Canon has announced two new DSLRs based on the 5D body, the 5DS and 5DS R, both containing a monstrous, full-frame 50.6 megapixel sensor and a handful of other hardware tweaks. With the two new cameras—available in June, priced $3,700 and $3,900 respectively—Canon once again retakes the 35mm resolution crown from Nikon. The 5DS R, like Nikon's D800E, has a self-canceling low-pass filter, which can result in even higher optical resolution and sharpness. Both cameras are being pitched at studio and landscape photographers who absolutely need as much resolution as possible—but perhaps a little oddly, neither of them replace the 5D Mark III.

For the longest time, Canon was the go-to choice for high-resolution crop sensor (APS-C, APS-H) and full-frame digital cameras. Once the company's cameras hit 20 megapixels, though (a few years ago now), the focus shifted toward higher quality pixels, better image signal processing, better autofocus, and other features that made more sense than just mindlessly adding mo' pixels. Eventually, Canon was overtaken by Nikon with the 36.3-megapixel D810, Nokia's 41-megapixel Lumia 1020, and others. Now, clearly, Canon wants to prove that it can be good at all those other bits and still dominate the resolution race.

Hardware-wise, the Canon 5DS and 5DS R are identical, except the 5DS R has a self-canceling low-pass filter (more on that later). Both new cameras use a body that is very similar to the 5D Mark III. There are dual Digic 6 processors (allowing for up to 5 fps continuous shooting), 61-point AF, and an ISO range from 100 to 6400 (extendable to 12,800). Reinforcing that this is a studio and landscape camera, both cameras feature a reinforced tripod socket and some fancy tweaks to how the mirror works to reduce mirror slap and increase image sharpness.

Almost every digital camera has a low-pass filter, which is essentially a very fine grid that slightly blurs the incoming light before it hits the CMOS sensor. This obviously lowers image sharpness slightly, but it eliminates moiré (that odd visual effect that can occur when patterns of lines are viewed at a certain distance/resolution). Landscape and studio photographers, who crave as much detail as possible, obviously aren't huge fans of these low-pass filters. Nikon released the D800e in 2012 to satisfy those image quality addicts and then followed up with the D810 in 2014. Now, Canon is hoping to pull some of those high-end photographers back into the fold with the 50.6-megapixel 5DS R, which handily smashes the Nikon's 36.3-megapixel sensor.

You would think that the 5DS, which has a higher-resolution sensor and newer Digic processors, would replace the 5D Mark III—but alas, it seems Canon has loaded up the 5DS and 5DS R firmware with some arbitrary restrictions to segment its lineup. For example, the Mark III has an extended ISO of up to 102,400, while the 5DS and 5DS R can only go up to 12,800 (a Canon representative told DP Review that the ISO cap is completely "arbitrary").

In a similar vein, Canon has probably restricted the two new cameras to 5 fps continuous (the Mark III can do 6 fps)—and for some reason, the new cameras can't do uncompressed HDMI output, while the Mark III can. These differences might seem fairly insignificant, but if you look at the entire Canon DSLR lineup, there's an awful lot of feature fragmentation. That's great from a business perspective (product segmentation increases sales), but not so good for consumers, who end up having to buy more than one camera to fulfill all their needs.