Features
Handling
Performance
Verdict
Specification
The fourth version of the highly successful Canon EOS 5D, the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is now available, and the latest version introduces a number of new features, including a new 30 megapixel full-frame sensor made by Canon, 7fps continuous shooting, 4K video recording, plus built-in GPS and Wi-Fi.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Features
The Canon EOS 5D was introduced in 2005 as the first affordable full-frame camera from Canon. When the 5D Mark II was introduced, in 2008, it transformed the industry as a Digital SLR capable of shooting FullHD video. Canon says the 5D Mark III, introduced in 2012, was a fully rounded DSLR, with a greatly improved focusing system, making up for any shortcomings in previous models. The Canon EOS 5DS and 5DS R were introduced with a 50-megapixel sensor, and are ideal for detail, and landscape type shots. (Side note: The largest number of World Press Photo winners of 2016 use a Canon EOS 5D series camera)
The 5D Mark IV improves on the 5D Mark III with a number of ways, which we have highlighted below:
- New 30.4mp Full-Frame sensor
- Dual-pixel AF system - improved live view and video focus speeds
- 3.2inch 1.62m dot touch-screen
- 7fps continuous shooting
- 4K video recording
- GPS and Wi-Fi built-in
- Dual pixel raw
- Improved weather sealing
- Improved handling
- USB3
Here we run through some of the main features and differences between the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, III and IV:
| 5D Mark II | 5D Mark III | 5D Mark IV |
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21.1mp FF sensor |
22.3mp FF sensor |
30.4mp FF sensor 3.2inch 1.62m dot touch 61 AF points (with phase) ISO50-102400 7fps continuous shooting 150,000 shutter rating 4K, FullHD video SD/CompactFlash USB3 Mic, Headphone GPS + Wi-Fi built-in Weather-sealed (improved) 900 shot battery life 150.7x116.4x75.9mm size Weight 890g £3629 RRP |
*To see how the 5D compares to the Mark I, see our 5D Mark I vs Mark II vs Mark III comparison.
The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV makes a leap in resolution to a 30.4 megapixel full-frame sensor, and the new sensor uses Canon’s Dual Pixel AF system for high-speed focusing on-sensor, which works in both live view shooting, and video recording. Canon's dual-pixel sensor was first seen in the Canon EOS 70D, and gives on sensor phase-detection focus. There are 61 AF points, and the focus system is now sensitive down to -4 EV.
The Mark IV has a very similar design to previous to make it familiar to people who have used other 5D cameras. The camera now features a deeper front grip and the rear thumb grip is bigger. There's also a new customisable button on the back, where your thumb lands. Introduced with the camera is a new battery grip, designed to match the 5D Mark IV design and control layout.
Dual pixel raw optimizer – This is a new feature that gives a number of benefits. For example, you can fine-tune images in post-production, altering the sharpness after the shot is taken, and make adjustments similar to lens Micro-adjustment. This means you can get more hits, and alter the focus point after taking the photo, or move the bokeh of an image. This is possible when editing the raw file in Canon's Digital Photo Professional software. You need to enable this in the menu, and switching “Dual pixel raw” on, means that camera records 65mb raw files, instead of the more usual 35mb raw image, due to the camera recording the dual pixels (left and right / A and B areas on the sensor). We'll go into more details on this later in the review.
GPS and Wi-Fi are built-in so you don't need to add any additional accessories. The Wi-Fi also supports FTP/FTPS so you can upload more quickly, and it's also compatible with the Canon Camera Connect app so you can shoot remotely and transfer images to a smartphone or tablet.
Key Features
- 30.4 megapixel Full-Frame CMOS sensor (latest generation, same generation as 1DX II, and 80D)
- 3.2inch Touchscreen, active all the time
- 100% viewfinder, 0.71x magnification, Intelligent Viewfinder 2
- 61-point AF, (very similar to 1DX II), f/8 sensitive, -3EV
- 150,000 pixel RGB+IR sensor (same as 5DS/5DS-r), Flicker detection (updated since 7D-II)
- ISO50-102400 (ISO100 to ISO32000 before expansion)
- 7fps continuous shooting full-res, 21 raw files, unlimited JPEG files
- 4.3fps live view continuous Servo AF
- 150,000 - Shutter rating
- SD and CompactFlash
- USB3.0, miniHDMI out, Flash Sync, Remote terminal (at front)
- Weather-sealed body - with improved weather proofing (extra grommets and seals)
- Dual-axis electronic level
- 900 shot battery life
- 50g lighter, redesigned mirror box, aluminium used instead of stainless steel.
- Wi-Fi/NFC/GPS/FTP transfer built-in
- IPTC meta-data for news and sports photographers (International press and telecommunications)
- DIGIC 6+ and DIGIC 6 image processor
- Mirror vibration control system
- Digital lens optimised for JPEG images
- Fine detail picture style
Video Features
- 4K video at 30/25/24p (DCI CINE resolution), upto 500Mbps
- 1080p video at 60/50/30/25/24fps, upto 180Mbps
- 720p at 120/100fps
- Mic, Headphone sockets, Dual pixel AF
- 8.8mp images from 4K video (in-camera)
- Time-lapse video creation
- Built-in mono microphone
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Handling
For anyone familiar with the 5D series, particularly the 5D Mark III, 5DS and 5DS R, the 5D Mark IV will be immediately familiar, with a few tweaks to the layout of ports and a new custom button. There are numerous external buttons and controls making it quick to change settings, and with the top illuminated LCD display giving shooting information at a glance, you don't have to resort to looking at the rear screen, or menus.
As you would expect on a camera priced at over £3000, build quality is excellent, and the camera body has improved weather sealing. The camera has a thicker chassis and tripod socket than found on the 5D Mark III, as featured on the 5DS and 5DS R. The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is quite heavy, however with a large handgrip covered in textured rubber you can get a good grip on the camera, and the camera is provided with a wide neck strap. There is a textured rubber area on the left of the camera as well. The ports on the side of the camera are updated to include: Mic, Headphone, HDMI, USB3, flash, and remote sockets.
Canon EOS 5D IV Vs Mark III
Focus is possible in low-light conditions down to -4 EV and up to 18 EV, which is an improvement over the 5DS and 5DS R. There are 61 AF points, covering a fairly wide area of the frame, and the full width of the APS-C 1.6x crop mode. When using Live View or recording video a much larger area of the frame is used for focus, as the camera can then switch to using the sensor-based phase detection pixels.
The optical viewfinder is large (with 0.71x magnification) and clear with a large rubber surround, as well as dioptre adjustment. The 3.2inch screen is large, clear, and bright with a good resolution of 1.6million dots and viewing angles are good. It's also quite clear and easy to use the screen outdoors in bright light however, it's a shame that the screen doesn't tilt.
The new custom button is also featured on the new battery grip, the BG-E20, which can be seen below.
The camera features a larger bump on top for GPS and Wi-Fi connection, and on the right-hand side if the NFC connection point, making it easy to connect to a compatible smartphone.
The menu system will be familiar to anyone who has used a recent Canon camera, but the range of options available has increased, particularly in the lens correction options. The menu system is logically and neatly arranged with colour coded sections, letting you change additional settings and options. The large number of buttons and controls on the camera mean you can change settings quickly without entering the menus, and the Q button makes it easy to change settings on the rear screen - the options here can be customised so you have quick access to your favourite settings. There is built-in help that can be accessed by pressing the INFO button, although studying the manual is recommended to fully understand all of the options. A comparative playback function lets you zoom in and view images side-by-side on the rear screen in playback, making it easy to see which image is correctly in focus.
Along with a variety of focus options in the menu system, there are auto focus (AF) scenarios built into the camera so that you can choose the most appropriate for your shooting situation. The choices optimise the following three options: Tracking sensitivity, Acceleration / Deceleration Tracking, and AF point auto switching - each can be increased or decreased +/-2. It's worthwhile studying the manual to get the best AF settings for your own shooting needs.
You can also use the touch-screen to scroll through the menus and change options. To spend more time reading each option in the menu below, simply pause the video:
The 5D Mark IV uses the same battery as the previous model, the LP-E6N, and the camera offers 900 shots. This means you don't need to worry about replacing any spare batteries you may have, as they will work on the new camera.
Continuous shooting has been improved, with the camera now able to shoot at 7fps at full resolution:
Wi-Fi features - With the camera featuring built-in Wi-Fi and NFC it's easy to set up a connection to a compatible (Android) smartphone with NFC built-in. Using Canon's Camera Connect app, which is available for Android and iOS devices, you can view and transfer images on the camera, shoot remotely as well as change camera settings, plus automatically update the camera's time.
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Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Performance
The performance section is where we look at the image quality performance of the camera. Additional sample photos and product shots are available in the Equipment Database, where you can add your own review, photos and product ratings. We will be adding more sample photos, as we take them.
Speed - We took a number of shots to test the camera's responsiveness, from switch on to first photo, shot to shot, focusing speed etc. We take a number of shots and then use the average to ensure accurate and consistent tests, making it easy to compare with other cameras.
| Shutter Response | <0.1secs (<0.1secs live view) |
| Wide - Focus / Shutter Response | 0.175secs (0.125secs live view) |
| Full zoom - Focus / Shutter Response | 0.175secs (0.125secs live view) |
| Switch on Time to Taking a Photo | 0.5secs |
| Shot to Shot without Flash | 0.3secs |
| Continuous Shooting - JPEG (shots before slow down) |
6.9fps (308+ shots / unlimited) |
| Continuous Shooting - RAW | 7fps (16 shots / 7 with dual pixel raw) |
We used a Lexar 2000x UHS-II SD Card, the Canon EF-S 24-70mm f/2.8 II lens, with lens correction settings of: peripheral illum on, chromatic aberr corr on, diffraction correction on, and One-shot AF.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Sample Photos
Sample Photos - Colour is excellent and for product shots, the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV does an excellent job. The camera is also well suited to portraits and any other type of photographer where colour is important, with the camera capable of producing pleasing results. Shooting in low-light conditions you can get better results by processing the raw files yourself. Exposure is reliable, and dynamic range is good. It's possible to recover shadow detail from JPEG images as well as the raw images. Nb. Where noted some images were taken with a Beta sample, and resized to 90%.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Lens test images
Lens Performance - The Canon EF-S 24-70mm f/2.8 II lens performs well and there is successful and quick focus when recording video, or using live view on the camera. The camera has the recently introduced Fine Detail picture style which is designed to give sharper images straight from the camera, and results were good, although there are plenty of options so that you can tweak these settings to your own personal preferences. There are a large number of lens correction options in the camera that will work with any Canon lens - provided the camera has been loaded with the lens correction data.
Dual Pixel RAW Optimizer editing:
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- Image micro adjustment lets you alter the focus point forwards or backwards, up to +/- 5. Using this we exported a number of images from the rear in focus to the front, and photomerged and stacked them in Photoshop to show more of the watch in focus (using this technique).
- Bokeh shift lets you move the blurred background left or right by +/- 10
- Ghosting reduction makes the overall image sharper. We've included an example above, and you can see the difference between the JPEG and the focus stacked images. The difference is quite subtle, and you really need to view the images at 100% to see the difference, but considering you're able to do this from one raw file, it's quite impressive as the stacked image makes the watch face noticeably sharper.
Using Canon's Digital Photo Professional is a little slow, and the larger 65MB raw files will quickly fill your memory card.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV ISO test images
ISO Noise Performance - At the lowest ISO setting of ISO50, dynamic range is reduced. Noise performance is very good between ISO100 until ISO6400 when some noise starts to appear. ISO25600 is most likely the highest ISO setting you'll want to use without applying further processing to images, as noise becomes much stronger at ISO51200, and at this setting you're best resizing the image or converting to black and white (or both). The ISO speed goes up to ISO102400, and this setting is best avoided.
Noise performance is similar to the Canon EOS 5D Mark III, although, at higher ISO settings, including ISO25600, there is less chroma noise (coloured patches of colour) in the 5D Mark IV images. Processing 5D Mark III raw images with the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw is likely to get equally good results.
Noise performance at ISO25600 is better than the 36 megapixel Nikon D810, and Pentax K-1, and very similar to the 42 megapixel Sony A7R Mark II (which goes to show the benefits of BSI CMOS sensors).
Noise reduction options are: Off, Low, Standard, High, and if you're shooting JPEG only, then there is a Multi-shot Noise Reduction option. We took these shots with "High ISO speed NR" set to Standard, which is the default option.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV White-balance test images
White Balance Performance - Like other recent Canon EOS DSLRs, the 5D Mark IV features a "white priority" auto white balance (AWB) option, which means you can get excellent, accurate white balance with this switched on, which is great for product shots. You can leave it on normal settings and get warm white balance results, which is great for portraits or other general photography.
The "White priority" option is designed to work under Tungsten lighting, but it also works under fluorescent and mixed lighting. This makes it possible to get good results in a variety of lighting conditions and means you shouldn't need to use the white balance presets, and as you can see above has worked well under both tungsten and fluorescent lighting.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Digital filters
Digital Filters - You can choose from a number of different "Picture Styles" and each one can be customised with options for sharpness (strength, fineness, threshold), contrast, saturation, colour tone, filter effect (monochrome filters), and toning effect (monochrome). There is no automatic panoramic shooting mode.
Video - The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV records 4K video at the full CINE resolution of 4096×2160, at up to 30fps. For higher frame rate 4K video recording, you will need to look at the Canon EOS 1DX Mark II, which offers 4K video at 60fps. Video can be recorded using an ISO speed up to ISO102400.
There is a built-in mono microphone, and for stereosound you will need to plug a stereo microphone into the microphone socket on the camera, which is a shame considering the high-spec of the rest of the camera. You can select still frames from 4K video and save them as 8.8-megapixel images, in camera.
4K video uses the centre of the frame and crops into the frame quite noticeably with a 1.74x crop factor, so a 50mm lens becomes equivalent to an 87mm lens. 4K CINE video at 25fps recorded for 30 seconds resulted in a 1.9GB file (at 500Mbps), so you'll need a large memory card to record longer videos.
As with other Canon DSLRs, due to the lack of in-camera image stabilisation, the use of a lens with image stabilisation (IS), or the use of a tripod is highly recommended, for the best results. There is the option to record HDR videos.
We have published a number of 5D Mark IV videos on the ePHOTOzine YouTube Channel.
Video Crop Factor
FullHD uses the full width of the frame, and HDMI output is FullHD resolution, and not 4K resolution.
4K video quality
Testing focus while recording FullHD video:
Value For Money
The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is available for £3599 body only which makes it quite a sizeable investment.
Pentax K-1 - 36mp, 4.4fps, FullHD video, £1799
Nikon D810 - 36mp, 5fps, FullHD video, £2399
Sony Alpha A99 Mark II - 42mp BSI CMOS sensor, 12fps, 4K video, £2999 (due November)
Sony Alpha A7R Mark II - 42mp BSI CMOS sensor, 5fps, 4K video (CSC), £2599
Canon EOS 5DS R - 50mp, 5fps, FullHD video, £2899
If you can live without built-in GPS, then for video, the Sony Alpha A7R II would be an appealing alternative due to built-in 5-axis image stabilisation and 4K video recording. Being a CSC, the camera is also smaller, and cheaper, by around £1000.
Have a look at more Full-Frame DSLRs in our Top 10 Best FF DSLR Cameras. You'll also need to buy a memory card and a case or bag to keep your camera safe and protected - have a look at our complete guide to camera bags.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Verdict
The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV introduces a new 30.4-megapixel full-frame sensor, with dual-pixels, which can be used for quicker AF, as well as Canon's new "Dual Pixel Raw Optimizer" for fine adjustment of raw files after you've taken the shot. 4K CINE video recording gives the camera an edge in video recording when compared to 4K cameras that record in UHD resolution instead. Continuous shooting speed is improved, with the camera now shooting at 7fps, and the camera's weather sealing has been improved over previous models. The design remains very similar to previous versions of the 5D, but it has now been subtly refined to improve handling and control, thanks to a new custom button and improved grip.
With GPS and Wi-Fi built-in, USB3, and more sockets than most, the 5D Mark IV is an extremely versatile DSLR, and there will be many photographers out there that will be extremely pleased with the performance of the 5D Mark IV, and rightly so. The continuous shooting speed makes the camera more competitive with other cameras, but isn't a massive increase over the Mark III. For 5D Mark III owners, upgrading to the Mark IV could not be as pressing. If you own a Mark II (or Mark I) and can afford the Mark IV, then the upgrade would make a lot of sense, particularly if you've built up a collection of Canon lenses.
Dual Pixel Raw works well, but the difference can be quite subtle, and time-consuming if you want to get the best out of it, for example, stacking shots for sharper macro photos, as all processing must be done on your computer and can't be done on the camera. It would be better to use live view focus and the touch screen to get the photo right in camera in the first place (and here technologies such as face-detection, and eye-detection focus help in other camera brands). It would be nice if the screen tilted, particularly as using live-view for stills and video has become much more useful, and usable, with vastly improved live view focusing speeds.
The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is the fourth version of the highly popular 5D series, and brings with it a number of improvements that make it a highly competitive full-frame Digital SLR. For the working professional, the updates, including IPTC meta-data, Wi-Fi (with FTP support), and GPS, will be extremely welcome, and the 5D Mark IV is likely to find itself equally popular, and extremely desirable for many.
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The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is a highly competitive full-frame Digital SLR that is extremely desirable, with excellent image quality. |