Canon 5DS R & 5DS First Shots: Production sample lab shots are now available!

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posted Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 9:13 AM EST

At long last, we've finally gotten our hands on production-level review units of the brand new, 50MP-packing Canon 5DS R and Canon 5DS full-frame DSLRs. Earlier this year, we had an opportunity to post images and crops from both a pre-production 5DS R model as well as a later-but-still-beta sample of this camera. Now, we're finally able to share with you our official First Shots sets of our lab test images from both the Canon 5DS R and Canon 5DS, including RAW files, which are ready for your pixel-peeping pleasure.

As before with our earlier beta sample, we used Canon's new Fine Detail Picture Style introduced with this camera across the board for our lab test shots, though we did provide a shot using the Standard Picture Style setting for comparison's sake. The Fine Detail Picture Style uses newly-refined sharpening processing to deliver much crisper, finer detail than we're accustomed to seeing from in-camera JPEGs, with little or no oversharpening. (The new sharpening controls are quite similar to those for Photoshop's Unsharp Mask, in that you can tweak and control the strength, fineness and threshold all in-camera.)

In the 1:1 crop example below, we have a comparison of the Fine Detail Picture Style against the Standard Picture Style. The Fine Detail Picture Style works quite well at resolving subtle, fine detail, and in a much finer, more precise way than with the Standard Picture Style. At first glance, the Standard style image may appear sharper, but upon closer viewing, the less refined sharpening comes at the expense of fine detail, and a lot of the apparent sharpness is the result of the oversharpening and haloing. The Fine Detail mode also subtly reduces image contrast, which accouts for the slight brightness/contrast changes between the two images.