The Canon R6 Mark III Makes the C50 Far Less Compelling for Most People

Earlier this year when the Canon C50 was announced, I saw a significant amount of chatter online about how well-designed and well-priced it was for the average content creator. I wanted to agree, but thought it lacked two major features that those content creators were going to miss: in-body image stabilization and an electronic viewfinder.

I really like the price, physical design, and video options that Canon packed into the C50, and the price of $3,900 felt like a pretty good deal because of it. The inclusion of the top handle was really unexpected, as that is usually something you have to pay extra for. Considering Canon isn’t including a hood with the newly-announced 45mm f/1.2 (it’s an extra $60), there was every reason to believe it was going to be an optional add-on. But it wasn’t, and that, along with everything the C50 offers, really made it feel like a good deal.

But both PetaPixel‘s video expert Jordan Drake and I agreed that, as good as that camera is at so many things, it just doesn’t make sense for the average content creator. The lack of IBIS is a big problem for an audience that typically does a lot of capture hand-held, and the lack of a viewfinder means it’s really hard to see what you’re filming in bright daylight.

When I talked to Canon at IBC in Amsterdam about the lack of IBIS, representatives told me that it was because filmmakers who are rigging cameras don’t want it because it can cause problems in footage. This is true: if you try to rig a camera with IBIS to a car, for example, the natural shake of the vehicle tends to look really bad when an IBIS unit is involved, even if you turn it off. That’s why Panasonic released a special version of the GH5 that removed it: the GH5s was designed to be used by high-end filmmakers who complained about IBIS when the GH5 was announced.

Canon has made it abundantly clear to me and anyone who asks that the C-series, of which the C50 is part, is made for professional filmmakers specifically. Canon is historically extremely tunnel-visioned on what type of person it designs cameras for, and it does not deviate from that. So if you liked the idea of the C50 but wanted IBIS and a viewfinder, you weren’t supposed to buy the C50.

You are supposed to buy the R6 Mark III.

I don’t love this level of product segmentation, but at least Canon did answer calls for a content creator-level camera that does all the important things that the C50 does, but also does it with IBIS and an EVF. It also helps that Canon knocked $1,000 off the asking price with the R6 Mark III versus the C50.

The thing is, I’m not really sure who the C50 is for now. I’m not convinced we’re going to see it all over high-end film sets. The inclusion of Open Gate recording is really nice, specifically for capturing content for multiple formats at the same time, and the ability to record two feeds to two separate memory cards simultaneously remains exclusive to the C50 — the R6 Mark III did not get this feature. That’s super strange to me, because the folks who care the most about capturing dual formats are very often not the same people who are strapping cameras to cars.

Will it be on some sets? Sure, the form factor and timecode input are really nice, but Canon threw away a huge number of possible buyers by staying so tight on who it thinks should buy a C-series camera. Now we’ll probably only see the C50 in use as crash cams, remote cameras, or as the occasional C-camera where a smaller body is necessary. But for everything else in the high-end space, the C80 makes way more sense.

“We travel without support all the time, and being able to hand-hold on location and still get usable footage is, I think, a necessity these days,” Drake tells me. “An EVF is much sharper than an LCD for checking focus; you can see it in bright sunlight, and the way you hold a camera while using an EVF is more stable for static shots.”

The features that make the C50 different from the R6 Mark II are generally things that most users, including modern content creators, don’t care about while the benefits that the R6 Mark III has versus the C50 matter a lot to many users — and that’s before we get to the difference in price. All of that is to say, the C50 is a difficult sell now that the R6 Mark III exists, and that didn’t have to be the case.

Image credits: Elements of header photo licensed via Depositphotos.