Sony has officially made Canon RF a 2nd rate camera system.

[sceneit]

I'm not gonna lie I've had a lot of bad experiences with Canon recently and that's partially why I'm making this post...

With Sony charging $6,000 for the a9 III I think the message is clear: Canon can't compete with Sony and they no longer need to price accordingly. The fact that Sony has recently been pricing all their gear at or above "equivalent" Canon models suggest they have never really been afraid of Canon, now they're charging $6,000 for a 24MP a9 III while Canon is struggling with a 24MP R6 II priced at $2,300. Which technically is a 48MP sensor due to it's dual pixel design. The fact that Sony is nearly tripling the cost of the R6 II pretty much makes a statement that they no longer intend to be #2 in the marketplace but #1. 

Now, you may think the a9 III is an R3 competitor but it's really not. The a9 series is what Canon was targeting with the R6. The specs and form factor prove it. The previous pricing on the a9 was pretty steep, more of an R5 price tag, but Sony has decided they can add $1,500 to that price which puts it squarely in 1Dx territory. Obviously the 1Dx and the a9 are vastly different and I can only imagine that if Sony were to do a 1Dx style camera it would be priced above $10,000 USD. 

Basically they're saying they can sell a tiny, lightweight, low resolution camera for $2,000 more than an R5 and $500 more than an R3. 

Sony thinks that Canon RF is second tier, and their pricing proves it.

For me personally, I'll never buy a Sony camera because I think they're fraudulent. For one, I think the a9 III is a glorified cellphone camera that is using digital fixes whether the user turns fixes on or off in the camera. By definition this is fraud. Digitally fixing crappy lenses that cost $3,000 is fraud. I'm not going to sit idly by and be robbed by a bunch of lazy morons at Sony and Canon who can't work up the gumption to figure out how to build a camera lens properly. 

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I should accept a $3,000 lens that has 12 pixels of blazingly bright chromatic aberration near the center of the image because I can fix it digitally in Lightroom. I just want to know why the lens costs $3,000? You know what else we can do digitally?  We can add fake bokeh, fake sky, fake everything. Why even buy a camera I can just use stable diffusion if I want a lame digitally fixed photo. 

The basic reality is that the digital fixes in an iPhone will equal or surpass what a Sony or a Canon are capable of in maybe 1 or 2 years. The only reason to continue with Canon and Sony is that they offer a real picture. If it's all going to be digital fraud imagery, then Sony and Canon are just overpriced cellphones.

[sceneit]

There is CA all throughout the image in some photos at 28mm. Even at f/8 it shows CA more towards the edge. Really bad if you ask me, Every lens I own is near perfect at f/8 except this one.

[Danfaz]

I tried to take a similar shot as you have, one at f/2 and one at f/8. I can't see anywhere near, if any, the CA you are seeing. Hopefully the links to these RAW files work. The forum doesn't allow .CR3 uploads.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P9UnVFzcWmcoJg6Og2FUt3arRuy6vHSp/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W9DTv4NtjCB1ZOoF1Wc8jyLe3NVNF5Cy/view?usp=sharing

[sceneit]

Thank you for posting this... It's so disappointing to be sent these defective lenses over and over again. I think they want to punish me because I live in a red state, lol. It's the only thing I can honestly come up with.

[wq9nsc]

Past and current "snapshot in time" market share isn't a good indicator of company performance nor does it indicate who has the highest performance products.  Kodak had great market share right before they didn't, ditto IBM, International Harvester, General Motors, etc.  What really matters is how a company views the importance of a market, what kind of resources they are willing to put into it, and whether their strategies are a good match for where the world is currently and where it is going. 

The higher end products from Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc. are all at the low volume end of the curve accounting little for share and sales volume.  That is no different than any other market, Porsche makes a variety of high performance vehicles but they aren't a major player in the overall holdings of parent organization Volkswagen AG.

We are in a fairly short window before traditional high performance cameras and glass of any sort will be largely disappearing from the market.  Ultra wide band sensing combined with AI will quickly render obsolete the practical (and economically feasible) market for high performance cameras and lenses.  Why try to capture an image, correct for noise and lens aberrations, adjust exposure to transform the high contrast/wrong contrast original scene, remove undesired elements, and modify desired elements in post when all the AI bot needs is a rough starting image and a natural language conversation with the "photographer" to generate the image that the photographer would have loved to have captured?  To a major extent, any image of the desired scene is needed only because it is easier and more efficient to feed that to the processing machine as part of the data than relying purely upon a verbal description of what transpired and what was desired.

I enjoy photography because of photography.  To me, the attraction of sports photography is the challenge of it but I don't want too much challenge 🙂  So I use Canon's 1 series DSLR bodies which are extremely responsive and incredibly reliable coupled with glass that focuses quickly and surely and can provide high signal to noise ratio images under trying conditions. 

Currently the photographer and his/her gear are a team and that is an interaction I enjoy; having a relationship with an image generating AI bot isn't the way I plan to spend time but it will be the most practical way of creating images in the very near future.  Why correct for the deficiencies of the camera gear and environment in post when AI will generate noiseless, flawless images based upon relatively poor images from the event coupled with its inventory of stock image data and an easy description from the "photographer" of what is desired in the final the image.  It is not only far less expensive and much faster but results in image quality that could never be achieved just by normal manipulation of the original image data.  Don't de-noise the player's face, just generate a perfect replica of the face without noise using the desired expression.  Photography's version of voice pitch auto tune 😞

Rodger

[sceneit]

Images should be clean and distortion free from the lens itself. They shouldn't need corrections of any kind, whether they're applied in camera or in Lightroom. It's just laziness and a lack of caring that is causing this to happen with the 28-70 f.2 L. This lens can have near perfect image quality wide open at all focal lengths if it is built right. People don't want to take 5 minutes to adjust a lens in the factory, instead they send out crap and expect us to pay $3,000. Who are these select few who get the perfect lenses that everyone is singing the praises of? I honestly don't know. 

And here I am wondering if the RF 24-105 f/2.8 L will fix my issues with image quality... most people would say, once bitten twice shy. Maybe it's time to finally switch systems, not because I want to but because its the smart thing to do at this point.