Canon EOS RP Review
Here is the longer form version of the Canon EOS RP Review that I hinted about during my presentation of the for air version on Friday April 1st 2022:
Instead of a lens review this week I’m going to be reviewing a camera body, the Canon EOS RP. I used this camera for over a year and shot about fifteen thousand pictures on it, so I think I’m going to talk about its ergonomics, usability, performance, and features.
But first, a brief description. Released in March 2019, the Canon EOS RP was Canon’s second full frame mirrorless camera in the R series. It uses the RF mount, which retains the diameter of the EF mount but has a shorter flange distance. The RP has a 26.2 megapixel sensor borrowed from the 6D mark 2.
The R series also introduced a control ring on each of the RF mount lenses, and on one of the EF mount adapters to allow use of the control ring with an EF lens. The control ring is used to quickly change a camera setting, such as aperture or shutter speed. I’ve used EF lenses on the RP and they perform brilliantly. I’ve never used any native EF mount cameras but a lot of people online say that their EF lenses work better adapted to RF mount cameras.
The RP uses the LP-E17 battery like many of the Rebel series enthusiast DSLRs. This gives it a maximum rating of two hundred and ten shots per battery using just the electronic viewfinder, less if you switch between the electronic viewfinder and the rear screen. These numbers come from an industry standard testing method that involves taking a picture every 30 seconds, with or without flash, and with the screen on at all times. In real conditions I managed to get many more, as high as sixteen hundred, but usually five or six hundred.
Canon markets this as the smallest and lightest full frame camera, and one of the least expensive. It is 132mm long, 85mm tall and 70mm deep. It weighs 485 grams with battery and memory card, of which it takes only 1 SD. The camera is really small, and Canon offers a small “extension grip” to make the bottom of the camera just less than a centimeter taller. I had one as part of my RP kit and really did not like it. It didn’t add enough length to be useful, and made it more difficult to remove the battery and memory cards. The rest of the camera was decent to hold, but I found myself holding it angled down somewhat because of how the grip was designed. I did like the overall small size because it allowed me to put it in my jacket pocket with a nifty fifty lens on it.
The RP has the standard set of camera controls with a few new ones, namely a lock switch which prevents inadvertently changing camera settings, and a multi function button that can be configured by the user for various functions. In addition, you can change the focus point and even take a picture by swiping and tapping on the rear screen. If you prefer a manual control for the focus point, it has a 4 way controller on the back.
One of the features I liked the most in this camera is the focus bracketing feature. You tell the camera how many pictures to take and by how much to move the focus in between, and it takes them. If it judges it has reached the back of the scene, it does not take all the photos you tell it to. Then you can stack these photos on a computer to produce a final image where almost everything is in focus, without having to use a small aperture. This is really useful for macro photography and I was surprised to find it in a camera this cheap.
A lot of the buttons are customizable, though to do this you’ll have to dig down through several levels of the menu system to get access to them and not all buttons can be reassigned.
There are other things about the RP to be aware of if you’re thinking of buying one. It’s a mirrorless camera, which means you look into a small screen showing what the sensor sees instead of a mirror. What you see through the camera will be ever so slightly behind real time.
Also, it only shoots in electronic first-curtain shutter mode. A standard focal plane shutter has 2 curtains that open and close in coordination to start and stop the exposure. Electronic shutter essentially just turns the sensor on for a certain period of time then stops and reads out the pixels without moving any parts, just electrons. Electronic first curtain does in between. It starts the exposure electronically and ends it using only one shutter curtain. The advantage of doing it this way is it reduces shutter shock, vibrations where the shutter curtain hits the bottom of its travel, helpful for longer exposures. An electronic shutter mode is available in the fully automatic “silent” scene mode. I don’t mind either of these limitations, with the RP you aren’t going to be shooting with the fast aperture lenses which have problems with an EFCS, and the autofocus system can hardly keep up even at its pedestrian 4 frames per second drive mode in servo AF, so shooting at a higher frames per second rate with an electronic shutter mode is probably going to result in even more out of focus pictures.
Like most cameras these days, it can also take videos, however I didn’t explore this so I can’t really comment on it, other than to say that it can shoot video in different modes up to 4k.
The electronic viewfinder is big and clear, and a neat feature offered by it is exposure simulation. Essentially, the camera can show you what the final image will look like…. before you take the picture. Exposure simulation has pretty much eliminated looking at the rear screen after each photo for me. It’s also a good feature for beginning photographers, as you can see what changing different exposure settings does to the image in near real time.
You can access the same menus in the EVF and the rear screen, so most of the time I had the rear screen folded around to protect it. This has led to some weird looks from people as I appeared to intently focus on something at my feet with my giant 600mm lens, but I was looking at the menus.
My only complaint about the electronic viewfinder is that its refresh rate was a little slower than I’d have liked, meaning that following a fast moving bird, for example, was a little problematic. However, the autofocus system usually couldn’t keep up with the fast moving bird, so the fact that the viewfinder refresh was a little laggy wasn’t really that much of a problem.
If you want a more objective preview of the exposure, you can get a live histogram in the electronic viewfinder. However, I turned this off because it cluttered up the viewfinder and exposure simulation performed the same basic function. Another feature I liked was the level that you could display in the viewfinder.
The RP has three custom functions available on its mode dial, which I used the most for my wildlife photography because they allow me to quickly change settings such as autofocus mode or drive mode in response to different situations like perching animals, animals in branches or birds in flight.
Another mode the RP has is called Fv or Flexible Priority. Essentially, you can change any one, or all 3 legs of your exposure triangle, while the camera changes the other(s). This is like the Program mode, but without the settings resetting after each exposure.
To sum things up, I think the Canon RP is a great beginner camera that is a jack of all trades master of none kind of camera. You can get the body only for $999 new, for a refurbished one from Canon for $899, which includes a 1 year warranty. I would recommend it for every purpose except perhaps for capturing birds in flight, as its autofocus and drive speed aren’t quite up to the task.