New gear is often exciting, but new gear that helps you make better stuff overall? Double the excitement, and Canon has some of that inbound.
Photographers and filmmakers keen on taking their art form and commercial pursuits a little further could see a little more capability on the way, provided they sit within one of the several camera ecosystems.
There are a few, and owners of interchangeable lens cameras know that the initial purchase of their camera is just the first of many, many they’ll be making through the life to support content creation.
Whether you’re a photographer or a filmmaker, there’s the camera, lenses, flash heads, bags, straps, filters, memory and storage, tripods and monopods, and so on and so on. There’s always something.
Lenses, however, make up the crux of where photographic and filmmaker spend invariably goes, particularly when new gear comes out. Picking a lens is always fun, but if you’re a member of a Canon system, you’ll shortly be tempted by a few more releases happening there.
This week, there are two lenses for filmmaking, with one of these doubling up for film and video, as Canon readies new gear for its EOS R series of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.
First up, there’s the $2699 RF 35mm F1.4, a low-light lens built for portraiture thanks to that low F1.4 aperture that’s will do double duty for stills and video with an extra ring to control video on the lens itself. That ring includes a custom function button for the lens, affording photographers and filmmakers that little bit extra control as they use it.
There’s also filter support can be found on both the front and back of the lens, providing a little bit of extra room for creativity, something the RF 35mm F1.4 seems developed for in the first place.
Alongside the prime portrait lens, Canon has a new lens made for stereoscopic video, specifically focusing on filmmakers keen to capture video for devices like the Apple Vision Pro.
With Apple announcing an 8K immersive video mode for the Vision Pro this week, as well as an expected local release for the headset in July, Canon’s dual fisheye lenses make sense, providing a way to capture 3D imagery for a world beginning to experience media in virtual reality, which delivers imagery in 3D inside a headset.
We’ve previously seen a stereoscopic lens from Canon before in the RF 5.2mm F2.8L dual fisheye, a lens made for Canon’s full-frame cameras, but the latest addition is the RF-S 3.9mm F3.5 STM dual fisheye, a variation on a theme that brings the dual fisheye stereo approach to the smaller sensor in the EOS R7, bringing VR filmmaking to a different price point.
It’s still a slightly higher price point than you may expect, boasting an Australian recommended retail price of $1999, but that’s markedly lower than the rough $3500 RRP of its big brother made for full-frame sensors.
Both lenses are also joined by a new flash head, which probably won’t be of any use to filmmakers, but may see photographers able to get a little more light in low-light situations, and for under $500. Priced at $499, Canon’s EL-10 speed light is a compact flash built with speed in mind, offering a 1.5 second flash cycle recharge time and uses four AA batteries.
It’ll join the other two lenses in release shortly, all of which should be available by July.
