The Canon EOS R1 is actually a PED for sports photography

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Canon’s new flagship camera is finally available for purchase, four months after it was announced. And now that I have the camera back in my hands this week, my feelings are the same as that day in July when I first used it: the Canon EOS R1 is simply a photography cheat code.

The first time I shot the R1 was at BMW Park, home of the legendary Bayern Munich basketball team. I’d attended a presentation where Canon specialists told me how clever the camera’s autofocus was, light years ahead of the mighty Canon EOS R5.

I was told it was the R1 So smart that can predict when basketball players would perform an alley-oop – a play in which the ball handler throws the ball toward the basket while a teammate jumps and catches it in the air before throwing it into the hoop for a spectacular dunk. The R1, I was told, would track the ballhandler, detect that an alley was being set up and automatically shift focus to the receiving dunker.

This was nonsense. Cameras like the R5 could track the ball, or lock onto the player I told them to, of course. But without manual intervention, they wouldn’t know which player to prioritize – and they did damn sure wouldn’t be able to distinguish whether a player was throwing the ball to the basket or making one of the most elaborate setup plays in basketball.

So when I photographed some hoopers in Munich, I asked if they could set up some alleys. And they did. And I was amazed: the R1 tracked the ball handler, tracked the ball as it was swung toward the basket, and linked to the receiver to capture a completely crisp dunk – all at 40 fps, with every single frame in view. focus where it needed to be.

That was the exact moment. That despite people joking that this was “just an R3 Mark II”, or claiming that the autofocus “wasn’t that much better” than before, that was the moment I knew the R1 was nothing short of a cheat code for the shooting sports.

I raved about all the camera’s clever tricks in my Canon EOS R1 review, which I recommend you read if you’re interested. Long story short, the camera features a dedicated Digic Accelerator processor on top of the Digic X chip to power the all-new Dual Pixel Intelligent AF.

Added to this are tricks like Action Priority mode, which uses AI dataset deep learning to predict player movements for things like alley whoops. There are currently presets for three sports – basketball, football and volleyball – but I understand more could (and most likely will) be added via firmware.

You also have tricks like Registered People Priority, where you can program up to ten faces in order of priority – from the star player to the scrub on the bench to the coach on the sidelines – and the camera will prioritize focusing on the most common faces. important face entering or leaving the frame. You can program the camera by taking a photo of the person on the field, or even by taking a photo of their photo on the internet!

There are so many other incredible tricks to this camera, from pre-continuous shooting (where frame recording starts when you half-press the shutter button, so you can literally take pictures before you press the button) to the neural network image processing that makes it possible you can upscale your 24 MP shots to 96 MP files without losing quality (which is great not only for making an image large, but also for cropping your shot and then enlarging it back to or beyond its original size ).

But the biggest testament I can give to the Canon EOS R1 is the fact that not a single shot was missed.

“I took 3,525 photos with a camera I’d never used before and got a 100% hit rate while shooting sports. Basketball, too, which might be the hardest of all to shoot with a camera besides martial arts, I said. wrote in my review.

“This camera simply didn’t miss a beat when I tested it: not a single incident of focus seeking, no focus wandering to random patterns in the background or suddenly jumping on a knee instead of a face or other subject… “

That’s more than I could say about the Sony A9 III, which managed to miss about 10% of shots – which is still the case bloody impressive, but it made some serious rookie mistakes, such as focusing on an obstacle when the intention was to follow the runner jumping over it.

The Canon EOS R1 is simply the best sports camera I’ve used. Even if I feel like my photography is on PEDs when I use them.

As one of the best Canon cameras, the R1 can accept both the best Canon RF lenses and the best Canon lenses for DSLRs with the help of an adapter. And make sure you check out the best Canon Black Friday deals!