Instead of a lens review this week I’m going to be reviewing a camera body, the Canon EOS RP. The RP was my first Canon camera, and I found it really easy to use. I used this camera for over a year and shot about fifteen thousand pictures on it, so I think I’m qualified to review it.

Released in March 2019, the Canon EOS RP was Canon’s second full-frame mirrorless camera in the R series. It uses the new RF mount. The RP uses the 26.2-megapixel sensor from the 6D mark 2. A new body costs $999, or $899 for a refurbished one from Canon that includes a one-year warranty.

Canon markets this as the smallest and lightest full-frame EOS camera. It is 132 millimeters long and 85 millimeters tall. It weighs 485 grams including the battery and an SD memory card. Canon sells a small “extension grip” to make the bottom of the camera about a centimeter thicker. I had one as part of my RP kit and really did not like it. It didn’t add enough length to be useful and made it difficult to remove the battery and memory cards. The rest of the camera was relatively comfortable to hold. I loved the overall size because it allowed me to put it in my jacket pocket with a nifty fifty lens on it.

The RP uses the LP-E17 battery found on the Rebel series of DSLRs. This gives it a maximum rating of 210 shots per battery using just the electronic viewfinder; less if you use both the electronic viewfinder and the rear screen. However, in real conditions, I managed to get as many as 1,600 on one battery but usually five to six hundred, using primarily the viewfinder.

There are some things about the RP to be aware of if you’re thinking of buying one. It’s a mirrorless camera, which means you look into a small screen showing what the sensor sees instead of a mirror, so what you see through the viewfinder will be ever so slightly behind real-time, which can make tracking fast-moving objects tricky; something other more expensive R-series models are better at.

The electronic viewfinder is easy to use, and a neat feature offered by it is exposure simulation. Essentially, the camera can show you what the final image will look like before you press the shutter. Exposure simulation pretty much eliminated me looking at the rear screen after each photo. It’s also a good feature for beginning photographers, as you can see what changing different exposure settings does to the image in near real-time.

A lot of the buttons are customizable via the menus, but not all buttons can be reassigned.

You can access the menus via the EVF or the rear screen, so most of the time I had the rear screen closed. This has led to some weird looks from people as I appeared to intently focus on something at my feet with my giant 600mm lens when I was actually looking at the menus.

The RP’s sensor offers plenty of megapixels, and while it suffers a little in dynamic range, it has decent high ISO performance, up to about 12,800, above which it starts to get a bit noisy. I have no problems with its image quality.

Most of the native RF mount lenses are expensive, but you can use any EF lenses that you may already have on the RP using an adapter. I’ve used EF lenses on the RP, and they perform brilliantly. A lot of people online say that their EF lenses work better adapted to RF mount cameras. It can also mount EF-S lenses designed for crop sensors, though this cuts the resolution down to about ten megapixels.

Another feature I liked in this camera is focus bracketing. You tell the camera how many pictures to take and by how much to move the focus in between, and it takes them. When it judges it has reached the back of the scene, it stops taking photos. Then you stack these photos on a computer using free Canon software to produce a final image that is in focus from front to back. This is particularly useful for macro photography and I was surprised to find it in a camera this inexpensive.

In its standard mode dial, the RP has three custom functions available, which I used for my wildlife photography because they allowed me to quickly change settings in response to different situations.

Like most cameras these days, it can also take videos; however, I didn’t explore this, so I can’t really comment on it.

To sum things up, I think the Canon RP is a great beginner’s camera. It’s an inexpensive way to buy into the RF lens system, which has fantastic enthusiast lenses like the 600mm f/11 and 16mm f/2.8. I would recommend it for most purposes except perhaps for capturing birds in flight, as it isn’t quite up to that.

My full review of the RP was about twice as long as I could put in the show, so please read the full version on my Medium.