A superb full-frame all-rounder combining speed, autofocus and impressive hybrid performance

Our Verdict

There is a moment in every camera’s life when it stops being the newest thing and starts being the sensible thing, and the R6 Mark II reached it in November 2025 when Canon announced the Mark III. Nine months on, that’s the most useful fact about this camera. It’s not changed; it’s still a superb full-frame all-rounder with outstanding subject-detection autofocus, 40fps electronic bursts, eight stops of stabilisation and uncropped 4K 60p oversampled from 6K. What has changed is that it now costs around £1,949 new, down from a launch price near £2,780, and second-hand it’s even cheaper.
If you want more than 24.2 megapixels, or you need CFexpress rather than SD, the Mark III offers both; it brings 32.5MP and a CFexpress-B slot for around £2,699 to £2,800. That’s roughly what the R6 II cost at launch. The question is whether those changes are worth about £1,240 more than a good used Mark II, and for many photographers the honest answer is no.
There are, of course, some reservations that existed when the camera launched that remain unchanged, and it’s worth knowing a little more about them. The sensor is neither stacked nor backside-illuminated, so the electronic shutter shows skew on fast movement and the 40fps buffer runs out sooner than the headline implies. There’s no top status display, the HDMI port is micro, such a bad decision, and storage is SD only. None of that stops this from being one of the most complete cameras Canon has made.
Who it’s for: sports, wildlife and wedding photographers who need speed and autofocus more than resolution, hybrid shooters who want serious video without a dedicated cinema body, and anyone who has been waiting for an R6 II to become affordable.

What is the Canon EOS R6 Mark II?

The R6 Mark II is Canon’s full-frame hybrid all-rounder: 24.2MP, a DIGIC X processor, Dual Pixel CMOS AF II across the whole frame, dual SD slots and video good enough that plenty of people bought it primarily to shoot with. It replaced the 20MP original R6 in November 2022 and was aimed squarely at content creators, wedding photographers and anyone shooting sport or action.

Buy the Canon EOS R6 Mark II from MPB

Canon’s big design decision was the sensor. At launch, it was new, and they deliberately chose neither stacked nor backside-illuminated. Canon was explicit at the time that either would have pushed the price beyond what it considered acceptable for this position in the range. That single choice explains both the camera’s value and its one real technical weakness: you get 40fps and full-frame coverage at a mid-range price, and you get rolling-shutter skew when you use it on fast movement.

What has changed since is not the camera but its position. The EOS R6 Mark III arrived in early November 2025 with a 32.5MP sensor, a CFexpress-B slot alongside the SD, 7K raw video, 4K 60p oversampled and 8.5 stops of stabilisation. It directly addresses two of the Mark II’s limitations. It also costs around £2,699 to £2,800, which, to be honest, is what the Mark II cost when it launched.

Canon EOS R6 Mark II review

I have been shooting the Mark II again alongside my EOS R5 C to work out what that means for anyone buying now, and the answer is more interesting than a straightforward “buy the newer one”- well, what did you expect!

Specifciation

Camera type: Mirrorless, full-frame
Sensor: 24.2MP full-frame CMOS (35.9 x 23.9mm), Dual Pixel CMOS AF II
Processor: DIGIC X
Lens mount: Canon RF
ISO: Stills 100-102,400, expandable to 50-204,800
Electronic burst: 40fps, 190 JPEG / 75 RAW / 140 C-RAW
Autofocus: Dual Pixel CMOS AF II, 100% coverage, up to 1,053 AF segments, to -6.5EV
Stabilisation: 5-axis in-body, up to 8 stops with coordinated lens IS
Video: 4K up to 60p uncropped, oversampled from 6K
Weight: 588g body only / 670g with card and battery

Build and Handling

Robust, comfortable and laid out by someone who has actually used a camera when they’re in a hurry. The magnesium alloy chassis, dust and moisture resistance and a large, deep grip make this a body you can work with all day, and at 670g with a card and battery it’s substantial without being heavy, and of course compared with the older DSLR, the mirrorless form factor is still smaller even at this level.

The control system is the R6 Mark II’s advantage over cheaper Canon bodies. It has a dedicated AF joystick, three control dials, a proper mode dial, and a fully articulating touchscreen, and everything is customisable. Coming from an R8, that joystick alone really does change how quickly you work.

Canon has also moved the power switch to sit beside the rear control dial, which makes the left-hand switch a dedicated stills/video selector. It’s definitely an improvement: with no rotating the mode dial and no diving into menus to set video exposure, it’s just more to use. Our original review noted the catch, and it is real: if you are not paying attention, it’s easy to flick between stills and video when you meant to switch the camera on. After a few weeks, I still did it occasionally.

Canon EOS R6 Mark II review

The mode dial itself distinguishes this camera from the R5 and R3, which use a mode button and dial. The dial is faster because it is one control rather than two, though it means the R6 II handles differently from the bodies above it; this is only an issue if you shoot a two-body kit and want that button layout continuity.

The 0.5in 3.69m-dot viewfinder at 0.76x is lower resolution than the R5’s 5.76m-dot panel but refreshes at 120fps and gives a clear, accurate preview of exposure and colour, accurate enough that our original review found the meter largely redundant, and I agree. The 3in 1.62m-dot vari-angle screen flips and rotates to any angle, including forwards, which makes this a far better self-shooting camera than the three-way tilt on something like an X-T5 which I’m also testing at the moment.

Two omissions are worth naming. There is no top status LCD, which at this level and this size is a genuine miss, the R5 has one, and you notice its absence when working from a tripod. And the HDMI port is micro rather than full-size, which is a fragile choice on a camera that outputs 6K raw to an external recorder.

Features

The feature set was pretty impressive at launch and remains so, and Canon is still adding to it, which is worth noting for a camera with a successor already on sale.

Buy the Canon EOS R6 Mark II from MPB

Just in the last year, Firmware 1.6.0 arrived in July 2025 with improved AF tracking while zooming on compatible RF lenses, flash exposure simulation, protect-on-rating, automatic over-the-internet firmware updating, and a run of fixes covering high-speed continuous shooting, EF-lens stabilisation, and HDMI output. Firmware 1.7.0 followed in May 2026, six months after the Mark III went on sale, adding 5GHz Wi-Fi handover and Camera SDK support, and fixing FTP and SFTP transfer errors, USB smartphone recognition and a brief horizontal line in the viewfinder.
Canon is still maintaining this body after replacing it, which is exactly what you want to know before buying one used.
Dual Pixel CMOS AF II inherited from the R3, with 100% frame coverage, up to 1,053 AF segments and sensitivity to -6.5EV. Subject detection covers people; animals, including dogs, cats, birds, and horses; and vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, aircraft, and trains, with an Auto mode that looks for any of them.
The hierarchy is what makes it work in practice. Eye detection runs in any focus mode with any focus area; you can specify left- or right-eye priority, and when the eyes are not visible, the camera falls back to the face, then the head, then the body. There is also a Face only mode that stops the camera hunting to the background when your subject leaves the frame and picks them up again when they return.
Canon EOS R6 Mark II review
Forty frames per second with the electronic shutter, 12fps mechanical, and a RAW Burst mode that shoots at 30fps with half a second of pre-capture before you fully press the shutter, up to 191 files.
Pre-capture is valuable for unpredictable action and genuinely awkward to use. The sequence is saved as a single file, and you have to extract individual frames afterwards, either in camera or in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software, before you can do anything with them. It works, but it does add a step to your workflow every time you use it.
Focus bracketing with in-camera focus stacking, a JPEG multiple-exposure mode combining up to nine frames, an interval timer, anti-flicker shooting, panorama and OVF View Assist. Video runs to uncropped 4K 60p oversampled from 6K, Full HD to 180p, Canon Log 3 and HDR PQ, with 6K raw output over HDMI to a compatible recorder, focus breathing correction on supported RF lenses, and a movie pre-record that captures three or five seconds before you hit record.
Canon removed the 29 minute 59 second recording limit for this camera and improved the thermal design, quoting over 40 minutes of oversampled 4K 60p or up to six hours at 4K 30p given acceptable ambient temperature, storage and power.
One limitation has not moved. Canon opened the RF mount to Sigma and Tamron in April 2024, but only for APS-C RF-S lenses. Full-frame RF glass remains effectively Canon-only, so an R6 Mark II buyer is still choosing from Canon’s own catalogue at Canon’s own prices. On a system this mature, that is less painful than it sounds, the RF range is extensive, but it is a real difference from what a Sony or Nikon buyer gets.

Performance

The feel of this camera just doesn’t feel dated; it’s well balanced and optimised for shooting. The real drawbacks come from some of those technical aspects, not the quality of use or the image quality.

Starting with the image, it’s absolutely on a par with the latest cameras, and at 24.2MP the camera produces images that feel well balanced for the price. Looking closely at the image, the detail is more than sufficient for print and client work; with the files showing excellent dynamic range, Canon colour straight out of the camera is superb. The evaluative metering handles high-contrast scenes without being pulled around by large bright or dark areas.

Canon EOS R6 Mark II reviewHigh ISO is again good and the direct benefit of the modest pixel count. Our original review was comfortable using ISO 12,800 and ISO 25,600 when light levels demanded it, noting that in-camera noise reduction on JPEGs is well judged and raw files carry luminance noise without it becoming excessive. Underexposed low-ISO files take a three- to four-stop lift before noise becomes a problem.

The AF is fast and responsive, and is still one of the main reasons to choose this camera. Human tracking is excellent, animal tracking is excellent, eye detection is reliable, and vehicle recognition works. Our original review found it holding dancers across stills and video in low light, and picking up animal eyes consistently enough to change how wildlife work feels.

It’s not perfect, and the failure modes are worth knowing. A subject that is very far out of focus may not be recognised at all until you focus somewhere near it manually. And the camera can be fooled by things closer to the lens than the subject; our original review lost a duck to the spray it was splashing.
Canon EOS R6 Mark II review
This is where the unstacked sensor asks for its money back. Forty frames per second is real and useful, but two things limit the performance. The buffer holds 190 JPEGs, 140 C-RAW or 75 raw files at that rate, so full raw gives you under two seconds. And because the sensor is neither stacked nor BSI, the readout isn’t fast enough to eliminate skew, fast horizontal pans, propellers, golf swings, and hard vertical lines will show it.
The workaround is straightforward and costs you speed: the mechanical shutter at 12fps has no distortion at all and a much deeper buffer, at 110 raw or over 1,000 JPEGs. In practice I found myself using 12fps mechanical as the default and reaching for 40fps deliberately, for subjects moving towards or away from the camera rather than across it. That is a sensible way to use this camera rather than a fault to work around, but you do need to understand it before you rely on it.
Up to eight stops with a compatible lenses IS, and it does hold up under real abuse. Our original review shot handheld video with the RF 100-500mm at the 500mm end and got usable footage, which at that focal length is a considerable achievement; digital stabilisation improves it further at the cost of a crop.
Video quality is also good. Uncropped 4K 60p oversampled from 6K is detailed and clean, low-light video holds together, and removing the recording time limit alongside the improved thermal design makes this a camera you can actually use for long-form work.
Canon EOS R6 Mark II review

Final Thoughts

The R6 Mark II is a superb full-frame all-rounder, and it has aged almost entirely well. The autofocus is outstanding, the burst speed is exceptional, the stabilisation is effective, the handling is among the best Canon has produced at this level, and it is a genuinely capable video camera rather than a stills camera with video attached. For sport, wildlife, weddings and events it remains an easy recommendation.

Its limitations are the ones it was designed with. Twenty-four megapixels is modest compared with rivals and its own successor. The electronic shutter needs care. The micro HDMI is disappointing on a camera that outputs 6K raw. There is no top display, storage is SD only, and full-frame RF glass still means Canon glass.

But what has actually changed is the price, and it has changed a lot. The Mark III did what successors do: it took the top of the range and pushed this camera down into the space where it represents excellent value. There are 28 used bodies on MPB as I write, which is more stock than I have seen for any of the other cameras I have revisited recently, and that is not a sign of a problem; it’s a sign of a lot of owners trading up and leaving very good cameras behind them at £1,459.

Canon EOS R6 Mark II review

Canon shipping firmware for it in May 2026, six months after replacing it, is a detail that should also be seen as a positive. There are a lot of Canon R6 Mark II users out there, and Canon needs to keep them on side, so they’ll upgrade to the R8 Mark III. This is not a camera that has simply been replaced. It’s a current-generation body at last-generation prices.
Canon EOS R6 Mark II review

Should you buy the Canon EOS R6 Mark II?

Yes, and buy it used. At £1,459 to £1,579, this is the best value full-frame camera Canon currently has on any shelf, new or otherwise, and the £1,240 or so you save against a new Mark III buys a great deal of glass.
Buy the Mark III instead if you specifically need the extra resolution, if CFexpress matters to your workflow, or if you shoot enough fast lateral movement that the rolling shutter is a working constraint rather than an occasional annoyance. Those are real reasons, and for some photographers they will be decisive. For most, 24.2MP and a mechanical shutter at 12fps cover the job.
If you are buying new, look at the price carefully. Around £1,949 for a Mark II against roughly £2,699 for a Mark III is a much narrower gap than the used comparison, and at that point the newer camera starts to make sense.

Buy it if

+ You shoot sport, wildlife or weddings
+ You want outstanding autofocus for the money
+ You need serious video as well as stills
+ You are buying used and want maximum capability per pound

Don’t buy it if

– You need more than 24.2MP
– You shoot fast lateral movement at high frame rates
– You need CFexpress for your workflow
– You depend on third-party full-frame lenses

Alternatives

Canon EOS R6 Mark III: the direct successor, around £2,699 to £2,800, with 32.5MP, a CFexpress-B slot alongside the SD, 7K raw video and 8.5 stops of stabilisation. The upgrade is if resolution or card speed is what limits you.

Canon EOS R5: more resolution at 45MP, a 5.76m-dot viewfinder, a top-status LCD and CFexpress, now well down from launch on the used market. The choice if detail matters more than outright speed.

Canon EOS R8: the same 24.2MP sensor and much of the same autofocus in a 461g body for around £929 to £1,019 used. No IBIS, one card slot and no joystick, but remarkable value if you can live without them.

How we tested

I shot with a Canon EOS R6 Mark II over two weeks alongside my EOS R5 C, with RF and adapted EF lenses. Testing covered stills at 12fps mechanical and 40fps electronic, the 30fps raw pre-capture mode, rolling shutter on fast pans, subject-detection autofocus on people and animals, buffer depth in raw and C-RAW, in-body stabilisation with a long telephoto, uncropped 4K 60p video, and a comparison of new and used pricing against the R6 Mark III across UK retailers and MPB in August 2026.

Canon EOS R6 Mark II FAQs

Is the Canon EOS R6 Mark II still worth buying in 2026?

Very much so, used. Now that the Mark III has arrived, used Mark II bodies start around £1,459 against a launch price near £2,780, and you get the same outstanding autofocus, 40fps bursts, eight-stop stabilisation and uncropped 4K 60p. Canon is still issuing firmware for it, most recently in May 2026.

What is the difference between the EOS R6 Mark II and Mark III?

The Mark III raises resolution from 24.2MP to 32.5MP, adds a CFexpress-B slot alongside the SD, moves to 7K raw video and increases stabilisation to 8.5 stops. Burst speed stays at 40fps electronic and 12fps mechanical. It costs around £2,699 to £2,800, compared with roughly £1,949 for a new Mark II.

Does the Canon EOS R6 Mark II have rolling shutter?

Yes, on the electronic shutter. The sensor is neither stacked nor backside-illuminated, so readout is not fast enough to avoid skew on fast lateral movement at 40fps. The 12fps mechanical shutter has no distortion and a deeper buffer, and is the better default for most action.