Canon 5D Mark III first impression

by philg

My Canon 5D Mark III arrived yesterday from Adorama (also available from amazon.com but shipping date is unclear). I immediately took it out in the bright sunshine and tested the autoexposure system in the high-contrast conditions that often resulted in exposure errors of more than two f-stops by the 5D Mark II. The Mark III handled these conditions beautifully.

The amazing new autofocus system is not all that amazing for taking pictures of children (my subject). There are 61 autofocus points but the probability that the camera chooses the one that corresponds to your subject’s eye is very small (about 1 in 61!). The $3500 camera actually has face-detection capability (just like a $100 camera!), but as far as I can tell it is only available in the video mode. This is presumably because the sensor doesn’t see the image until the mirror flips up, but in any case it is not really a wonderful thing to have a picture of a child with a perfectly focused elbow and an out of focus face.

The silent operation mode is very nice. I’ve heard enough SLR mirror slap to last me the rest of my life.

A huge number of the camera’s features relate to post-processing of the image, e.g., optimizing for tone and contrast or correcting for lens design shortcomings. The 400-page manual does not make it clear if these settings have any effect on RAW files or if they are only applicable to JPEGs produced in the camera.

The switch layout is slightly different than on the Mark II camera and the menu layout is dramatically different. Some of the differences relate to giving more priority to video capture with a big “still/video” switch on the back of the body. The baroque custom function interface of previous bodies has been cleaned up.

Overall it is impressive that the camera, part of the first batch shipped to the U.S., works at all. If this amount of new software were delivered by a typical software company, there would be daily required patches!

8 thoughts on “Canon 5D Mark III first impression”

  1. ROTFLOL at your last comment, so true. I wonder how much (80%) of the Mark II software was leveraged… my guess is that the basic OS and UI was highly leveraged, the camera functions such as AE, AF, etc were somewhat leveraged and the sensor interface was also highly leveraged. Of course, how much of it was written in assembly – we can only guess 🙂

  2. We’ve abandoned film, CRT monitors, typewriters, floppy disks…how long do we have to wait for Canon to give up on the @#!% mirror box on their high-end cameras?

  3. The post processing features only apply to the JPG files. The RAW files are the digital negative. No software actually modifies those files. Adobe Lightroom saves metadata for the edits you “apply” to a RAW and then will actually apply those edits the rendered JPG you produce from the RAW.

  4. By definition the “post processing” settings don’t affect the raw data (not “RAW data”; raw it a word, not an acronym). At worst it’ll be baked into the embedded JPG preview, but certainly the raw data will remain. It’s likely that raw converters (other than Canon’s) will not even know about or honor those post-processing settings, so they always seem to me to be a waste on a high-end camera because they target a low-end demographic.

    With respect to your comment about auto-focus and children, you seem to not understand the impossibility of the physics. Young children can move faster than the speed of light, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle definitely applies.

    Congrats on your new toy.

  5. With Mark II, I found that it’s never a good idea to allow the camera to choose AF points. You are always better with ‘smart AF’ thing turned off and having just one point designated for focusing – most often, you want central point – that way, you and not the software will have control over what is in focus.

  8. I think it’s really glaring that only now are Canon and Nikon adding face detect to their high end cameras–Olympus’ m4/3 cameras allow for selecting near or far eye focusing and it works great. Granted there’s a difference with the mirror but you’d think they could figure a way around it, if they wanted to. Something innovative like Nikon’s J1 and V1 with phase detect sensor built into the imaging sensor itself.

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