"We added what they had six years ago"

Canon added in-body stabilization to the R8 Mark II in 2024 after Sony shipped it standard on the A7C in 2018 and Nikon on the Z5 in 2020. The gap matters because it reveals a pattern, not a product oversight.

The camera itself is competent. At 1. 2 pounds with full-frame stabilization, it sits where amateurs want entry-level bodies to sit — lightweight enough to carry without the weight penalty feeling like a punishment for wanting the feature at all. The stabilization works. But that is precisely the problem.

Canon is repeating the exact mistake that ceded the mirrorless market: announcing table-stakes features as victories, then wondering why the installed base moved elsewhere. In 2012, the company sat on the DSLR lead for five years while Sony iterated A7 after A7, each one pulling the serious amateur away. By the time Canon brought the EOS R to market in 2018, Sony had already established what buyers expected from full-frame mirrorless — not incremental improvements. The features that defined the category from the start. Canon has spent six years catching up on stabilization alone.

The R8 Mark II is heavier and more expensive than its predecessor because of this addition. That is not innovation; it is parity. When you announce as progress what your competitors shipped years ago, you are implicitly admitting that you have been playing catch-up, not leading. The camera does not need to be better than the original R8. It needs to have arrived when stabilization was still worth the weight trade-off, not after Sony's A7C made it the baseline expectation.

This is not about one camera body. This is about what happens when you treat table-stakes as selling points. The photographers who stayed with Canon through the mirrorless transition did so because they already owned the lenses. The new ones. The people Canon needs. Are choosing based on what Sony and Nikon offered five years ago. Canon has now matched that. The market has moved on to asking what comes next.