| |  | | Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review (Expanded and Updated)
Drew Strickland
Published by drew
06-16-2007
| | Page 1
Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review (Updated and Expanded)
drew strickland  See our Continuing Coverage of the Autofocus Problems.
Additional Note (June 23, 2007) : I may have access to the 1D MKIII again next week. If so, I will attempt to more directly replicate the problematic conditions being reported by some other websites. Hopefully, I will also be able to report on some additional features of the camera. If you have any specific requests please let me know in the forum thread.
Expanded Coverage (June 25, 2007)
3 New pages have been added. Please see the navigation menu to the right to jump straight to the new pages.
I only had about 24 hours to review this new camera from Canon. I made the most of the time available. However, you will see lots of shots of dogs and little league baseball as they turned out to be the most available subjects. 
Special thanks to David Chapman at Professional Photo Resources in Atlanta for providing two of the camera bodies in this review. They now have this new Canon 1D Mark III available for rental.
By now most professionals have heard of this new camera from Canon. I will provide a general overview and then focus in-depth on some areas of interest popping up on other websites and in various other community forums.
Read on to find out if this camera lives up to the hype. To navigate this review use the arrows at the bottom of each page and/or the content box at the top right of this article.
__________________ drew strickland
faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is ... | | | | | | | Re: Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review
This was a very useful review, Drew. In my opinion, this is how technical reviews ought to be carried out. It is worth far more to me to be able to read about real world usage rather than seeing the endless, and often sterile, identical test images that have been de rigeuer in the technical press for decades.
I think it is very worthwhile having access to the RAW images so that the potential of the camera can be evaluated while using our own workflows. It speaks far more to me than having to look at (and compensate for) another person's own image processing techniques. I look forward to more of this type of review. Thank you. 
Jeff | | | | | | Re: Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review
Thanks for all the effort you put into this review, Drew. I had just read Rob's review this afternoon, and I think I learned a lot from both of them.
I wasn't planning to purchase the camera at this time anyway but I'm keeping my up with this in case I decide to purchase one later on, after some of the focus questions that some have experienced are getting answered.
I appreciate that you put images that are completely unprocessed up for everyone to dudge the image quality at different ISO settings for themselves.
Tim | | | | | | Re: Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review
I've read both your AF review and the AF review by RG. He is not the only one reporting AF problems with the 1DIII. I've been jumping around on a lot of forums over the last month and the AF issue is far from consistent...I'd call it random at best. However, it has been reported often enough to cause me to postpone my current 1DIII order until the issue is resolved satisfactorily. It is entirely possible that the future resale value of these first releases will be impaired and I do not like the Canon dogma that..you bought it... you own it...you can't return it. And by inference...we don't know what's wrong with it, if anything, yet.
IMO your test does not exactly duplicate RG's, if I correctly interpret his conditions...bright clear mid-day skies on an 80+ day. You test appears to have been done at 6:30 in the evening with some clouds.
Is it possible that direct sunlight on the 1DIII black body under the clear mid-day sun is causing a heat build up that is the source of this phenomenon that is not repeatable with the waning sun rays at 6:30?
Scientific method would mandate EXACT conditions be repeated in every respect to refute the other test including exact framing. Your runner was slightly off the lens axis...his were directly perpendicular to the sensor. HIs test showed the principal point of focus...yours does not. To repeat his test you would have to be standing on the baseline looking directly at home plate with the baseline fixed in the viewfinder throughout the series. I don't recall that is the case. His test had a closeup of a stationary person with focus point indicated...I saw no such test of yours. His tests show the OOF focus shots graphically...yours do not. There may be other differences.
As I recall RG was given an unrestricted pre-production 1DIII with the proviso that he not publish the images and there is an AF issue with the pre-production models that will be corrected before mass production begins. If you have not read his pre-review you might find it of interest, as the same AF anomaly existed in both pre-production and mass production versions of the 1DIII.
RG is one of the more respected reviewers on the planet. If I recall correctly, he was invited to Tokyo by Canon. For him, or anyone with his reputation, to jeopardize the loss of that stature by posting a negative review of that magnitude takes a great deal of fortitude. His tests were not just checked and rechecked, and checked again, they were also shared with Canon.
One could surmise that Canon's usual "so what" attitude would be the only thing that prompted him to go public...to protect the buyers.
I applaud him.
I will give you the same accolades, once you EXACTLY and REPEATEDLY replicate his conditions with more than one camera regardless of your outcome.
Until then I hold your AF test to be suspect and unscientific.
Joe Sesto
Nipomo, California | | | | | | Re: Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review
Sorry, but there is no camera movement in the one out of focus shot. That is clear from the background fence, which is tack-sharp and without blur at all.
The shot is back-focused.
I suppose one out of so many is no big deal. In my day (the 60s) most shots were unsharp and one had to pick and choose and then, for commercial shots, retouch the whole photo to get anything really sharp.
I, personally, would have used one single sensor and always placed it on the boy's face. Not even on his helmet, where the sharpness usually is in this series. As good as these photos are, had the focus been exactly on his face, the photos would have been even better.
In these photos, the helmet has more plasticity than the face itself (see papers on absolute focuc at www.anstendig.org for explanations).
Mark B Anstendig | |
Last edited by mbanstendig : 06-20-2007 at 08:21 AM.
| | | | Re: Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review
What seems to have happened is that the boy was next to the junction of the pipes holding up the fence, which had blue and green things behind it to the right. The blue and green things were similar to the boy's colors and the pipes of the fence were large enough to be seen by the sensors as important. So the sensors averaged the distances between those three things, settling in between, which was pretty much on the fence.
The auto-focus is working just fine. That is why I never use it with my EOS-1Ds MK II.
I only use single sensors, which is the only way to be sure you get the focus exactly where you want it with the image types that it can handle. Some image types cannot be exactly focused with this system or any other auto-focus system, except perhaps large format systems, with magnifiers, etc.
But, of course, I don't do sports.
However, sequences of photos I did live during the sixties, using the old lenses of the day and the Messraster focal-point-exact focusing screen in SLR cameras, are better focused than these, even without the depth of field (they were mostly wide open) because the focus is almost always exactly on the nearest eye of the main subject, and they were done in poor lighting. They are at www.anstendig.com at the URLs: http://www.anstendig.com/East-west/parting_index.html
and http://www.anstendig.com/Pantomime/cain_abel_index.html
Click the thumbnails to see larger images. And there is some shake and movement in the second series.
Mark B Anstendig | |
Last edited by mbanstendig : 06-20-2007 at 08:43 AM.
| | | | Re: Canon 1D Mark III- Full Review
Great job, Drew. You'e done my kind of real-world review: Actually use it, and show the results.
Heh, one OOF shot, with rest nice and sharp. It's pretty clear what happened there... The bit of fence showing through between the boy's appendages tricked the camera into focusing on that. Nothing wrong there with the camera at all. Just keep the focus point on the boy's body and everything would be fine.
Regarding the noise at high ISO, I've been experimenting... It's pretty much standard Canon fare, though there's less of it than in prior models. I have a banding noise reduction tool I'm about to release, and I already have luminance and color noise reduction tools that work a treat. Between these two ISO 6400 Mark III images can be made into publication quality.
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