then choose whether to generate an enhanced version in playback later.

The benefit of Canon upscaling in-camera, versus a third-party on a computer later, is having knowledge of the entire capture pipeline from the lens and camera type to the image processing that’s already been applied and in theory can be reversed. You can also select multiple images in playback to process in bulk. 

Going forward, I’m interested to see how enhancing RAW files might avoid having to deal with pre-compressed JPEG and HEIF images, although Canon assured me the process is aware of how an image is compressed and can effectively reverse it.

Canon’s also been talking about noise reduction with neural networks for some time, and this too has now made it into the R5 II’s playback menus, but this time as part of RAW post processing. I’ll demo the menus on the R1, but the process is identical on both cameras, and I’ll show you results from the R5 II in a moment.

So when you select a RAW file for processing during playback, you’ll not only see the usual options, but under the NR section, a new setting to enable neural network noise reduction. As before, you select the options you desire, before saving the result as a new JPEG or HEIF file, which of course can subsequently be AI up-scaled in-camera too if you like.

To show you what it can do, here’s a RAW+JPEG I took with the R5 II at 25600 ISO, so let’s zoom into a portion for a closer look. I’ll keep the original in-camera JPEG on the left, before comparing it to the RAW version on the right processed with Neural Network noise reduction set to the default middle value. At first glance the processed version on the right is clearly much cleaner, and it appears to have avoided smearing or loss of detail.

Next for the same crops at 51200 ISO, where again the processed version on the right is much cleaner, and while there’s still some noise, it’s much reduced without visible compromise.

And finally at the top sensitivity of 102400 ISO, where the processed version on the right is now visibly suffering, but remains superior to the original on the left. I’ll be doing many more tests in my final review, but for now I’d say the neural network NR is a valuable addition to improving high ISO shots, especially around the 25600 ISO level.

Some of the biggest upgrades on the R5 II involve its autofocus, aided by a new DIGIC Accelerator processor, and many of the new features are shared with the flagship R1. Along with adding horses, aeroplanes and trains to the targets, human recognition has received big enhancements. First the AF system can now better identify poses and upper bodies, stay locked-onto a subject as others pass in front of it, as well as recognising actual sporting moves. 

The new Action Priority mode has knowledge of three sports, soccer, basketball and volleyball, and attempts to anticipate the movement of the ball to change the target AF area. In short, if it recognises one player passing to another, it should automatically switch to the recipient. Or if it detects, say, a spike in volleyball, or an approaching dunk in basketball, it’ll again switch to that player.

You may be wondering why these three sports in particular? Well right now, the technology is looking for the movement of one, large circular ball, as it moves between players, as opposed to smaller or non-circular balls that may be harder to see or held by a player. Other sports may be added in the future though.

You can further refine the priority of specific people by registering their faces with the camera. You can pre-load a photo from any source, or take one with the camera itself, and amazingly it only needs one shot face-on to work its magic. I believe you can store ten different people in a bank and you can store up to ten banks on a card, although only one is active in the camera at a time.

Here I’ve registered myself with a single photo, after which you can see an additional icon alongside me in live view, and see how it stays recognised even as I turn to profile. Note how I’ve also restricted it to a central zoned area. This can not only be useful if you’re concentrating on key players in a match, but equally beneficial at events or weddings where you can pre-load images of the most important people.

I tried it out with basketball at the Canon event and found that Action Priority did a good job at anticipating the action most of the time, when given the entire frame to analyse. As with all AF systems, you’ll improve your success if you can drill-down, traditionally with a more focused area, but here by exploiting registered people, or using the eye-control to over-ride and quickly select the desired target. I’ve only had a brief time with the camera so far, but the AF system is definitely a highlight, and it’s great that the R5 II gets to enjoy so much of the R1’s tech here.

As for burst shooting, the mechanical shutter offers the same 12fps at up to 1/8000 as before, but the electronic shutter has accelerated to a top speed of 30fps at up to 1/32000. In a small but very useful upgrade, you can also select slower frame rates at more intervals including 20, 15, 12, 10, 7.5, 5, 3, 2 or 1fps.

I’m also pleased to report the R5 II has a pre-burst option during electronic capture that doesn’t involve grabbing a burst of RAW files and storing them in a single huge file. Now it works as you’d hope, buffering up to 15 shots as you half press the shutter, which works out at half a second’s worth when set to the fastest 30fps. Half a second doesn’t sound like much, but it’s plenty if you fully push the shutter down as soon as the key event takes place, like a ball being kicked, or a bird taking flight.

Do be aware though that keeping the shutter half-pressed to maintain the rolling buffer is like shooting continuously for long periods and will drain your battery faster, as well as warming the body. I mostly used pre-burst during the basketball sessions and found my R5 II sample getting quite warm, although the venue itself was also quite hot.

You can see the new temperature scale in the upper right corner which approached the halfway mark during an hour of solid shooting, using either 30fps bursts with constant pre capture, or filming short clips of 4k 120 video.

Also be aware of the other issues involving electronic capture. The stacked sensor may have reduced skewing compared to the previous model, but may be susceptible to banding.

In my tests, I found my pre-production R5 II exhibited pronounced banding when shooting directly into some very bright artificial lights. I was exclusively shooting fast bursts with the electronic shutter, but I’m not yet sure if this was to blame, as it didn’t affect my video clips under the same conditions. Much more testing is required.

Moving onto video, the R5 II builds upon the core capabilities of its predecessor with a number of options that better match the cinema series. These include renaming MP4 to XF-AVC S or XF-HEVC S, storing them in a new folder, and adding C-Log 2 in a new custom picture settings menu. The R5 II also gets a new waveform monitor that’s absent on the R1, as well as support for four channel audio and a tally lamp on the front ridge.

As before you can film 1080, 4k or 8k in either traditional 16:9 UHD or wider DCi formats, but there’s still no open gate option. Standard line-skipped 1080 and 4k are available at up to 240p or 120p respectively, while oversampled fine versions are limited to 60 and 30p respectively, but run the risk of overheating sooner. Meanwhile 8k is available up to 30p. It’s nice to now have 4k 120 with sound, allowing you to slow or speed ramp it later, but it’s still alternatively available in the high-speed menu without sound and already slowed-down if you prefer.

As before you can record 8k RAW internally, but it’s now available up to 60p in a RAW Lite format, or in a more compact 4k SRAW format, also up to 60p. Both are in the DCi shape, so again no open gate. You can alternatively output ProRes RAW over HDMI to a compatible recorder in 8k up to 30p, while storing a proxy in-camera if you like.

Pre-capture for video is available with a three or five second buffer, and there’s also a new mode that lets you shoot stills as you record video, albeit limited to 1080 video with 33 Megapixel photos in the 16:9 shape.

Beyond the actual quality, the big questions are of course how well the R5 II manages overheating, not to mention rolling shutter, especially in the Fine and 8k formats. In my tests so far, the stacked sensor definitely reduces the effect of skewing compared to the original R5, but it may still be beaten by rivals. 

As for overheating, better heat dissipation from the camera alongside the optional cooling accessory should see improvements over the original, but whether it’s now good enough for your needs will require substantial testing of final production models.

Which is as far as I can go with this first-looks report. There’s an enormous number of features to discuss on the R5 II, and hopefully I’ve given you a flavour of what’s new and improved, along with a taste of some of them in practice.

So far the highlights for me are the improved autofocus and viewfinder eye control, along with reduced skewing from the stacked sensor and the in-camera upscaling and noise reduction. 

As for overheating, I look forward to testing a final model and seeing what everyone else finds, as with products this complex, there are often gotchas you don’t anticipate.

Once I’ve completed my full review I’ll update this page link to it here, but in the meantime if you’re putting in an order, please do consider going through my links below, thanks!