- Wildlife Photographer of The Year 2025 winners were announced on October 15
- The Canon EOS R5 was the most popular camera among the finalists
- Released in 2020, it has since been succeeded by the EOS R5 Mark II
If you’re anything like me, you’ll love being nosy about what other photographers are shooting with, especially award winners. With experience as a photo contest judge myself, unsurprisingly I found myself browsing through the winning images of the Wildlife Photographer of The Year 2025 contest, announced on October 15.
It was while looking closer at the technical details behind the successful entries, that I was quite amazed by the gear of choice. Surely speed and accuracy are paramount for wildlife photography, right? I’d therefore expect the top WPOTY shots to be taken with a flagship high-speed mirrorless camera.
The Nikon Z 9 featured, sure. The Canon EOS R3? That too. But there was a much more popular camera among successful entrants (besides the 11-year-old Nikon D810 DSLR used for the winning shot). It wasn’t even the Canon EOS R5 Mark II, a winner itself of TechRadar’s Choice Award for Camera of the Year 2024, but it was in fact the original model from 2020 that was the most popular among the WPOTY winners. Yes… it was the Canon EOS R5 (Mark I).
Now, I’m one of the first to preach about the throwaway nature of the tech industry, but when it comes to this level of imaging, I admit I was expecting more recent headline-grabbing cameras to be the weapons of choice for this group of award-winning photographers.
An enduring balance of pixels and power
The original EOS R5 was launched back in 2020, alongside its slimmed-down sibling, the EOS R6. Both cameras have since been replaced with the Canon EOS R5 Mark II and Canon EOS R6 Mark II – superb successors, which has got me wondering about why the five-year-old R5 still ranks so highly.
The EOS R5 lacks the Eye-Control AF of the Mark II, and the more recent EOS R3, but still makes use of a snappy Dual Pixel CMOS AF II system with 5,940 focus areas. More specifically, the EOS ITR AF X autofocus component incorporates deep-learning AI – a phrase with which we’ve quickly become accustomed, but which was truly futuristic tech at launch. This system was initially developed by Canon for the popular EOS-1D X Mark III DSLR camera, which coincidentally also made an appearance in WPOTY 2025.
The EOS R5 comes armed with a full-frame 45-megapixel CMOS sensor, 20 frames-per-second burst shooting with the electronic shutter, 8-stop body stabilisation, and 8K video. When you compare this to another frequent competition performer, the Nikon Z 8, a far more recent release, the resolution and top RAW burst rate of the older camera are more than a match. The same goes for the aforementioned Nikon Z9, which is not only more recent but is positioned higher in its range (it’s aimed squarely at pros, while the EOS R5 was also priced for enthusiasts). Meanwhile, 2024’s Sony A1 II has a comparable resolution of 50MP and 8K video, and only just beats the EOS R5 on top burst rate with 30fps.
When prominent wildlife shooters like Andy Rouse, and commercial pros such as Peter McKinnon choose the R5 for their top-level work, it’s hardly surprising that the camera was built to last. If anything, the success in the Wildlife Photographer of The Year 2025 proves that, just because newer, shinier cameras come along, it doesn’t immediately mean that older cameras become irrelevant.
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