Canon R100 Mirrorless Camera Kit — EOS R100 with RF-S 18-45mm f/4.5-6.3 IS STM Lens, 24.1 MP APS-C, 4K Video

The Canon EOS R100 is the least expensive way into Canon's RF system, and as a first camera it is usually the right one. A 24.1 MP APS-C CMOS sensor, the DIGIC 8 processor and the RF-S 18-45mm f/4.5-6.3 IS STM kit lens arrive in one box for well under $1,000. A complete APS-C mirrorless camera, not a body you still have to shop lenses for. Canon left the low-pass filter off this sensor, which is why files come out of it sharper than the price suggests, and the sensor is far larger than any phone's, which is where the real background blur and the clean indoor frames come from.

As a mirrorless camera for beginners the R100 is deliberately simple: fewer dials, fewer custom buttons, one decision at a time. That is the point. Dual Pixel CMOS AF covers roughly 88% of the frame across 143 zones, locks onto people and finds their eyes, and keeps working down to EV −4, darker than most rooms you will ever shoot in. Burst runs at up to 6.5 frames per second in One-Shot AF, or 3.5 with subject tracking. Shoot JPEG while you learn, then move to RAW (or to C-RAW, Canon's smaller raw format) when you start editing. (The R100 does not record HEIF.)

Put your eye to the finder and you get a 0.39-inch OLED electronic viewfinder, approximately 2.36 million dots and a 100% view. That is the part a phone cannot match on a bright day, and it is the reason to buy an entry level mirrorless camera rather than another handset. The 3-inch rear LCD is fixed rather than articulating, and it is not a touchscreen, those two omissions are what earn the price. The RF mount takes every RF and RF-S lens, and Canon's Mount Adapter EF-EOS R opens up the whole EF and EF-S catalogue, so no glass you buy for this body is wasted when you step up. One SD card slot, UHS-I compatible. One caution worth knowing before you buy: the R100 has no self-cleaning sensor unit and Canon does not support manual sensor cleaning on this model, so change lenses somewhere out of the wind.

Video is 4K UHD at 24p taken from the middle of the sensor, Full HD up to 60p, and 720p at about 120 fps for slow motion, all written to MP4. Canon rates it at roughly 340 shots through the viewfinder or 430 on the LCD, in a body of 116.3 × 85.5 × 68.8 mm and about 356 g. The smallest and lightest in the EOS R line.