9 must-know Canon EOS R6 Mark III features that you might have missed

The Canon EOS R6 Mark III is a feature-packed full frame mirrorless camera that brings a new level of performance to the popular EOS 6-Series. Its newly-developed 32.5MP high-resolution CMOS sensor alone is a significant step up from the 24.2MP sensor in the EOS R6 Mark II, but it also delivers 40fps continuous shooting, 7K Open Gate RAW video, and improved Dual Pixel CMOS AF II with Deep Learning for intelligent, reliable and incredibly fast autofocus.

Comparing the Canon EOS R6 Mark III versus the EOS R6 Mark II , you’ll find more than 50 enhanced features that make photographing and filmmaking an easier, more streamlined experience – whether you’re shooting professionally or for pleasure. Take the new Canon EOS R6 Mark III card slots, for example. While the EOS R6 Mark II has two UHS-II SD Card slots, the EOS R6 Mark III is equipped with one slot for SD Cards and another for CFexpress Type B. This supports up to 8TB, offering not just longer recording times but greater flexibility when it comes to video recording.

The EOS R6 Mark III is a photography powerhouse too, packed with helpful tools such as Pre-continuous shooting – which works whether you are shooting RAW, JPEG or HEIF format and captures 20 frames before you fully press the shutter button – and IBIS technology that gives up to 8.5 stops of image stabilisation at the centre of the frame, depending on the lens being used.

But what about the features and functions that don’t leap out from the EOS R6 Mark III specifications? Here, we run through some of the lesser-known and "hidden" aspects of the EOS R6 Mark III that help to unlock its full potential, with insights from Canon Europe Product Specialist Tibor Szövetes.

One of the headline Canon EOS R6 Mark III video specs, Open Gate recording uses the full area of the sensor to capture video footage. This not only provides greater flexibility for reframing and stabilising footage in post, but the expanded height also allows you to frame a scene for both horizontal and vertical output. As a result, you avoid having to crop different aspect ratios from a standard horizontal video and losing image data.

You can activate two different aspect markers to indicate the "safe" area for both ratios when you frame your shot, Tibor explains: "It’s worth exploring the many different options the EOS R6 Mark III gives you. It's not limited to the usual 16:9 or 9:16 – you have 4:5, 4:3, 1:1 and various cinema formats as well.

“EOS R6 Mark III is also a great option for shooting video with anamorphic lenses. These lenses squeeze a wider image onto the Open Gate sensor area, which is then de-squeezed in post-production to produce a more cinematic look.”

The EOS R6 Mark III is armed with Canon’s intelligent autofocus system, which can detect and track people, animals and vehicles. The EOS R6 Mark III's AF doesn’t just detect people, though – it can recognise a specific person in a scene. With Register People Priority, you can save up to 10 individuals on the camera for it to identify and automatically focus on. Even better, you can have up to 100 people registered on a memory card, from which you can pull your top 10.

Register People Priority was introduced in the EOS R3 via a firmware update but the EOS R6 Mark III has an improved, next-generation version, which is also available in the professional EOS R1 and EOS R5 Mark II. “You need only a simple head-on image of a person, which doesn’t even have to have been taken on the camera," Tibor reveals. "It could even be an image taken from a magazine, if you’re shooting famous people at an event.

The EOS R6 Mark III introduces a new shortcut control that lets you easily send photos to your smartphone without you having to spend time navigating the camera menus. “The Multi-function button has a blue smartphone icon printed above it, which indicates that you can instantly transfer images when you press that button during playback mode," Tibor says. “It’s a handy feature for photographers who want to share their work online as soon as possible and are not too worried about editing their images on a computer.”

A small but not insignificant addition to the EOS R6 Mark III is the ability to quicky clear the magnified view when you’re focusing manually. Normally you’d have to tap the Magnify button to do this, but pressing the shutter button halfway immediately returns to the normal view. “It’s a very handy feature for macro work where you’re magnifying an area so you can focus precisely on a fine detail,” Tibor says. “Once you’ve focused, you can simply start pressing the shutter button to go back to normal view before fully pressing the button to take a picture. It’s cutting out that additional button press and streamlining the manual focusing process.”

The EOS R6 Mark III offers an expanded range of control customisation, enabling you to personalise the camera in a comprehensive way, Tibor explains. “You’ll find a dedicated menu for button and dial customisation, allowing you to apply a similar level of control to that on the EOS R5 Mark II. The function of almost every button on the camera can be customised in three ways – one for stills, one for video, and one for playback. Take the COLOR/RATE button on the top-left of the camera, which is now fully customisable for the first time. You can allocate functions such as AF point selection or switching between One Shot and Servo AF, have it turn Eye Detection on or off, or switch from one eye to the other. You can even turn it into a MENU button if you like.”

Slow/Fast Motion (S&F) Movie mode lets you capture video at a high frame rate for slow-motion movies or at a low frame rate for timelapses and high-speed movies. Several Cinema EOS and EOS R System cameras are equipped with S&F Recording, but the EOS R6 Mark III lets you quickly set it using the Mode dial and gives you an expanded range of recording frame rates to choose from.

“The speed settings are a lot more customisable,” Tibor explains. “You can set frame rates from 180fps to 1fps, but there are even fractions of frames available – including 168fps, 144fps and 56fps.

“It’s a professional way of setting up the camera to get high-quality slow and fast motion – and you can also use timecode to make it easier to synchronise the footage with other video and audio recordings.”

Professional cameras such as the EOS R1 and EOS R5 Mark II let you save current camera settings such as shooting setup and Custom Functions in a Camera Settings file on a memory card, so you can load them into a different camera. This has never been available in a 6-Series camera until now.

"This function makes it easy to switch between a main camera and backup body, which needs to be the same model,” Tibor says. "If you’ve got a loan camera because yours is being serviced, for example, then you can load your own settings into the camera and you don’t have to worry about going through all the settings one by one to transfer them from your existing camera. You could even set up your camera for specific subjects, save these Camera Settings files to the card, and load them back into the camera when you need them.”

It's also possible to use the separate Save/Load Communication Settings on Card option to save your wireless setup and apply this to other cameras – a real time-saver.

The EOS R6 Mark III has some white balance enhancements compared to the EOS R6 Mark II. One of these is the lock function, which is particularly convenient when you’re relying on Auto White Balance (AWB) while shooting video. “For example, if you’re shooting an interior that’s lit by artificial light and you pan the camera across a window, normally you might notice the white balance transition from bluish to amber and back again,” Tibor says. “But with the white balance lock function, you can prevent the light coming through the windows fooling AWB.

“You can assign the function to a button, allowing you to quickly lock the white balance for a scene. It gives you the flexibility to lock it temporarily and then go back to the convenience of Auto.”

It might not be a headline-grabbing feature, but the ability to reset the camera to its factory-fresh state in one go is a beneficial addition to the EOS R6 Mark III. “With lower-end cameras, you only have the option to reset individual settings,” Tibor says, “so if you really want to clear everything, you need to go into each area of the menu and do them manually. The factory reset option on the EOS R6 Mark III clears all the settings at once, which saves time and is really useful if you need to troubleshoot the camera.”