Move over Sony, Canon is trying to take the lead in bleeding-edge tech for mirrorless cameras. The company’s new $4,300, 45-megapixel EOS R5 II offers advanced features like eye-tracking autofocus (AF) that can’t be found on any recent Sony model. The new camera is also pushing Sony’s A1 and other models in the key areas of speed, video and autofocus. And it’s arguably more desirable than Canon’s own upcoming flagship R1 as it has nearly double the resolution.
I’ve had the R5 II for a few weeks, evaluating not only its practicality and speed for both professionals and serious amateurs, but also how it stacks up against Sony’s A1, the gold standard for high-resolution mirrorless cameras. And frankly, I’m impressed.
Canon
The EOS R5 II is Canon’s best camera in years thanks to improvements in key areas like autofocus and video.
I love the handling of Canon’s mirrorless cameras and the EOS R5 II may be its sweetest design yet.
The body and controls are very similar to the R5, apart from a couple of changes. Canon moved the power switch to the top right where it’s easier to access, and added a dedicated photo/video switch on the left. The company gave photo and video modes their own settings, making it much easier to jump from one to the other. Canon also made a rare change to its menu system, adding a new olive green tab for control customization. This new tab also contains the settings for eye control AF tracking.
Otherwise, the R5 II’s layout is similar to its predecessor. That’s a good thing, as the control placement is the most natural of any camera I’ve used, from the comfortable grip that provides a secure place to hold, to the nicely tactile controls that fall perfectly to hand.
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Moving to the displays, the R5’s 2.1-million-dot fully articulating rear touch screen was already sharp and easy to use, so Canon didn’t mess with that. The R5 II has the same sharp 5.76-million dot OLED electronic viewfinder as before, but the company boosted the brightness and redesigned the optics to accommodate the new eye control autofocus.
Steve Dent for Engadget
The R5 II supports CFexpress Type B cards for capturing 8K RAW video, along with SD UHS II if you’re okay with cheaper and slower media. Other key features include headphone and microphone ports, a full-sized HDMI input and a USB-C port for charging and transfers. Canon also released three new battery grips, including one with a cooling fan that extends video shooting times, as I’ll discuss soon.
I’m a big fan of the R5 II’s design, and my pro photographer friend agreed, saying that like most Canon products, the R5 II’s ergonomics are so good the device is comfortable to hold for long periods of time. He also said he slightly preferred the R5 II’s handling to his Sony A9 III and A1 cameras, thanks to how easy it is to use with one hand.
Performance
Steve Dent for Engadget
The EOS R5 II offers a blend of speed and resolution that rivals and sometimes even surpasses the Nikon Z8 and Sony A1. That’s mostly due to the new stacked 45-megapixel sensor and updated Digic X processor to crunch all those pixels.
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The R5 II can shoot bursts at up to 30 fps in electronic shutter mode with a blackout-free view. That’s slower than the R1, but I’ll trade a small hit in performance in exchange for the extra resolution. I was able to capture about 100 RAW frames before the buffer filled. Speeds drop to 12 fps with the mechanical shutter, but there’s rarely any need to use it because there’s no issue with rolling shutter distortion – thanks to the stacked sensor. The R5 II’s new pre-capture mode can record up to 15 photos when you half-press the shutter. That’s great for photojournalists or wildlife photographers who may otherwise miss a shot by a fraction of a second.
Canon’s “Dual Pixel” autofocus has always been good, but on the R5 II it’s the best I’ve ever seen. When shooting bursts with a subject biking toward the camera, 80 percent of my shots were in focus. And the EOS R5 II now tracks animals, birds and vehicles, on top of faces, eyes and bodies of people.
Steve Dent for Engadget
The camera also has a couple of new autofocus tricks, including one called action priority. That keeps the AF focused around the ball in three specific sports: volleyball, basketball and soccer. I didn’t notice any particular AF improvement, as my hit rate seemed to be about the same without it, but dedicated sports photographers might see the difference.
Another new function keeps the tracking point on your subject even if someone crosses in front of them. That did seem to work well most of the time, but it would occasionally wander off and lock onto someone else.
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When Canon launched the R5 II and R1 in July, it introduced pre-registered person priority AF that lets your camera memorize up to ten specific people, like star athletes for instance. This feature functioned as advertised, switching AF to a registered person and tracking them instead of other people in the scene.
Finally, I tested Canon’s famous eye control AF that detects where the photographer is looking and moves the subject tracking point there. This is an undeniably cool feature and has improved compared to the first implementation on the EOS R3, but is still too unreliable for professional use.
Steve Dent for Engadget
In fact, the pro photographer friend I mentioned pointed out that though eye control feels futuristic, it’s still a bit too flakey for paid gigs where focus reliability is paramount.
On the R5 II, in-body stabilization is the best I’ve seen on any Canon camera, keeping the sensor rock-steady for handheld shooting, with up to 8.5 stops of shake reduction. It was so reliable that I never felt the need to carry a tripod when using slow shutter speeds.
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I’ve always found Sony cameras to be slightly superior to Canon when it comes to autofocus and speed. I can no longer say that, as the EOS R5 II is very even with Sony’s latest models. My Sony-using photographer friend agreed, saying he couldn’t see any real difference between the R5 II his A1 or A9 III.
Image quality
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Canon EOS R5 II sample images
The EOS R5 II is Canon’s best camera in years thanks to improvements in key areas like autofocus, video and more.
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Image quality on the R5 II is largely the same as the R5, and that’s a good thing. The 45-megapixel sensor produces photos as good as or better than the Sony A1 at a much cheaper price, and compares favorably to Nikon’s similarly priced Z8.
When shooting in RAW mode at lower ISOs, the R5 II offers good dynamic range in high contrast bright and dark scenes. Like other stacked sensor cameras, though, there’s a bit more noise than with regular CMOS sensors. Quality also drops slightly in electronic shutter mode, so it’s better to use the mechanical shutter in tricky lighting conditions.
High ISO performance isn’t too bad for such a high-resolution camera either, with noise staying under control up to ISO 12,800. After that, the R5 II doesn’t quite measure up to models like the Nikon Z7 II or Sony A7R V, as both of those offer cleaner images with less grain.
Steve Dent for Engadget
If you don’t want the hassle of processing RAW, JPEG rendering is excellent straight out of the camera, with well balanced sharpening and noise reduction. For low-light shooting, skin tones are flattering at all ISO settings, and the best among all cameras in this price range.
One new notable feature on the R5 II is the AI-powered upscaling applied after the photo is taken. The result isn’t quite as good as a dedicated app like Topaz, but it’s not bad considering it’s in-camera processing.
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Video
The original EOS R5 would have been a darn near perfect video camera if not for its pesky overheating issues. Canon has improved this to a degree with a new passive cooling design and $400 fan grip. With those updates, heat is only really an issue at the highest resolutions (8K 60p and 4K 120p). However, these limitations are less severe on the rival Nikon Z8.
Steve Dent for Engadget
Aside from the heating issue, the EOS R5 II has impressive specs. It can shoot up to 8K 60p and 4K 120p video, but does so with far less rolling shutter than the R5, again thanks to the new stacked sensor. The camera now has Canon Log 2 (CLog 2) capability that allows for higher dynamic range capture than the R5.
Video autofocus is outstanding at all resolutions, with rapid acquisition of the subject and reliable tracking. Face- and eye-detection work very well, and I only occasionally noticed AF lag with fast-moving subjects.
As for stabilization, I could shoot smooth footage while handheld in optical mode with no crop, provided I didn’t move the camera too much. Digital stabilization allowed for more movement while only cropping in a touch, and the enhanced setting let me shoot smoothly while walking with a 1.5x crop. Panasonic’s S5 II is still the best in this regard, but the R5 II is close behind.
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As for quality, video on the EOS R5 II is extremely sharp, particularly with supersampled 4K HQ. Other 4K modes are subsampled, but nearly as sharp. Rolling shutter is well managed, so you won’t really notice it unless you do whip pans or jostle the camera while shooting.
Canon’s excellent color science delivers warm skin tones and accurate colors. RAW video allows lots of room for adjustments in post, while the CLog 2 brings dynamic range up to 14 stops to enable shooting in contrasty conditions. With all this, the Canon R5 II is now my go-to camera for shooting video — even over Sony and Panasonic models.
Wrap-up
Steve Dent for Engadget
The $4,300 EOS R5 II is Canon’s best camera in years, thanks to improvements in key areas like autofocus, video, shooting speeds and overall feel. Newly introduced tech like eye control AF is less useful, but it’s still nice to see Canon try to innovate, and the feature should improve in subsequent models.
The R5 II is up against some great competition in this price range, especially the $4,000 Nikon Z8 that holds its own against this camera in most situations. However, Canon’s autofocus is slightly faster and more reliable, and I greatly prefer the R5 II’s handling. The only other full-frame option with a stacked sensor and similar resolution is the Sony A1, which costs $2,200 more.
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The main issues with the R5 II are overheating, the wonkiness of action priority and unreliable eye control autofocus. However, it now stacks up extremely well against Sony’s A1 in terms of speed and autofocus, while offering superior stabilization and handling. Which one you choose may simply come down to brand preference or existing lens collection.
Less than two months after Fluid Truck’s board ousted its sibling co-founders from their executive positions, the company has laid off 30% of its staff, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and found a potential buyer to take on the business, pending court approval, according to bankruptcy filings and information from a former employee.
Fluid has also been approved on an interim basis as of today for a $7 million loan to keep the business operational and fund the restructuring and sale process through the end of the year.
The bankruptcy filing in a Delaware court comes as the company’s losses mount and it faces several lawsuits, including a class action filed on October 10 in Colorado, after it allegedly failed to pay money owed to members of its Fluid Vehicle Investor Program (FVIP) — a program that allowed individuals, including employees, and small business owners to purchase fleets of vans and trucks to be rented out on the platform under Fluid’s management.
Fluid Truck has estimated that the number of creditors awaiting payment is at around 5,500. The company owes FVIP members $12 million, and owes vendors $26 million. That’s on top of the $20.6 million in cash losses Fluid Truck suffered in 2023.
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James Eberhard and Jenifer Snyder, Fluid Truck’s sibling co-founders and former CEO and chief legal counsel, respectively, founded the startup, which has been referred to as the Zipcar of commercial vehicles, in 2016. Since then, Fluid Truck has managed to raise more than $80 million in venture funds and expand to 400 cities in 32 states across the U.S. But the company soon found itself in a deep financial hole under the stewardship of Eberhard due to a combination of macroeconomic factors and mismanaged insurance claims.
Fluid’s deficits accumulated and bad blood started festering between Eberhard and two minority shareholders on the board — Bison Capital and Ingka Investments — according to people familiar with the matter. Eberhard was unable to raise more capital to fund the company’s losses, and in July, the board voted to remove him and Snyder from their roles.
Eberhard’s replacement, Scott Avila from Paladin Management, began exploring liquidation options in August, according to a declaration he filed in bankruptcy court on October 16.
But then Fluid Truck received a large, long-awaited payment from a customer, and decided to use that momentum to try to sell the company. That’s when Kingbee Rentals, a van rental agency in West Valley City, Utah, came forward unexpectedly as a potential buyer.
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The only problem? Kingbee couldn’t afford to acquire all of Fluid Truck’s assets on its own. And Fluid Truck couldn’t afford to keep the lights on for much longer. So in its bankruptcy filing, Fluid Truck has asked the courts to approve emergency funding in the form of a $7 million debtor-in-possession (DIP) loan from Kingbee and some existing investors, and the court approved it on an interim basis on Friday.
“The DIP lenders basically said, ‘We’re going to loan you this money, but if the sale doesn’t close by December 31, you’re in default, and we can liquidate the business,” Adam Stein-Sapir, a bankruptcy expert at Pioneer Funding Group, told TechCrunch. “It gives them a hammer to do something if [Fluid] blows past that deadline.”
It’s unclear how much Fluid Truck will be able to sell its assets for, but Stein-Sapir says it could be around that $7 million mark. That’s bad news for any unsecured lenders, like FVIP members, who will be among those last in line to be paid back.
“For people who are just unsecured here, it’s looking pretty grim in terms of recovery,” Stein-Sapir said. “Unless they filed a lien or have some kind of security in those funds, they are in some trouble.”
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Fluid Truck did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency / human identity network / UBI project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is now known as World. Along with the name change, World introduced an updated version of its eyeball-scanning Orb device which is designed to solve a problem that does not currently exist: authenticating that someone is human “in the age of AI.”
People registered to the system get a World ID that they can use to “securely and anonymously” prove their humanness online, as well as a share of its associated WLD cryptocurrency token.
The new Orb is made with 30 percent fewer parts than its predecessor, which is supposed to make it easier and cheaper to build, and equipped with Nvidia’s robotics and AI platform, Jetson, for some reason. Rich Heley, the chief device officer of Tools for Humanity — the foundation behind the World project — said during an event on Thursday that the simplified design should help achieve the goal of making the Orb widely available.
“To provide access to every human, we need more Orbs. Lots more Orbs. Probably on the order of a thousand times more Orbs than we have today,” Heley said. “Not only more Orbs but more Orbs in more places.” In addition to ramping up production of the Orb, World will even let people purchaseor rent their very own eyeball-scanning sphere so they can “start verifying unique humans” in their communities.
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It’s also launching a new service called “Orb on Demand” (yes, it’s really called that) that will let people order Orbs “much like a pizza you would have delivered to your apartment,” Heley said. The Orb is also coming to more countries, including Costa Rica, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and others.
World says it has verified nearly 7 million “unique humans” so far, despite privacy concerns about building a privately operated global database based on biometrics.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite chips have been the star of many AI PCs released to market in 2024, greatly enhancing performance and battery life compared to their previous gen iterations. However, the manufacturer’s recent endeavor to improve on one of its negative points hasn’t panned out.
Qualcomm has canceled its dev kit, a Snapdragon mini-PC powered by Windows on Arms. Originally, it was planned for a June 2024 release window but missed that entirely. Now, as part of an official announcement, Qualcomm has stated that the kit has been canceled because it “has not met our usual standards of excellence.”
Interestingly enough, The Verge spotted that multiple developers had already received the mini-PC including YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who reviewed the product and performed a detailed hardware teardown of it. Despite Qualcomm not providing any specific reasons for why the PCs had been canceled, the conclusions from Geerling’s review are that despite it matching the Apple M3 Pro’s performance, it lacks Linux support and had restrictions around reselling the device.
There’s another theory for the cancellation as well, which comes down to the HDMI port — or lack thereof. Though the shipped mini-PCs all came with the chips for internal DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, the actual port was missing for some reason.
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According to Richard Campbell, founder of DEVIntersection, the HDMI port could have been the cause of the massive delays if it failed FCC compliance testing. This seems to be supported by the fact that Qualcomm emailed anyone who ordered the PC in September that they would be sent a USB-C to HDMI dongle with their dev kit.
But what does this mean for the consumer?
One of the most well-known drawbacks to anything Qualcomm is that Windows on Arms still has compatibility issues with some Windows programs, tools, and apps. The manufacturer has improved this by leaps and bounds to the point that the average user wouldn’t know the difference, but for gamers and others using specialized programs, those compatibility problems can be quite difficult to parse.
In comes the Qualcomm mini-PC dev kit, which would have been the perfect tool for developers to port their apps to Windows on Arms. This potentially could have introduced a large amount of apps to the OS that otherwise would have never seen the light of day on Arm chips. This is especially important for the consumers who have been left in the dark due to the lack of app support for tools that they need themselves, limiting Qualcomm’s sales of its AI PCs to them in turn.
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And with fellow industry rivals Intel and AMD teaming up to form the “x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group,” in response to Qualcomm and other competitors, the latter must figure out either how to fix the issues with the dev kits or figure out another way to resolve these app compatibility issues if it wants to see Arms continue to thrive.
Marquee at the main entrance to BlackRock headquarters building in Manhattan.
Erik Mcgregor | Lightrocket | Getty Images
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SALT LAKE CITY — A year ago, Samara Cohen believed there was so much pent-up demand for bitcoin that she and her team at BlackRock launched one of the first-ever spot bitcoin exchange-traded products in the U.S. Now investors are flocking in, and a lot of them are crypto enthusiasts who are new to Wall Street.
Cohen, who heads up the asset manager’s exchange-traded funds and index investments as chief investment officer, told CNBC that BlackRock now sees the demand was for a better way to access bitcoin. “It was for the ETF wrapper,” she told CNBC on stage at the Permissionless Conference in Utah.
The total market cap of all eleven spot bitcoin ETFs now tops $63 billion, with total flows of nearly $20 billion. In the last five trading days alone, spot bitcoin ETFs have seen net inflows of more than $2.1 billion, with BlackRock accounting for half of those sales.
The spike in trading volume comes as bitcoin hit its highest level since July this week, trading above $68,300. Bitcoin ended the third quarter up around 140% from the same quarter a year ago, outpacing the S&P 500, as these spot token funds and the crypto market cap move higher in lock-step. Crypto-aligned stock Coinbase closed up about 24% this week, its best week since February.
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Cohen told CNBC that part of the strategy for attracting customers to its funds was teaching crypto investors about the benefits of exchange-traded products (ETPs).
13F filings, which offer quarterly reads on equity positions taken by large investors, show that 80% of the buyers of these new spot bitcoin products in the U.S. are direct investors. Of the 80% of direct investors, Cohen told CNBC that 75% had never before owned an iShare, one of the best-known and largest ETF providers on the planet.
“So we went into this journey with the expectation that we needed to educate ETF investors on crypto and on bitcoin specifically,” said Cohen. “As it turns out, we have done a lot of education of crypto investors on the benefits of the ETP wrapper.”
Before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission green-lit spot bitcoin funds in January, investors had a few ways to buy and custody cryptocurrencies. A centralized exchange like Coinbase was among the most user-friendly options for U.S investors. But the blockbuster debut of bitcoin ETPs has laid bare to Cohen and others across Wall Street, that crypto exchanges weren’t giving digital asset investors everything they needed.
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BlackRock’s IBIT vs. bitcoin YTD
It helps that the U.S. is a huge market for digital assets. New data from Chainalysis shows that North America remains the biggest crypto market globally, accounting for nearly 23% of all crypto trading volume. The blockchain analytics platform estimates that between July 2023 and July 2024, there was $1.3 trillion in on-chain value received.
Venture firm a16z found in its recently released State of Crypto report that more than 40 million Americans hold crypto.
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So far, adoption has mostly been through wealth management clients asking advisors to add new spot crypto products to their portfolio.
In August, Morgan Stanley was the first big bank to allow its 15,000 financial advisors to pitch bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity to clients with a net worth over $1.5 million. Other firms are still performing in-house due diligence before allowing their armies of FAs to start actively pitching the funds.
“Wealth manager allocators have not been allocating,” VanEck CEO Jan van Eck told CNBC in Utah. “I mean, they’re barely even warming up.”
Van Eck drew parallels to the European market, where the company has 12 token-based products trading in Europe.
“It’s exactly what we see in Europe,” he said. “Very few private banks have really approved investment in bitcoin or ethereum or anything else in a major way.” Van Eck said his company has about $2 billion in its European crypto ETPs, and that a lot of the volume is from individual investors.
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Wall Street needs rules from lawmakers on Capitol Hill before it gets more comfortable with crypto.
Cohen thinks that in a lot of ways, ETFs and blockchain technology are solving for similar things.
“ETFs have been a decentralizing force in TradFi markets that have brought a lot more access and transparency, and importantly, really accelerated in growth during the post crisis 2008, 2009 period,” said Cohen, referring to traditional finance markets.
“I find it incredibly meaningful to look at the fact that the bitcoin whitepaper was published on October 31, 2008, and then you have the G20 leaders from around the world meeting to discuss the aftermath of the financial crisis and how do you create more transparency through public reporting,” Cohen continued.
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BlackRock took on less risk by using counterparty clearing and multilateral trading. In TradFi markets, those moves created huge tailwinds for ETFs.
“Then at the same time, DeFi is becoming a reality over the intervening 15 years,” she said.
“Was this a win for Bitcoin? Was this a win for ETPs? To me, the answer is: It’s a win for investors, to the extent we can effectively marry these ecosystems which are solving for the same goals.”
State-of-the-art generative AI models like ChatGPT can be tricked into giving instructions on how to make a bomb by simply writing the request in reverse, warn researchers.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are trained on vast swathes of data from the internet and can create a range of outputs – some of which their makers would prefer didn’t spill out again. Unshackled, they are equally likely to be able to provide a decent cake recipe as know how to make explosives from household chemicals.
If you’re not that inclined to build a PC from scratch, then buying a pre-built gaming PC makes a lot of sense, especially since there are a lot of great deals now that more than make up for anything you would lose for not building it yourself. One great example is the RDY Y60 from iBuyPower, a solid gaming desktop from a boutique maker specializing in interesting builds, and the best part is that it has quite a significant discount on it for a configuration that comes with an RTX 40-series card. Instead of the usual $2,349 the RDY Y60 goes for, you can snag it for just $1,899, which accounts for a solid $450 discount. Also, if you use the code IBP25YR, you can get an extra $50 discount, or up to $300 if you spend up to $3,999 on an iBuyPower PC.
One of the most important parts of any gaming desktop is the GPU, and in this case, you get the excellent RTX 4070 Super, which straddles the line between performance and price. This is actually the perfect 1440p GPU since you’re going to be getting between 60-100 fps with ultra settings, depending on the game. You could theoretically push it to 4K if you want to pair it with the latest and best gaming monitors, but you likely won’t see more than 55-60fps, at best, and you may need to have to play around with graphical settings.
Besides that, you get one of the best CPUs on the market, the Intel Core i9-14900KF CPU, which will easily handle any game or task you throw at it and even allow you to do some streaming while you game. The 32GB of RAM included is also very impressive, as is the 2TB of storage that you get to work with. Of course, you could always expand that storage with one of these SSD deals, but it probably isn’t necessary once you first get it. Also, it should be noted that the RDY Y60 ships without the GPU installed, so there will be some minor assembly required, but at least iBuyPower provides you with instructions.
This configuration iBuyPower’s RDY Y60 has a lot of powerful specs under the hood, and for the $1,899 price tag, it’s essentially a steal. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a few different options to pick from, these gaming PC deals are worth checking out.
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