Canon 1Ds Mk III

I personally buy from Ritz, Adorama and Amazon. I can't vouch for any other ads.

Canon 1Ds Mk III
© 2007 KenRockwell.com

Canon 1Ds Mk III.

Got 8 grand? Ritz and Adorama are taking orders now and will ship as soon as it comes in. That's how I'd get mine today. Amazon isn't taking orders but only starting an interest list. If you use any of these links to get yours it goes a long way towards helping me keep adding to this site.

More Canon Reviews

It's official! Canon introduced the 1Ds Mk III on Tuesday. Do I want one? YOU BET! Will I get one? Probably not at $8,000, at least not this week. You people know who you are; if you're one of them, go for it! I'm perfectly happy with my 5D, which is also full-frame, far more portable, and a fraction of the cost.

The Canon 1Ds Mk III is a full-frame, 21 megapixel, 5 frames per second, 3" LCD, 1/250 sync, $8,000 DSLR. 5 FPS was a world leader for full-frame speed for three days (until Nikon announced the 9 FPS D3), and the 1Ds Mk III has a huge 57 frame buffer (only 12 raw). Heck, that's as fast as my piddly Nikon D200 or the 30D!

The 1Ds Mk III is the update to the 1Ds Mk II introduced way back in April 2004. I've always admired how Canon introduced the 1Ds Mk II at $8,000, and as of the day the 1Ds Mk III was introduced, the Mark II still sells at $7,000. That is staying power even film cameras never had.

Today the 1Ds Mk III asks the same price as yesteryear's Mk II, but with one very important difference: The Mamiya ZD medium format back today costs less, has slightly more pixels, and has a far larger sensor. Oops!

The difference in sensor size between the Mamiya ZD and the 1Ds Mk III is as vast as full-frame is from dinky 1.6x cameras like the Digital Rebel. If the large format quality difference plays out, the Mamiya may smoke the 1Ds Mk III, and the Mamiya ZD back costs $1,000 less than the 1Ds Mk III! Of course you'll need a Mamiya 645AF II body with the ZD back, but you can get the ZD back today and the 645AF II body used, while you still have to wait for this new Canon. The ZD has a 0.72 crop factor. My Full-Frame Advantage probably applies to the ZD over the 1Ds Mk III just as the 1Ds Mk III outdoes anything with a smaller sensor.

The Mamiya is slow and the Canon is fast and more versatile. If you want quality on a tripod, I'd be looking at the Mamiya very carefully. If you want familiarity and compatibility with yesterday's 35mm-based systems, get the 1Ds Mk III. For instance, I already own a Canon 14mm lens for ultra-ultra wide shots, and the widest lens for the Mamiya is nowhere near as wide, and Canon has just introduced an even better 14mm lens on top of that. If you want fast frame rates and huge lens line ups, get the 1Ds Mk III; if you want the last word in image quality and don't need as crazy a line of lenses or speed, look very carefully at the ZD.

One of my pro friends already looked at both. She bought a 1Ds Mk III because the practicality and flexibility of thhe Canon system outweighed the potential quality advantage of the ZD. I haven't gotten to face them off yet against each other.

Make your own choices, but today you can get medium format digital for the same price as the Canon 1Ds Mk III. It's not 2004 anymore. I haven't tried either of these, but you'd better believe I would before I drop eight of my own Gs on either one.

Canon uses the clear-as-mud phrase "highlight tone priority custom function," which means better highlights if you set them in a custom function.

Digital cameras look digital because they rarely can handle highlights well. Highlights blow out and look like crap, especially with skin and stone tones. This is the biggest area which gets better with each generation of camera, but it's subtle and not obvious in camera lab tests or easy to measure, as flat-field noise and resolution are. Highlight handling is obvious even in 4x6" prints, while all the things that hobbyists worry about aren't.

Flying under most people's RADAR, Canon increased the range of manual Kelvin setting for WB to allow better images in dim interiors. Previous cameras only went to 2,800K, which gave me images that were still too orange in dim household lighting. Thanks Canon! (My Nikons with Kelvin settings all go to 2,500K.)

Better AF system from the 1D Mk III. Focus offset can be calibrated by savvy users to each lens, something I'll do but most people probably will want not to touch.

5FPS vs 4 FPS. Reasonably important for shooting action, but sports shooters rarely use 1Ds series cameras.

The Canon 1Ds Mk III has the ability to flip up the mirror to see what's on the image sensor, live. Canon calls this "Live View" and it's only useful for manual tripod shooting, since autofocus doesn't work in Live View. (A custom function is probably available to let the AF-ON button flip down the mirror and autofocus while held.)

Live view is also a mirror lock-up and slightly shortens the already minimal shutter delay. I'm unsure if you can use Nikon's ancient wide and fisheye lenses which poked into the camera with a Nikon-> Canon adapter. Good luck!

Live view also adds a quieter shooting mode, taking advantage of the mirror being up already. This is advantageous for remote surveillance, since you can duct tape your $8,000 1Ds Mk III someplace it doesn't belong, and with the WFT-E2A wireless transmitter you can see what's going on and fire it from your laptop as you sit in your car . The images are transmitted to your laptop and you can see through and adjust the 1Ds Mk III. You may lose your $8,000 camera if detected by a hostile target, but you'll have your images and you're rolling before they see you. You also can do this with a USB cable, but it's not as stealthy.

21 MP is less than a 13% linear resolution improvement over 16 MP. The Mk III's images are 5,616 pixels wide while the Mk II's are 4,992 pixels wide, or only an extra 624 pixels, less than a crappy VGA image. Vertically, the Mk III only has 416 more pixels, also less than VGA's 480.

Lens performance matters at these resolutions. Only if you are very careful will the higher resolution be doing anything other than giving you a more precise picture of the fuzziness or sloppiness of your own lenses and technique. For instance, if you shoot at f/22, diffraction lowers resolution to less than the resolution of my 5D. That's simple physics.

14-bit ADCs instead of 12-bit ADCs. Insignificant unless you're doing crazy curve mutilation. These ADCs operate linearly, so they are not comparable to 8-bit JPGs, which are logarithmic.

Tougher shutter tested to 300,000 cycles, an SLR record. Not that it wont last longer; I've heard anecdotes of Nikon technicians seeing F5s that clocked over 1,000,000 shots and were still humming along.

Magnesium alloy for the entire body. The 40D uses magnesium alloy only for its exterior, not its guts.

Finder: Canon claims this is the finest finder they make, with 0.75x magnification (50mm lens) and zero distortion. -3 to +1 diopter. 20mm eye relief (eyepoint).

AF: 45 points, of which 19 are cross points and 26 are assist points. The cross points all offer extra precision with f/2.8 and faster lenses.

Shutter Death: Tested, but not guaranteed, to 300,000 cycles. I suspect if you can kill it under warranty, you're covered regardless of how many frames you get off.

Buffer Depth: 57 JPG, 12 raw (per Canon USA press information). Canon USA's consumer website lists 45 JPG and 15 raw. I wouldn't worry about the difference, since all these take into account the fact that one is writing to the memory card about as fast as the camera can shoot. Change the card speed or a camera setting slightly, and this number will change. Personally I've never filled more than 9 frames in a buffer at once.

Advance Settings: Single, silent, high-speed continuous (5 FPS), low-speed continuous (3 FPS), self-timer (10 or 2 second delay).

Image Sizes: 5,616 x 3,744 native (L), 4,992 x 3,328 (M1), 4,080 x 2,720 (M2), 2,782 x 1,856 (S). I saw mention in a press leak about in-camera cropping to various aspect ratios including square, but have not seen it in the formal literature.

Color Spaces: sRGB (the world standard for photography) and Adobe RGB (for printing on printing presses; your colors will be dull if used for normal photography). See also sRGB vs. Adobe RGB.

White Balance: Auto, Direct sunlight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Studio Strobes, Five Custom WB settings (1-5), Kelvin (2,500 - 10,000K) and five Personal White Balance settings (PC-1 to PC-5). I'll need to see a manual to figure out if there are ten total personal settings or what Canon is trying to say.

White Balance Trim: The usual +/- 9 steps in warm/cool (blue/amber) and green/magenta, also WB bracketing.

Metering: 63 zone evaluative, center weighted average, "partial" (wide spot) and spot.

Flash Metering: E-TTL II, identical to the 20D, 30D and 40D. New wireless remote control of the settings of the 580EX II.

File Formats: JPG (10 levels of compression), raw and new s-raw (reduced resolution). You can party with two cards in the camera at the same time and write them to an external hard drive with the WFT-E2A and write different files different places.

S-raw is a reduced resolution raw with only 5 megapixels. I pity the fool who uses s-raw to save file size: it has one-quarter the area resolution of JPG. S-raw throws away 75% of your pixels, while JPG throws away none.

You need a math PhD and an understanding of discrete cosine transforms, Huffman coding and quantization matrices to understand how JPG eliminate most of the file size but retains all the color depth and resolution of the original. JPG is the best way to compress file size.

Avoid s-raw unless you have a very good reason. S-raw lets you do all the color and exposure fiddling of raw, but with a fraction of the resolution. Use s-raw to experiment and learn, but I'd leave it alone otherwise.

S-raw is a very poor way to reduce file size and loses far more visible image quality than JPG, unless you're unskilled at initial photography. The reason you would want to use s-raw is if you are indecisive and want to adjust color and exposures after a shoot, but never intend to need the full resolution image again.

S-raw has its uses, but I caution the great majority of my readers for whom this s-raw feature is a bad idea. Then again, Bayer interpolation isn't involved in s-raw, so it's not as bad as you would think. S-raw (as well as small JPG) gives very similar results to what a similar Foveon sensor would give, and at 5 MP the image quality is still wonderful, just more bloated than a better-looking JPG would be.

Storage: Two slots: CF type I and II memory cards and SD cards. UDMA and SDHC are AOK.

Data Transfer: USB (standard) or wireless with optional WFT-E2A. Also an NTSC/PAL video output.

It's interesting to note that that is the same resolution as the 2.5" LCDs of the Rebel XTi, Canon 30D, Canon SD850 and Nikon D40, D40x, D80 and D200. A 3" LCD is 20% bigger in linear dimension than a 2.5" LCD, thus with the same resolution, a 3" LCD has 20% less linear resolution. In simple English, this 3" LCD shows the same detail and information as today's 2.5" LCDs, just bigger.

From the press information: Among the most valuable features of the EOS-1Ds Mark III Digital SLR is its compatibility with Canon's new Picture Style Editor 1.0 software. With PSE, photographers can personalize the look of their photographs by inputting their own preferred image processing parameters, including custom tone curves. The EOS-1Ds Mark III Digital SLR also ships with the latest versions of Canon's powerful software applications, including Digital Photo Professional 3.2 and EOS Utility 2.2, which support the camera's Remote Live View and Dust Delete Data functions, as well as incorporating a broad range of additional improvements designed to improve image quality and speed up workflow. Particularly noteworthy in DPP 3.2 is a new Lens Aberration Correction Function that corrects various image defects such as chromatic aberration, color blur, vignetting and distortion. Initially, the Lens Aberration Correction Function will support images captured by the EOS-1Ds Mark III and 11 other EOS Digital SLRs using any of 29 individual EF and EF-S lenses. Also included are ZoomBrowser EX 6.0 and ImageBrowser 6.0 for easy browsing, viewing, printing and archiving with compatible computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows XP, as well as Mac OS X.

Power: LP-E4 lithium-ion rechargeable battery. ACK-E4 AC adapter included. Six level meter and percent readout with shots made per charge. CR2025 clock backup.

Weight: 42.5 oz. (1,205g), specified, presumably stripped (without battery, cards, lens, strap, etc.)

WFT-E2A Wireless File Transmitter ($1,000!). Works over Wi-Fi, ethernet or USB and lets you see the Live View, control the 1Ds MK III and capture the files as they are shot. You can plug a USB hard drive into it and record your files direct to the hard drive for almost unlimited shooting capacity.

It's probably spectacular, but I'll bet you that many less experienced photographers may have sharpness complaints because the 1Ds Mk III will be testing their technique and optics more than many photographers will be able to test the performance of the Canon 1Ds Mk III. For instance, you can't go shoot a wall and expect it to be sharp unless you have a micrometer to square everything up. A one degree error is significant if you're shooting flat subjects.

If you're not ready to pony up by spending about as much as the 1Ds Mk III on a suitable set of lenses, don't come complaining to me that it's not sharp. I'd get the new 14mm f/2.8 L II, the new 16-35mm II and the 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS. Even if you pass on the $2,200 14mm, you're still into it for $1,400 for the wide zoom, $1,700 more for the tele, and you still have no mid-range zoom.

As I've said at the top, for eight grand I'd have a long hard look at the Mamiya ZD medium format digital back.

Personally I'm not feeling any need to dump my perfectly wonderful full-frame, lightweight Canon 5D with its more than adequate 13 megapixels. My 5D makes images 4,368 pixels wide, which is only 22% less than the 1Ds Mk III's 5,616 pixels. (see also The Megapixel Myth.) I doubt I can see the difference, but I sure will feel the weight out of my wallet and added weight around my neck with the 1Ds Mk III.

Unless you're loaded, the extra $5,460 spent on a 1Ds Mk III compared to a 5D buys a lot of first-class lenses, without which the image quality of the 1Ds Mk III will be unrealized. A 5D and excellent lenses will easily outperform a 1Ds Mk III and sloppy, off-brand lenses.

For instance, my 5D out-resolves the old 16-35mm f/2.8 L and my 14mm f/2.8 L. If you want to make progress, you're into this for buying the new II versions of each, or using the 17-40mm f/4 L, which also has its limitations compared to a $5 Olympus Trip 35 film camera.

Obviously you pros who have your 1Ds Mk IIIs on order know who you are. I'm not trying to pee on your parade. I'm writing this to the vast sea of advanced, enthusiastic and successful hobbyists who may be tempted to drop eight grand on a 1Ds Mk III without thinking it through.

Heck, I'd love to have a 1Ds Mk III and I avidly shoot full-frame digital. I just don't know that I can justify eight large on it, at least until I play with a ZD system.

If you find this as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me continue helping everyone.

It also helps me keep adding to this site when you get your goodies through these links to Ritz, Amazon and Adorama. I use them and recommend them personally .

Caveat: The ads below come from a third party and I don't see or approve them. They are sent to your screen directly from a third party. They don't come from me or my site. See more at my Buying Advice page. Personally I get my goodies at Ritz, Amazon and Adorama.