Coming from an older Canon camera one thing I noticed is things haven't actually changed a whole lot (I didn't see the 5DIII gave me anything that made it worth the cost, so got Panasonic GH bodies as my "other" camera as they offered a bunch of new and useful things). Even jumping two generations is not even vaguely a science-fiction experience.
Here's my thoughts since last Thursday, when I got the camera.
* The files are big. Really big. I usually shoot Raw+LF JPEG so if I'm in a hurry I have a picture ready to go. After seeing JPEGs getting to over 20MB I changed that to the medium compression and they seem to top out at 13.5MB. That's still a lot!
* The files are big. Really big. I know I said that already. While waiting for new/fast SD card to arrive I just put my Eye-Fi card in the camera, I have one of the faster ones they make (16GB Pro X2, 22MB/s writes). I assumed a big-ish buffer plus reasonable write speed would be good. It really wasn't. Shooting House Martins I sometimes just watched great things happen in front of me while waiting and waiting for the buffer to clear to allow even one more shot. Of course the buffer shrinks at high ISO too (I was at 800). It's much nicer now the faster card is here, but shooting 2-3 frames a second you will run out of buffer and most cards won't clear that for a while. (A 95MB/s max speed card will probably write about an image a second, the Eye-Fi was about 4 secs per image. Doesn't sound long but count "one thousand and one" ...)
* On the same subject - Eye-Fi cards are supported, yea! Not sure I'll bother though as the speeds are likely to be pretty slow. Actually I had a CF adapter which allowed them to work fine in a 5DII, so not a great change (I just had it set to send the image when you protect it).
* Oh and the buffer isn't huge, it's okay but 50% more would have been nice.
* I hate the AF point illumination scheme. I know this is the same as the 5DIII but surely they could have moved from flashing the whole viewfinder red to the pre-5DIII scheme of just illuminating the actual points by now, how complicated can that have been? I really do dislike it a lot.
* There's noise. If you resize down to 24MP it looks really good. If you crop in to pixels ISO 100 is your friend. Rather strangely I get mixed results at ISO 800, some are low noise and some not so good. I don't fully understand why as the illumination levels were similar.
* There's (obviously) no EVF and unfortunately the rear screen isn't good in bright light (my RX100 is clearly better, for example). Also I shoot with my left eye and it does get smeared very easily by my face, perhaps they could have coated it with something to help with that? I do like optical viewfinders, but miss in-viewfinder image review.
* Battery life is okay. About twice as good as I was expecting from what people were saying. I shot 16GB of pics on my first outing and used about 1/3 of the battery. The first thing I do with a camera is turn off image review, which probably helps. (I'm looking through the viewfinder so not interested most of the time, I can push the play button as I take the camera away from my face.) It also takes 5DII batteries
* I don't really have the issues with blurry images I was expecting. Most of the blurry ones are just subject movement vs. shutter speed. I'm now not worried about hand-holding the camera.
* I've used DXO 10 for raw processing so far as people seemed unhappy with the results from LR (which I also have) on 5Ds/sr images. If you turn on DXO's whizzy Prime noise reduction (which seemed like a good idea) it goes from being slow (with 16-20MP images) to somewhat glacial. I have a fast computer.
* I really like the Fine Detail Picture Style, it's a big improvement on Standard, but I think the defaults need some tweaking. I'll have to work on that but maybe less contrast and a teeny bit more of some other stuff? At the end of the day I mostly work from raw, but having good JPEGs really doesn't hurt.
* It really really needs a custom option to just save the Raw data from inside the 1.3x/1.6x crop area when using crop modes, otherwise they are just frame-lines and not much use. Only saving 40% the data gives 2.5x the buffer clearing speed and would make it much better for shots you'll crop anyway.
* I don't think the single-point AF is any faster than the 5DII, just maybe more accurate.
* I think it drives my 85 1.2 II focusing more slowly than the 5DII, not idea why but it really does seem to. Less power to the lens? I have no idea.
* I haven't tried the video yet. Reading the manual I was worried as Canon originally said it read all the pixels (presumably in a 16:9 crop) for video, but the manual warns of moire, which I find usually means a camera is skipping pixels.
* I'd have liked the full manual printed, as after the first couple of days I don't need the basic manual as it's the obscure stuff I'll probably want to check later. Also as usual the manual does a rubbish job of explaining a lot of the stuff. It gets it over quite well, but doesn't explain it enough - I have a reasonable idea what most things do, but a newcomer to Canon would wonder about many things and have to start Googling.
* The Spot Meter only works at the centre of the frame, it can't be set to be at the active AF point.
* The anti-flicker mode borrowed from the 7DmkII (to solve problems shooting at high speeds with lights that are flickering) is a thing you may only need very rarely, but if you do it's great to have.
* It would be nice to have more choices of what to program onto the programmable buttons. All I've done so far is "Crop" onto M.fn, more through lack choices of what you can program onto them than anything.
* Live View (which I hardly ever use in DSLRs) is odd. The screen goes blank for over a second doing a Live-View shot. I'd assume it was doing a PDAF cycle but can't see any option for that. Surely all it has to do is an EFCS to start the exposure, use the mechanical shutter to end it and then open the shutter again, but it seems to me it's probably moving the mirror. What am I missing? (I don't mind if I end up feeling stupid as I did look at the manual.)
Update - I had someone try it with a 5Ds and it really is that slow, it isn't me doing something stupid. It appears the exposure happens just after you press the shutter, so what's it doing for the next second plus?
* Cropping plays havoc with the DoF, so if you think you'll be doing a fairly big crop you have to get your brain in gear over the aperture choice.
* I haven't seen any moire, so happy with my choice of the "r" so far.
* There's a lot of resolution, even non-50MP approved lenses (e.g. the 24-105) do really nicely. So far I've used the 16-35 f4 IS, 24-105 and the 85 1.2 II, assorted others are in the pipeline. No disappointments to date.
* The files are big. Really big. Hmmm... that sounds familiar from somewhere?!? It means I can't zoom through them checking what's good and what isn't at the speed I'd like. I'm investigating software that might speed this up. The trouble is you often need to view at full-res to see if the focus is good and movement blur not present.
I've got some nice images and it's a keeper, but not exciting like a GH4, just a useful tool.
I haven't Micro Focus Adjusted my lenses yet, as Reikan say the next beta of Focal Pro will support the 5Dsr so I'll wait for that. I did shoot the 85/1.2 wide-open and it's usable, but I suspect I'll mostly avoid challenging focus/DoF situations until I've adjusted it.
Here's my thoughts since last Thursday, when I got the camera.
* The files are big. Really big. I usually shoot Raw+LF JPEG so if I'm in a hurry I have a picture ready to go. After seeing JPEGs getting to over 20MB I changed that to the medium compression and they seem to top out at 13.5MB. That's still a lot!
* The files are big. Really big. I know I said that already. While waiting for new/fast SD card to arrive I just put my Eye-Fi card in the camera, I have one of the faster ones they make (16GB Pro X2, 22MB/s writes). I assumed a big-ish buffer plus reasonable write speed would be good. It really wasn't. Shooting House Martins I sometimes just watched great things happen in front of me while waiting and waiting for the buffer to clear to allow even one more shot. Of course the buffer shrinks at high ISO too (I was at 800). It's much nicer now the faster card is here, but shooting 2-3 frames a second you will run out of buffer and most cards won't clear that for a while. (A 95MB/s max speed card will probably write about an image a second, the Eye-Fi was about 4 secs per image. Doesn't sound long but count "one thousand and one" ...)
* On the same subject - Eye-Fi cards are supported, yea! Not sure I'll bother though as the speeds are likely to be pretty slow. Actually I had a CF adapter which allowed them to work fine in a 5DII, so not a great change (I just had it set to send the image when you protect it).
* Oh and the buffer isn't huge, it's okay but 50% more would have been nice.
* I hate the AF point illumination scheme. I know this is the same as the 5DIII but surely they could have moved from flashing the whole viewfinder red to the pre-5DIII scheme of just illuminating the actual points by now, how complicated can that have been? I really do dislike it a lot.
* There's noise. If you resize down to 24MP it looks really good. If you crop in to pixels ISO 100 is your friend. Rather strangely I get mixed results at ISO 800, some are low noise and some not so good. I don't fully understand why as the illumination levels were similar.
* There's (obviously) no EVF and unfortunately the rear screen isn't good in bright light (my RX100 is clearly better, for example). Also I shoot with my left eye and it does get smeared very easily by my face, perhaps they could have coated it with something to help with that? I do like optical viewfinders, but miss in-viewfinder image review.
* Battery life is okay. About twice as good as I was expecting from what people were saying. I shot 16GB of pics on my first outing and used about 1/3 of the battery. The first thing I do with a camera is turn off image review, which probably helps. (I'm looking through the viewfinder so not interested most of the time, I can push the play button as I take the camera away from my face.) It also takes 5DII batteries
* I don't really have the issues with blurry images I was expecting. Most of the blurry ones are just subject movement vs. shutter speed. I'm now not worried about hand-holding the camera.
* I've used DXO 10 for raw processing so far as people seemed unhappy with the results from LR (which I also have) on 5Ds/sr images. If you turn on DXO's whizzy Prime noise reduction (which seemed like a good idea) it goes from being slow (with 16-20MP images) to somewhat glacial. I have a fast computer.
* I really like the Fine Detail Picture Style, it's a big improvement on Standard, but I think the defaults need some tweaking. I'll have to work on that but maybe less contrast and a teeny bit more of some other stuff? At the end of the day I mostly work from raw, but having good JPEGs really doesn't hurt.
* It really really needs a custom option to just save the Raw data from inside the 1.3x/1.6x crop area when using crop modes, otherwise they are just frame-lines and not much use. Only saving 40% the data gives 2.5x the buffer clearing speed and would make it much better for shots you'll crop anyway.
* I don't think the single-point AF is any faster than the 5DII, just maybe more accurate.
* I think it drives my 85 1.2 II focusing more slowly than the 5DII, not idea why but it really does seem to. Less power to the lens? I have no idea.
* I haven't tried the video yet. Reading the manual I was worried as Canon originally said it read all the pixels (presumably in a 16:9 crop) for video, but the manual warns of moire, which I find usually means a camera is skipping pixels.
* I'd have liked the full manual printed, as after the first couple of days I don't need the basic manual as it's the obscure stuff I'll probably want to check later. Also as usual the manual does a rubbish job of explaining a lot of the stuff. It gets it over quite well, but doesn't explain it enough - I have a reasonable idea what most things do, but a newcomer to Canon would wonder about many things and have to start Googling.
* The Spot Meter only works at the centre of the frame, it can't be set to be at the active AF point.
* The anti-flicker mode borrowed from the 7DmkII (to solve problems shooting at high speeds with lights that are flickering) is a thing you may only need very rarely, but if you do it's great to have.
* It would be nice to have more choices of what to program onto the programmable buttons. All I've done so far is "Crop" onto M.fn, more through lack choices of what you can program onto them than anything.
* Live View (which I hardly ever use in DSLRs) is odd. The screen goes blank for over a second doing a Live-View shot. I'd assume it was doing a PDAF cycle but can't see any option for that. Surely all it has to do is an EFCS to start the exposure, use the mechanical shutter to end it and then open the shutter again, but it seems to me it's probably moving the mirror. What am I missing? (I don't mind if I end up feeling stupid as I did look at the manual.)
Update - I had someone try it with a 5Ds and it really is that slow, it isn't me doing something stupid. It appears the exposure happens just after you press the shutter, so what's it doing for the next second plus?
* Cropping plays havoc with the DoF, so if you think you'll be doing a fairly big crop you have to get your brain in gear over the aperture choice.
* I haven't seen any moire, so happy with my choice of the "r" so far.
* There's a lot of resolution, even non-50MP approved lenses (e.g. the 24-105) do really nicely. So far I've used the 16-35 f4 IS, 24-105 and the 85 1.2 II, assorted others are in the pipeline. No disappointments to date.
* The files are big. Really big. Hmmm... that sounds familiar from somewhere?!? It means I can't zoom through them checking what's good and what isn't at the speed I'd like. I'm investigating software that might speed this up. The trouble is you often need to view at full-res to see if the focus is good and movement blur not present.
I've got some nice images and it's a keeper, but not exciting like a GH4, just a useful tool.
I haven't Micro Focus Adjusted my lenses yet, as Reikan say the next beta of Focal Pro will support the 5Dsr so I'll wait for that. I did shoot the 85/1.2 wide-open and it's usable, but I suspect I'll mostly avoid challenging focus/DoF situations until I've adjusted it.
offerings from the likes of Olympus for mountain hikes.
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