Week 8 - After 9 years with Canon, it's time to move on...

I never thought I’d ever write this email or switch from Canon but here we are.

Late last year I was in Kenya for a week flying around what felt like every corner of this stunning country filming wildlife and stunning properties out there. We were spoiled, to say the least!

I was out there with some good friends of mine, all of whom shot on Sony while I was there with my R5C.

Now, at this point, I had already had my beef with my Canon gear and Canon as a company. Not only did I always struggle with autofocus with the R5C, the battery life was in the toilet, the customisation was limited at best, Canon took ages to make any significant technological advances (especially when it came to video) and slowly but surely I was just working out that this might not be the brand for me.

With all that said though, I’ve been shooting on Canon for 9 years. So not only was I incredibly loyal and a huge Canon fan boy but I had an emotional connection to the Canon lineup of cameras. I know that sounds strange but I’ve built my entire career with this brand of camera so I wasn’t game on switching it up any time soon.

Anyway, after seeing my friends in Kenya shoot with Sony and seeing what they could do, the 3rd party lenses they had and most of all seeing them not change the battery every 30 minutes was making me think.

Skip forward and I’m back in Dubai. Kenya was a blast and I’m no longer thinking about switching to any camera brand.

My Mum was just about to arrive so I was built filming a load of talking head videos for my YouTube Channel and my short-form educational platforms as well. I’m roughly 35 minutes into a very long video and what does my $5000 cinema camera decide to do? Stop recording and corrupt the file.

Now you might be thinking Zac, this might not be the camera’s fault, this could be anything. But what if I told you that this has happened countless times in the past?

See a few months ago Canon released a new firmware update that included a ‘Power Saving’ node for the R5C because god did it need it. And once I’d updated my camera and turned power saving on, the next time I filmed all my files were corrupted. Strange right?

Skip a month down the track and I’m shooting in Bangkok. We are halfway through the evening’s shoot and just filmed some awesome stuff on a rooftop at sunset. I get to a bustling street market to turn my camera on and everything is corrupted.

This happened time and time again when power saving was turned on. I’m not sure if it’s just me or not but either way, I was getting frustrated so I turned power saving mode off and everything was good.

However, when I was in Kenya in the middle of nowhere with no power, battery life was of extreme importance so on comes power saving mode.

The entire time I was in Kenya I had no worries and I’d forgotten about the issues I’d been having.

So when I got home and started to film and it corrupts 35 minutes deep into a talking head video I’d already been struggling to film, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

After seeing Sony run rings around Canon for years with nearly everything they put out, it was time to say hello to Sony.

I’m now shooting with the ZVE1 and have already sold my R5C and all my Canon glass, all that is left now is my Canon R6 which I don’t particularly want to sell but I know that I should.

I’m going to dive into my new camera setup in 2 weeks on here but for now, it’s goodbye Canon and hello Sony.