5D Mark III First impressions

[Trevoreast]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

Maybe the UK versions are ok ??

It's on the canon USA website but not the UK website at the moment

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/consumer?pageKeyCode=prdAdvDetail&docId=0901e02480538fc7&WT.mc_id=C126149

Trev

[clikklik]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

I don't know if anyone travels to the middle east but I'm presently in Dubai and I saw the 5DIII on sale in a couple of camera shops (one of them a Canon store) retailing for just under £2400 for the body. Strangely other bodies and lenses are about the same price as the UK.

Wayne, if I got one it would be from Adorama, around 2,150 plus a little shipping; if you're in Dubai get tickets for the final Sandance of 2012, my birthday is on the 3rd so Norman will be on the decks at my birthday bash, we got VIP tickets and can't wait.

[DaveCurley]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

Just heard from Calumet this morning, that my 5D3 is not now being delivered until mid May at earlist due to Light leak issue and Raw process problem. This should give Adobe time to update Lightroom and P/S.

Hope it arrives for June as I have booked 2 weeks following Otters and Whales around the West coast of Scotland

[Trevoreast]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

Hope it arrives for June as I have booked 2 weeks following Otters and Whales around the West coast of Scotland

I hope you get your camera soon, and look forward to seeing the pics from your trip.

Well at least this shows that Canon will issue product recalls and delay sales to suppliers when it’s in the best interests of customers regardless of potential damage to their reputation.

Trev

[Wayne Els]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

Clikklik,

Sadly I will be back in the UK, probably on Sunday. I didn't fancy the last Sandance line-up and I didn't bother with the Eagles either, mainly because getting back from the gig is a mare, although that was at the Rugby not at Atlantis like Sandance. Have a good party!

[DrJon]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

Even without the light leak (and the somewhat high price) I'm putting any 5DmkIII thoughts on hold for a while... the 5DmkII still does pretty good and I'll play a waiting game to see what happens.
Oh, and this:

http://www.dxomark.com/index.php/Cameras/Compare-Camera-Sensors/Compare-cameras-side-by-side/(appareil1)/795|0/(brand)/Canon/(appareil2)/792|0/(brand2)/Nikon/(appareil3)/483|0/(brand3)/Canon

Didn't help... (Not that there is any chance of me going Nikon.)

[briansquibb]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

This light leak IMHO has been totally over played - it only exists when shooting with the lens cap on

DxO testing has been totally discredited following their results for the D800 having a DR of over 14. Good trick if you can do it with only 14bits to play with.

[Trevoreast]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

This light leak IMHO has been totally over played - it only exists when shooting with the lens cap on

Here is the Product Advisorie post on Canon's Website.

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/consumer?pageKeyCode=prdAdvDetail&docId=0901e02480538fc7&WT.mc_id=C126149

To Users of the Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR Camera

Thank you for using Canon products.

The phenomenon described below has been confirmed when using the Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR Camera.
Canon is now examining the countermeasures and once the countermeasures are decided, we will post the information on our Web site.
Phenomenon
In extremely dark environments, if the LCD panel illuminates, the displayed exposure value may change as a result of the AE sensor’s detection of light from the LCD panel.

Affected Product
Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital SLR Camera

Support
Once the preparations are complete, we will be making an announcement on our Web site.

This information is for residents of the United States and Puerto Rico only. If you do not reside in the USA or Puerto Rico, please contact the Canon Customer Support Center in your region.

Please register the EOS 5D Mark III. By registering, we will be able to notify you via email when service updates are available. If you already registered, please ensure you are opted-in to receive the notification.

Thank you,
Customer Support Operations
Canon U.S.A., Inc

If it's just shooting with the lens cap on, how come they haven't worked out the "countermeasure" yet.
Surley the counter measure would be remove the lens cap LOL

Sorry, I have to go with the Canon official line on this.

Trev

[DrJon]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

You can easily get more DR than you have bits, you just don't have the bits evenly spaced (which is easy to do).

The World seems full of people having a pop at DXO as they don't like their results, but they do rigorous scientific testing, which is better than pretty much everyone else. However I do have two things I don't like about them, the first one is when they bundle a lot of stuff into one number. For example having one sharpness rating for a lens, or an overall score. Also some of their numbers need understanding before comparing with some number from another source.

Summary - I think DXO do good work, just look at the detailed results.

I think the light leak is not a good thing, and I don't think it's just with the lens cap on from some of the video examples I've seen. Still, I can't see it having much of an effect in the real World and I'm convinced Canon will sort it out, they are usually good at that.

I should add I will miss the improved AF that would have come from an upgrade, but I'll wait a while yet and see what comes along, my 5DmkII is still as good as it was three months ago.

P.S. technical paper here is good on stuff like multi-slope ADCs: http://harvestimaging.com/pubdocs/14...20Magazine.pdf
Then again 99% of people would be better off with the beer analogy: http://www.manufacturingnewsletter.c...technology.pdf
(Err, okay, other than the cute Beer analogy that one's fairly technical too...)

[rajjayaraj]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

P.S. technical paper here is good on stuff like multi-slope ADCs: http://harvestimaging.com/pubdocs/14...20Magazine.pdf
Then again 99% of people would be better off with the beer analogy: http://www.manufacturingnewsletter.c...technology.pdf
(Err, okay, other than the cute Beer analogy that one's fairly technical too...)

Thanks Jon for the link some very interesting read.
Raj

[briansquibb]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

The light issue only happens when you are shooting with the lcd light on - was also present in the 40d and 5D2 as well. You will find that the camera is operating within specs so there wont be a recall, although I reckon there will be a class lawsuit by the US togs because that is their culture.

DxO - you can only record a dr of 14 in 14bits. We are not talking of HDR here. Their lens results are also under question too - how is a 300 f/2.8 a worse lens than a 70-300 non L?

It seems to me that whatever testing they are doing it doesn't relate to real life.

I have a copy of their software too - not that impressed with that either.

[Trevoreast]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

I can only assume your just having a bit of fun Brain.
I’m all for that, photography forums, can get too serious at times.

Yesterday you said it was shooting with lens cap on

I think it's the illuminated lights on the back, ie the info, play buttons etc.

LOL They should have just used that "glow in the dark paint" the type kids used to have on their Dracula models.

Trev

[DrJon]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

There are also videos showing the exposure changing if the sun is on the top LCD and then someone shades it. Although I still think it'll be a pretty minor issue and Canon will offer to fix people's cameras if they want (presumably by adding some black tape inside somewhere).

You can store as much dynamic range as you want in 12 bits of data, you just spread them out to suit. That doesn't mean you have 14 bits of resolution over that range, just you can differentiate detail in areas of a pic with 14 stops of brightness between them.

Okay, here's the more technical version:

The biggest noise source in brighter pixels is photon shot noise. That is the fact that the photons are little packets of light and even at a set brightness level you may get a few more or less in a particular exposure period. So, for example if you have a perfectly even grey card you are photographing, that would expect to put 3,000 photons of light into the sensor during your exposure period, you will in fact probably get a few more or less as the photons arrive randomly at that average level. The distribution is actually related to the square root of the number of photons. This means you get more noise as the number of photons goes up, but as the photons are increasing at the square of the noise you get better signal to noise in a brighter picture, but actually more noise (in a bright scene photon shot noise will dominate other noise sources by a big margin).

If you have 12 bits of ADC to encode a scene there will be a brightness level above which you are just encoding noise in your least significant bits. Hence the trick is (in some of the latest sensors) to space the gaps between the bits out as the scene gets brighter. This means you encode more than 12 bits of dynamic range. Example using 3 bits:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
or
0 1 2 4 6 9 12 15

The second sequence encodes 4 bits of dynamic range, but with less resolution over that range than the first one, however once that resolution is only encoding noise you really don't care. So if you get incoming brightnesses of 0, 1, 7, 10 and 15 in the second example you will see 5 levels (0, 1, 6, 9, 15) and the first one 3 (0, 1, 7), of course in reality you would map (adjust the exposure of) the first one so covered the range 3-10 or so, giving 3, 7 and 10. Actually with 12 bits you are still encoding a lot of noise at higher brightnesses, but that's okay as you can try to statistically process it out.

At least this is all my understanding of it.

John

[Muscat]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

presumably by adding some black tape inside somewhere.

Outside would also work

[DrJon]

Re: 5D Mark III First impressions

Actually if you look at the tear-downs of the 5DmkIII there's lots of black tape inside...

http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2012/04/5d-iii-strip-tease

Rather them than me...