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Vue lecture

Steady progress: shooting with the Canon EOS R8 Mark II

We shot Canon’s latest low-cost full-frame body with everything from kit zooms to ‘L’ series lenses

A gravel bike with top-tube bag leans against a stout wooden post at a public rest area, taken with the Canon EOS R8 Mark IIMitchell Clark

The EOS R8 Mark II is a refreshed and up-specced entry-level full-frame mirrorless camera, adding in-body image stabilization and an AF joystick as part of a complete re-styling.

These changes and a 2026 price tag position it essentially head-to-head with Nikon’s Z5II, our current pick in this part of the market.

We’ve had a chance to shoot the EOS R8 II for an extended period and with an array of lenses, so we’ve used it for the everyday photo taking its designed for. We’ve also got some friends to stand around in a flowerbed, to make sure we got to see how it performed for portraits and people pictures.

Overall we found it to be a very likeable camera: relatively small, usefully light and with a pretty straightforward interface. It’s not overflowing with clever features, but it has a lot of what a lot of photographers might need at a price that’s a fair step below that of the more sophisticated EOS R6 III.

We go into more detail about what we liked and disliked in our review, but this gallery should give a sense for what the R8 II can do. All the shots are unprocessed, out-of-camera images, but all of them taken in the camera’s conventional Picture Style color modes because you can’t capture Raws if you switch across to the more effect-like Color filter modes.

As always, you can download the Raws or JPEGs to inspect or run through your preferred processing workflow, to see how they look.

Sample gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page ). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.

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About the Author: Richard graduated as a scientist but had a lot more fun writing and shooting for his university magazine. A number of years spent variously as a reporter, writer and editor on science and engineering titles combined his knowledge of science with his interest in images and words. But it was spotting the connections between emission spectra, white balance and all the nonsense he’d taught himself playing around in Photoshop that helped kindle an interest in digital photography. Searching for a camera led to him discovering DPReview and Richard was recruited by Phil Askey in 2007. He’s been combining his love of photography, communication and attention to detail (pedantry?) ever since. He has unusually strong opinions about lenses for the APS-C format.

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