Canon SLR Digital Cameras : Canon EOS 1D Mark III Digital SLR Camera Review

Executive Summary about : Canon SLR Digital Cameras By Philip Ryan

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The Canon EOS 1D Mark III is all about speed - quickly capturing great shots of fast-moving subjects in even the toughest circumstances.

Canon’s EOS 1D Mark III offers a luxurious cocktail of high-resolution, extremely low noise, blazingly fast burst shooting, abundant customisation, and a build quality and ergonomic design among the best you’ll find in today’s camera market.

If you’ve ever looked at the sideline of a major sporting event and seen a gaggle of huge white lenses, then you’ve witnessed Canon’s dominance in the sports shooting world. Add to that this camera’s amazingly low noise, high-end build quality, and vast custom-function menu, and you’ve got one of the hottest cameras to hit the market this year.

Design

It still has a built-in vertical grip, with duplicate shutter and control buttons, so you don’t lose functionality when changing grips. Menu and Info buttons move above the screen, while the playback button drops to below. The Select button from the Mark II N is now obsolete, thanks to the Mark III’s Set button, which is mounted in the middle of the large scroll wheel, much like the scroll wheels found on the EOS 30D and 5D.

Canon does place the exposure compensation button a little too far to the left, but since the large scroll wheel doubles as exposure compensation in Aperture- and Shutter-priority modes, it wasn’t a problem for me. Our biggest control complaint is that Canon didn’t clearly mark a hard button for white balance.

While the Mark II N used button combinations for bracketing, drive mode, and ISO, the only combo that remains in the Mark III is for bracketing. Drive mode gets doubled up with the AF button, with the two split between the small scroll wheel behind the shutter and the large wheel on the camera’s back.

If you’re the type that likes to change your focusing screen, you’ll like the fact that Canon offers 11 different kinds of optional focusing screens for the 1D Mark III. Like its predecessor and big sister 1Ds Mark II, the Mark III includes numerous rubber gaskets to keep dust and moisture out of the camera.

Features

At the heart of this camera you’ll find a newly developed 10.1-megapixel Canon CMOS sensor. Like all other 1D cameras to date, the sensor is APS-H-sized (28.1 X 18.7mm), which gives the Mark III a 1.3x focal-length multiplier.

Whenever you turn the camera on or off, the camera vibrates the IR-cut filter to shake away any dust that may have settled on it. To process the data from the sensor, the camera uses a pair of Canon’s Digic III processors, making it the first dual-processor camera that I’ve ever seen.

Instead of the 12-bit analog-to-digital converters found in Canon’s other cameras, the Mark III uses 14-bit converters, which theoretically allow for more tonal gradations than their 12-bit brethren. A dedicated AF processing unit drives the camera’s 45-point autofocus system, which includes 19 cross-type points. For comparison, both the EOS 5D and 30D sport only one cross-type point, while Canon’s 16.6MP 1Ds Mark II has a mere seven cross-type points. Cross-type AF points provide a higher level of sensitivity than standard points.

Exposure metering options are just as sophisticated as the AF system. The camera uses a 63-zone through-the-lens (TTL) metering system that offers full-frame evaluative metering, centre-weighted average, and partial and spot metering. Canon calls this last option “multispot metering.” In our field tests, the 1D Mark III yielded remarkably accurate exposures and was rarely fooled by tricky scenes, but the 3D colour Matrix Metering found in Nikon’s D2Xs — with its 1,005-pixel sensor and onboard database of comparison image data - barely  edges out the 1D Mark III’s system when it comes to very tricky situations. If you’re really worried about highlights, though, you can activate the Mark III’s Highlight Tone Priority custom function, which extends the upper portion of the dynamic range to help preserve highlight detail.

Including the one mentioned above, the Canon 1D Mark III has 57 custom functions. If you own a previous 1D series camera, don’t assume that the number-labels of specific custom functions will be the same on the 1D Mark III. Canon officially joins the live-view SLR revolution with the 1D Mark III, which lets you frame images with the big 3-inch LCD on the back of the camera instead of the optical viewfinder, should you choose to do so. Canon also warns that increased temperatures can lead to increased image noise.

As usual, along with this new SLR comes a new version of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software for RAW processing. If you prefer to use Adobe’s Camera Raw plug-in with Photoshop, you may be as irked as we were to find out that Adobe forces you to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop Elements 5.0 if you want to use the latest update, which includes the 1D Mark III as well as Fuji’s FinePix S5 Pro, Nikon’s D40x, Olympus’ E-410 and SP-550 Ultra Zoom, and Sigma’s SD14.

Performance

When shooting Raw, the camera took 0.5 second between shots. Shutter lag measured 0.4 second in our high-contrast test, which mimics bright shooting conditions, and 1.1 seconds in our low-contrast test, which mimics dim shooting conditions.

Continuous Shooting basically lived up to Canon’s 10-frames-per-second claim. After a full weekend of shooting many hundreds of shots in Raw+JPG mode, the battery hadn’t even drained halfway. The charger that comes with the Mark III can charge up to two batteries at once, though only one battery comes with the camera.

Image Quality

Images shot with the Canon EOS 1D Mark III can be absolutely stunning. Colours look extremely accurate, and the automatic white balance does an excellent job of neutralising colours under a variety of lighting situations. If paired with a sharp lens, the 1D Mark III can produce images with a vast amount of fine detail.

• Good: Extremely fast, 10-megapixel continuous shooting | Very low noise | Highly customisable | Well-designed body with weather sealing | 3-inch LCD | Abundant optional accessories
• Bad: Heavy | May be a bit too large for people with small hands

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