Though once you start thinking about lenses, the full-frame proposition starts to get murky. For the same money, a cheaper crop camera with an expensive, wide-aperture lens can easily get you the same subject separation as an expensive full-frame camera paired with, say, the kit lens that came with our EOS R8. (Yep, we don’t love it, and if we owned the EOS R8 we’d be tempted to shell out for one of Canon’s legendary portrait lenses.)

The main downside of conventional full-frame cameras, though, is that they tend to be larger and heavier than crop cameras, and, most importantly, their lenses tend to be a lots larger and heavier, especially if you want telephoto lenses. This camera doesn’t have a mirror, which means it’s much lighter.

Also, full-frame cameras are usually more expensive, which brings us to the first word: entry-level.

This one doesn’t need expounding upon except to say that, in the case of the EOS R8, it means you’re sacrificing a couple of important things compared to Canon’s (or, indeed, anyone’s) more expensive models.

The sacrifice that hit us the most is the battery. It’s tiny, and doesn’t last very long at all.

The EOS R8 can be recharged with a USB battery pack, and more to the point it can operate from a battery pack, provided you have one that can deliver enough amps. (We’re not sure what the minimum spec is for this, but we can tell you our fancy battery packs could all power the camera, and our run-of-the-mill battery packs couldn’t.)

It’s not ideal, running a USB power cable from your back pocket up to your camera as we’ve been doing, but at least it’s an option.

The other thing that immediately struck us as an entry-level compromise was the SD-card slot. The EOS R8 has only one of them, where most full-frame cameras have two of them, either for added storage capacity or for added storage redundancy.

It made us a little nervous, heading out with only a single memory card loaded into the EOS R8, until we consider our actual experience. In all the years we’ve been using full-frame cameras, we’ve never once needed that second SD-card in an emergency because the first one was broken.

For us, it’s just been about convenience – we have one card that holds RAW images, and another card that holds JPEG copies of those same images – and it’s one we haven’t missed while using the EOS R8.

But, you know, never say never. One day, that single SD-card slot limitation could totally bite you in the arse. SD-cards do break.

The third limitation is one we care about even less: the EOS R8 doesn’t shoot many frames per second in continuous shooting mode when you’re using the mechanical shutter, compared to some other Canon cameras.

(The EOS R8 does have a very fast frame rate in electronics shutter mode, which will let you do some types of high-speed photography, but not the more exciting ones.)

But the frame rate of this camera is neither here nor there. If you need to shoot a bucket load of photos quickly, the tiny battery would have already ruled this camera out as an option.

Also, there is no joystick on the back for shifting the point of autofocus, but there are other ways to do that anyway., and we don’t think it’s a biggie, either.

Other than those entry-level compromises, the EOS R8 is a marvel.

The autofocus system, which Canon has borrowed from the much more fancy EOS R6 II, is wonderful, which is important because focus, much more than any other factor in our experience, is the one thing that’s going to be the difference between a shot being usable and unusable.

Other things, like exposure or dynamic range, you can often fix or at least work around after the fact, especially if you save your files in RAW format. Focus, not so much.

(OK, camera wobble is up there as something that’s hard to fix in post-production, too, and it’s worth pointing out that the EOS R8 doesn’t have in-body image stabilization, meaning you’ll need to stick to lenses with their own image stabilization if you’re wobble-prone.)

Not only does the EOS R8 do a stellar job at tracking and focusing on human eyes (and we think eye-tracking is arguably the single biggest improvement in photography this century, due to how important eye contact is to humans) it also tracks animals and vehicles very well in our tests, too.

Canon gives you lots of control over how you focus, too, all the way down to letting you choose which side of the rear touch-screen you want to use as a virtual focus joystick, just in case your nose has been, well, sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong.

Exposure, colors, dynamic range, all the other things you might care about in an image that is terrific in the EOS R8, too. You’d be hard-pressed to find a modern digital camera that doesn’t do a great job of getting the basics right, and the R8 is no exception.

The only thing exceptional about this camera is the bang for the buck it delivers. And maybe the battery. It’s exceptionally small.