New Canon 5D Unveiled – The Canon 5DS & 5DS R

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by Sebastian WöberFebruary 6^th, 2015

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Canon’s legendary 5D DSLR series has a history of huge market impacts. The 5D mark II changed the movie industry, the 5D mark III despite its limits brought a new area of clean HD video and beautiful RAW recording through hacks.

Today, three years later, Canon tries revolution again by bringing medium format resolution into a “normal” DSLR. The Canon 5DS & 5DS R are here. Oh, and they can also do video, but nothing fancy it seems.

Sporting a 50.6-megapixel sensor (8688 x 5792 pixels), the 5DS & 5DS R are now the highest-resolution DSLR cameras in existence. In comparison the Pentax 645Z does 51.4 Megapixels and the new $25,000 Leica S delivers 37.5 Megapixels.

There’s no question this will stir up the photography market once again. Because if you’re into stills then you know that pixels become more relevant every day and medium format photography has been out of reach for the prosumer type photographer, just as until recently 2K & 4K have not been an option for the prosumer filmmaker.

Speaking of which, what about video on the Canon 5DS?
Well it seems Canon wouldn’t call this one a “C” camera, as they refer to their line of movie shooting large sensor bodies.

The Canon 5DS & 5DS R is limited to do HD video in these modes:
MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 video with linear PCM stereo audio.
• 1920×1080 at 29.97, 25 and 23.98 fps
• 1280×720 at 59.94i and 50i

Just like the 5D mark III, the 5DS & 5DS R come with ALL-i and IPB compression modes.

Something new is the port protector the 5DS comes with, intended to protect hdmi connections as they are prone to break the connector on the camera.

A feature hint that we yet have to confirm comes from a comment on Ken Rockwell’s website who had a chance to play withe the camera and states that “The shutter button can be programmed to capture stills while rolling video.”.
This sounds like the 5DS will allow you to shoot stills without interrupting video capture.

As always the real video quality of a camera has to be tested properly and can’t be judged by a feature list alone. We will soon test the Canon 5DS in our test lab and compare its video functionality to similar cameras on the market.

5DS, 5DS R, what’s the difference? You guessed it, the 5DS R eliminates the low-pass filter effect to make images sharper while in turn having a greater potential for moiré and other color artifacts.

There’s a video on the Canon channel that shows off all the new features of the Canon 5DS & 5DS R:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gzrnneiHM4

The Canon 5DS & 5DS R will be start shipping in June and costs $3699. The camera is already available for pre-order here. We expect to see more new cameras by Canon in the next months.