Canon R5 Owners Have Heavy Fingers?

Word is zipping around the Canon blogosphere that the new R bodies IBIS has a flaw where a first frame is blurred due to what appears to be a sensor shift perpetrated by the in-body image stabilization (IBIS) feature. Tests at Camnostic show that such rotational blur can happen when a finger moves the camera while activating the shutter button. But putting the camera on a tripod and employing a remote shutter trigger reveals that no such rotation occurs absent the offending forefinger.

In the past, Canon has put technology in some higher-end lenses that detected whether the camera was set on a tripod, and would turn off image stabilization (IS) if so. Earlier stabilization tech made blur worse on locked-down cameras. However IBIS is always on with the R5 and R6 cameras when the IS switch is turned on with an image stabilized lens.

We also tested a tripod rig by rocking the entire tripod immediately before taking the series of test images to make sure Canon wasn’t sneakily adding in an IS-negating tripod feature. The YouTube video that first went viral on the issue (below) shows the finger press rotating the camera very slightly clockwise. As one might expect, the rotational effect shown as problematic in the reviewed pictures is correspondingly counter-clockwise.

Canon’s firmware is quite complex, and we don’t rule out the possibility that the problem may be non-existent with our chosen settings, yet appear as a genuine phenomenon with a different configuration.