A Teardown of the Canon EOS R

Oct 19, 2018

Michael Zhang

Want to see the internals of Canon’s first full-frame mirrorless camera? Roger Cicala over at LensRentals disassembled the new Canon EOS R to look at the design and engineering going on inside.

Here are some snapshots taken during the teardown:

The main PCB in the camera. The shutter motor and electronics are below now, whereas in DSLRs they’re usually to one side.

After removing the PCB, we see the green image sensor board, the shutter mechanism below, and the black battery box.

The front view of the stripped-down camera.

“One thing that struck me is that it’s not very crowded inside there, or as we like to say ‘they left a lot of air inside’,” Cicala writes, noting that this space in the Sony a7R III and Nikon Z is taken up by the in-body image stabilization (IBIS) systems.

A view from the bottom showing the air gap between the image sensor and circuit board.

“Do I think future Rs are going to have IBIS? No, I don’t,” Cicala writes. “Canon has been very clear that they think lens stabilization is superior. The space is probably just a matter of ergonomics and perhaps heat diffusion. But there’s certainly room for it.”

Cicala also notes that the weather-sealing doesn’t appear to be too different from the a7R III’s sealing, which has been the subject of criticism.

“Well-sealed buttons and dials, not much else,” Cicala says. “That means, I think, that it will be fine in a misty rain for a while, but don’t get it saturated and don’t set it somewhere wet.”

You can find the full tear-down over on the LensRentals blog.

Image credits: Photographs by Roger Cicala/LensRentals and used with permission