Canon's new flagship camera is finally on sale, four months after it was announced. And, with the camera in my hands again this week, my feelings are the same as that day in July when I first used it: the Canon EOS R1 is simply a cheat code for photography.
The first time I shot with the R1 was at BMW Park, home of the storied Bayern Munich basketball team. I'd been sitting in a presentation where Canon specialists were telling me how clever the camera's autofocus was, lightyears ahead of the mighty Canon EOS R5.
I was told that the R1 was so clever that could predict when basketball players would perform an alley-oop – a play where the ball handler lobs the ball towards the basket, while a teammate leaps and catches it in midair before throwing it into the hoop for a spectacular dunk. The R1, I was told, would track the ball handler, detect that an alley oop was being set up, and automatically shift focus to the receiving dunker.
This was nonsense. Cameras like the R5 could follow the ball, or stick to the player I told them to, sure. But without manual intervention they wouldn't know which player to prioritize – and they damn sure wouldn't be able to distinguish whether a player was throwing the ball at the basket or making one of the most elaborate setup plays in basketball.
So, while shooting some hoopers in Munich, I asked if they could set up a few alley oops. And they did. And I was gobsmacked: sure as sugar, the R1 tracked the ball handler, followed the ball as it was hurled at the basket and locked on to the receiver to capture a completely in-focus dunk – all at 40fps, with every single frame in focus where it was supposed 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 shooting sport.
I've waxed lyrical about all the camera's clever tricks in my Canon EOS R1 review, which I advise you to 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.
With it comes tricks like Action Priority mode, which uses AI dataset deep learning to predict player movements for things such as alley oops. There are currently presets for three sports – basketball, soccer and volleyball – but I understand that more can (and, more than likely, will) be added via firmware.
You've also got 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 sideline – and the camera will prioritize focus on the most important face that enters or leaves the frame. You can program the camera by taking a photo of the person on the court, or even by taking a photo of their picture on the internet!
There are so many other incredible tricks to this camera, from the pre-continuous shooting (which starts recording frames when you half-press the shutter, so you can literally capture shots before you press the button) to the Neural network Image Processing that enables you to upsale your 24MP shots to 96MP files with no quality loss (which is great not just for blowing an image up big, but also cropping into 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 it didn't miss a single shot.
"I shot 3,525 images on a camera I'd never used before and I got a 100% hit rate while photographing sport. Basketball, at that, which next to combat sports might be the trickiest of all for a camera to shoot," I wrote in my review.
"This camera simply didn't miss a beat when I tested it – not a single incident of focus hunting, no focus drifting onto random patterns in the background or suddenly jumping to a knee instead of a face or another subject entirely.."
That's more than I could say about the Sony A9 III, which managed to miss about 10% of shots – which is still bloody impressive, but it made some serious rookie mistakes like focusing on a hurdle when it was supposed to be tracking 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 using it.
As one of the best Canon cameras, the R1 can accept both the best Canon RF lenses as well as the best Canon lenses for DSLRs using an adapter. And make sure to check out the best Canon Black Friday deals!
