If you’ve been holding out on buying a Canon EOS R camera until it gets a stunning 85mm portrait lens, today has brought some good news (or perhaps bad news for your wallet). Canon has announced that its eagerly awaited RF 85mm F1.2L USM lens will be arriving next month.
The first of six new lenses that’ll be arriving in 2019 for its full-frame EOS R cameras, this lens is shaping up to be (on paper) one of the best ever made for shooting portrait photos.
Thanks to that bright f/1.2 aperture, it can apparently capture 50% more light than an 85mm f/1.4 lens, and brings the added bonus of glorious bokeh and background separation. In short, it’s a wedding photographer’s dream.
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Canon is also promising that the RF 85mm F1.2L will be “one of Canon’s fastest aperture autofocus lenses”, thanks to a new microprocessor that takes advantage of the new RF lens mount to help it acquire focus in a flash.
Alongside the manual control ring, you also get a programmable control ring which can be used for tweaking shutter speeds, aperture and exposure.
And as you’d hope for a premium prime lens, the RF 85mm F1.2L is also fully weatherproofed to keep it safe from unexpected downpours.
Of course, it won’t come cheap – when it goes on sale in June 2019, the RF 85mm F1.2L will set you back a cool £2,799.99. That’s even more than the Canon EOS R itself, which costs £2,349.99 with an EF-EOS R mount adaptor. But then no-one ever said buying prime lenses for full-frame mirrorless cameras was going to come cheap.
What do you think, are these new RF lenses starting to give the Canon EOS R range some momentum, or will you be sticking to Sony, Nikon or Panasonic? Let us know on Twitter @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
