I'm wondering if Canon RF-S is a camera system in the making or just a full-frame teaser

Canon EOS R7 & Canon EOS R10
The Canon EOS R7 and R10. are great cameras, but will they ever form part of a dedicated RF-S lens system as big as the old EF-S DSLR lens range, or even EOS M lenses? (Image credit: Canon)

I bought a Canon EOS R8 and I'm very impressed. Straight off the bat, I think this is one of the best Canon cameras to buy right now. It's also backed up by a good range of lenses, many of which are very affordable. And then something in the EOS R8 blurb on the website caught my eye.

"MAKE THE LEAP TO FULL FRAME" was the heading. "Give your creativity a full-frame upgrade. Better bokeh, wider angles of view and image quality that will blow you away – even in low light." was the strapline.

The thing that caught my eye is "...wider angles of view..."

Now this makes sense with the current lens line-up. Canon is comparing the EOS R8 and other full-frame models with its smaller APS-C EOS R7, R10, R50 and R100 cameras. Right now, there are only three dedicated RF-S lenses for these smaller format cameras, and they don't include any ultra-wide optics. Worse, there's no definite indication these are coming.

It's possible that Canon will steadily convert its best EF-M lenses over to the RF-S format. There seems no technical reason why it couldn't. These include a neat little Canon EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS STM which would be a great addition to the RF-S lens line-up, offering a handy 17.5-35mm equivalent zoom range – and there are plenty of other EOS M lenses which would be great to have in RF-S mount.

There's no clear indication from Canon, though, that it has any such plans. So what if its APS-C EOS R cameras are intended to get users into the Canon system, not as systems in themselves?

Canon makes four perfectly good APS-C RF-S format mirrorless cameras, but if you want a wide range of lenses, you've got to go full frame. (Image credit: Gareth Bevan)

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Rod Lawton
Contributor

Rod is an independent photography journalist and editor, and a long-standing Digital Camera World contributor, having previously worked as DCW's Group Reviews editor. Before that he has been technique editor on N-Photo, Head of Testing for the photography division and Camera Channel editor on TechRadar, as well as contributing to many other publications. He has been writing about photography technique, photo editing and digital cameras since they first appeared, and before that began his career writing about film photography. He has used and reviewed practically every interchangeable lens camera launched in the past 20 years, from entry-level DSLRs to medium format cameras, together with lenses, tripods, gimbals, light meters, camera bags and more. Rod has his own camera gear blog at fotovolo.com but also writes about photo-editing applications and techniques at lifeafterphotoshop.com