I’m Not Upgrading My Canon EOS R5 (Yet)

 

There’s a quiet pressure in photography to chase the newest body—as if creativity lived in release notes. Canon’s EOS R5 Mark II is a serious camera, built for speed and modern autofocus. But for the way I shoot—street, architecture, and fine-art black & white—my priorities are different.

So for now, I’m keeping my original EOS R5.

What the R5 Mark II does better (and why it doesn’t move the needle for me)?

The Mark II’s headline improvements are clear: faster readout, more responsiveness, and a camera designed to handle movement effortlessly. If you shoot sports, wildlife, or fast action, it makes total sense.

My work is slower. My bottlenecks aren’t fps. They’re framing, timing, and tone.

The real question: what happens to the files?

A stacked sensor design is often optimized for speed first. That can come with small trade-offs in “best-case” dynamic range and deep shadow elasticity—nothing dramatic, but potentially visible once you start pushing a monochrome file hard and printing it large. For the kind of B&W texture I’m after, I’ll take the predictable, familiar behavior of the R5 sensor over incremental changes.

45MP is still my sweet spot

I crop sometimes. I print. I want room to reframe without losing detail. The Mark II stays around the same resolution, and my current files already give me everything I need for large, clean prints.

Familiarity is performance

This is the unsexy part of gear decisions: I know my R5. I know how far I can lift shadows, what kind of grain I get at higher ISO, and how my RF primes render on this sensor. That confidence is worth more (to me) than a new spec sheet.

What would actually make me upgrade?

Not “more speed.” Not “more AI.”
I’d upgrade for a meaningful leap in what I print: tonal latitude, high-ISO cleanliness, and micro-contrast—or a real jump in resolution without sacrificing the look I’m chasing.

Until then, my EOS R5 isn’t “good enough.” 

It’s simply the right tool—for the way I see.