Canon’s M5 Is Company’s Most Capable Mirrorless Yet

Canon has taken a few passes at building a killer mirrorless camera without much luck. But the new M5, announced on the eve of Photokina, looks to be a more serious contender.

According to Canon, the M5 will have an imaging engine that closely resembles the 80D, including a 24-megapixel CMOS sensor with a 100-25,600 ISO. The ISO range won’t be expandable, but the M5 will use the latest DIGIC 7 processor to keep noise at bay.

The M5 employs Canon’s Dual Pixel CMOS AF technology and can deliver up to 7 fps of continuous shooting with AF engaged (9 fps with focus fixed on the first frame). The camera has a 3.2-inch multi-angle touch display that not only supports touch focusing but will let you select AF points when composing through the electronic viewfinder. When looking through the viewfinder, you can drag your thumb across the LCD to move and select AF points just as if you were using a dedicated button to toggle AF points.

The camera has a 5-axis stabilization system and a new dual image stabilization system that leverages in-camera and lens stabilization (if the lens has image stabilization) to keep stills sharp.

If you’re into transferring images from your camera to your phone, the M5 will have Wi-Fi, NFC and Bluetooth Low Energy. The latter helps maintain a constant connection between your phone and the M5 so that you can more quickly initiate a Wi-Fi image transfer.

Addition features include:

• Full HD video recording up to 60p
• 49-point AF system that works down to -1 EV
• 1/4000 sec. shutter speed
• battery life range of 295 to 420 shots

The M5 will ship in November and set you back $980 for the body. It’s available for pre-order now.

EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS II USM

Canon also announced a new lens, the EF 70-300mm, its first with an LCD info display. The LCD will show you focusing distance, focal length and also the amount of shake the lens is experiencing.

The lens will offer an image stabilization system good for up to four stops of image correction, per CIPA standards. It has a NANO USM motor for high speed focusing and has full time manual focus adjustment so you can make manual tweaks to focusing even when you’re in AF mode.

The new 70-300mm lens will ship in November for $550.