canon 5d mark iii early impressions

8/13/2019 Canon 5D Mark III Early Impressions

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Canon 5D mkIII early impressions

Canon EOS 5DmkIII front Canon EOS 5DmkIII rear

I was not intending to upgrade my 5DmkII to the 5DmkIII as I felt that the benefits gainedfrom changing did not justify the cost to change. However, the "Camera Comparometer"on the Imaging Resources website demonstrates a very significant image quality hike onthe mkIII and this whetted my appetite. If you look at the website, you can set up the twocameras side by side and I recommend selecting the still life images at various Iso's - besure to click on each image to get the full size versions to compare. The new camera isoften claimed to show a two stop noise improvement at high Iso. Finally the new 61 pointautofocus system is claimed to be a quantum leap over the 5DII's 9 point system. Enoughof the claims - what do I think of the camera ?

What's good ?

In a nutshell - a huge amount. In most respects the mkIII is a significant improvementover the mkII which was already a great camera. The build quality is a step up and is notdissimilar to a 1 series camera now, just minus the integral battery pack/handgrip. In manyways the mkIII shares many functional similarities with the EOS 7D but is of course a fullframe camera with better image quality. Weather sealing is apparently improved and thecamera feels really good in the hand and the new rubberised coating is grippier thanbefore. The battery door feels more robust now and my lenses appear to be a tighter fit onthe camera than on other Canons with less play which is a good thing.The viewfinder nowgives a 100% view and is beautifully big and bright.

The On/Off switch has moved to the top left of the camera and this makes more room onthe back for other buttons. A "Q" button has appeared for the first time on a 5 seriescamera which is useful to jump through the menus without going into the sub menus andalso is handy when making changes to camera settings from the rear screen (via the

joystick).

At last the mode dial has got a lock on it - a push button that prevents inadvertentlychanging settings when getting the camera out of a bag or when carrying it, something thatused to drive me nuts before.
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The new rear screen is simply stellar. It is so bright and vivid with great resolution andcontrast and makes checking focus a doddle. New coatings make it easier to see in brightlight too.This is not only relevant to image playback but when working in liveview too. Ifind it much easier to focus manually now than previously.At last Canon has put a white boundary around the histogram on the rear screen so at lastit is easy to see where the histogram ends - hoorah.

I like the fact that many of the buttons are customisable and I have assigned the function

of Af Off to the Af On button for example. I can now shoot in AI servo and press/hold theAf On button to stop focus - effectively taking me to a temporary One shot mode where Ican focus and recompose. The camera facilitates rear button focus that can be assigned tothe Af on or star button if preferred.

The depth of field preview button is now much bigger and relocated into a much moreaccessible position than before. If preferred, other functions can be assigned to the buttonsuch as changing between AI servo and One Shot. The camera is extremely customisablenow.

I don't shoot much video but might be more tempted to now that there is a dedicatedswitch with a push button availalbe to change between liveview and video. No more

delving into menus. The C1, C2 and C3 buttons can easily be programmed to rememberevery setting that you have put into the camera and recall it instantly. So you could nowhave a Birds in Flight setting, a Landscape setting etc. Previously I had all three settingsset to default as the lack of lock button made them more of a hindrance than a help.

The autofocus system is probably the biggest single change and appears to be a hugeimprovement over the 5D mkII and borrows a lot of technology from the range topping1Dx camera's system.You now have 61 points to choose from rather than a paltry nine where it was difficult toplace a point over a bird's eye before particularly in portrait mode. You can now pre selectdifferent Af points in horizontal or vertical formats. The options for customising the Afthrough 6 "cases" looks sensible but each case has a sports example assigned to it andthese will need interpretation into wildlife scenarios. Gary Luhm has written a useful

article on this.I will not repeat a description of the many improvements to the Af system that have beenmade, as this is covered on other websites and I have not yet had a chance to put AI servoto the test on action subjects, but first impressions are very promising - lock on is verysnappy and every single test picture that I have taken so far has been critically sharp whenviewed at 100% later.* Since writing this article I have tested the AI servo a little by photographing my catwalking towards me. I got 23/23 images in critical focus which is a terrific performance,the 1D4 would have thrown in a few out of focuis frames in that sequence. Next I need totry a faster subject.I also tried taking some closeups of a butterfly collection in a case using ai servo andflash. I purposely moved the cameras towards the subject in AI servo while taking the shotand it was so sharp, I could see the scales on teh wings of the butterfly. The shot was

sharp because the flash was fast enough to remove motion blur, but the focusing waschallenged and got it spot on. This is very encouraging and I will now definitely use AIservo when focusing on butterflies and other flighty closeup subjects.

The frame rate has now improved from 3.9fps to 6 fps and the carbon fibre shutter's soundis fairly muted and is a "nice" sound. More importantly the shutter is less likely to scareoff jumpy subjects. The 1 series cameras are shocking for this - the 1DmkIV machine gunwith its hard metallic clack scares off most birds when working close up in a hide. The5DIII has another ace up its sleeve in that it can shoot at 3 fps in silent mode. The 1DmkIV
http://www.garyluhm.net/bio/tips_0512.html


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can only do this as a single shot and is still noisier. Silent mode is now really impressivelyquiet and will be incredibly useful to me I'm sure.

Most important of all, the 5DmkIII's files are extremely high quality in terms of noiseperformance, colour rendering, resolution and contrast. The files take cropping andsharpening very well - better than a crop camera does.

The mkIII can perform in-camera HDR and saves the individual RAW files separately tothe HDR. Also the exposure bracketing can now be performed on up to 7 bracketed shots.

It can also perform multiple exposures and also in-camera RAW conversion of selectedimages that are saved to jpeg (but not Tiff). I'm not sure if I will ever use this feature asthe whole point of shooting RAW is the control it provides the photographer in postprocessing.

I'm sure that there are improvements on the video side too, but as this does not interest me- I buy my cameras to shoot stills, so I will leave others to report on this side of thecamera.

What's not so good ?

The most disappointing thing is that I cannot reproduce the Imaging Resource website's

image quality differences between the mkII and the mkIII . They were using jpegs and Ionly shoot in RAW, so the differences may not be there in RAW. The 5DII files havealways been superb but I can see zero improvement with the mkIII.The mkIII only has1 more megapixels than the mkII but has gapless microlenses on the sensor and largerpixels as a result so I hoped for at least a minor improvement.

I have read a lot about the mk III's improved noise performance (up to 2 stops) but again Iam disappointed in this aspect. Rather than reproduce my findings here, I have foundanother website that already mirrors my findings : Bellissima Photo. In a nutshell, thenoise up to 800 Iso is very similar. Over 1600 Iso the 5DIII shows a tiny improvement (0.5stop) and this gets better still as Iso rises. I could now imagine using 6400 iso onoccasions but the difference between cameras is probably more like 0.75 stop at Iso3200/6400.

It may get a bit better still at super high Isos, but unless you are only reproducing smallweb images etc, I don't find such super Isos are very useful for quality work.The Bellissima article also makes the point that the Canon DPP software currentlyproduces images that are softer than ACR. I used ACR and certainly saw no loss ofsharpness.

One example of my results is shown below - focus was on the toy chimp's eye. 100%crops - Zero noise reduction, zero sharpening, converted identically from RAW with nowhite balance correction.

ISO 6400 5D mark II
http://www.bellissimaphoto.co.uk/photographers/canon-5d-mkiii-review-vs-5d-mkii-high-iso-test.html


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ISO 6400 5D mark III


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In the crops above, look at the noise in the green triangle - top right corner of both

pictures. The new camera is a little better, but both images would clean up very well withchrominance and luminance noise reduction in the ACR RAW converter or later with NRsoftware such as Neat image.


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From the X Rite colour samples it appears that 6400 on the 5D3 is similar to the 5D2 at3200These are with zero noise reduction and sharpening in ACR

Moving on , the Af points are now seen as black squares in the viewfinder prior toselection and are hard to see against dark backgrounds. They do not light up individualy inred as expected once selected, so you have to remember where the selected point is whileplacing the black square against your subject. Also the viewfinder illumination can beseen through the front of the lens.This is really annoying some stage set, theatre andwedding photographers. You can read more here. I should add that the camera will flash afocus confirmation in red. Also you can press the Af select button which makes all 61points light up (overbrightly) and then make a selection, but all goes black again afterselection.It is a shame that the method used in the 1D cameras was not adopted, where theselected Af point is permanently lit.Apart from this, the camera actually focuses very well in low light (easily beating the1DmkIV) and makes a superb low-light camera otherwise.

It looks as though this issue and the following one are known to Canon and may well befixed in a future firmware update. There is a video of an interview with the technicaldirector of Canon USA (Chuck Westfall)on the Canon Rumours website and at about 8mins you can hear what Chuck had to sayabout this.

The magnifying tool which used to be in the perfect place on the top right of the cameraand just required repeated presses to enlarge the image playback has now been moved tothe left of the camera and requires the left thumb to press the button and the right thumb toturn the main dial to change magnification. I think that this is a change from all previousCanon DSLRs and I am having a devil of a job adjusting. My muscle memory takes me tothe Af select button every time ! To make the review of images a one handed operation, I

have now assigned the Set button to double as the magnifying tool and it now goes straightto 10 x mag when pressed to check focus which is useful.

In Liveview mode, the aperture and shutterspeed is reported in tiny red on black numeralswhich are impossible to see in bright light. This was also the case on the 5D mkII - whynot just use white lettering on the black background ? I should add that this only occurs in5x or 10x view, in normal view the lettering iswhite on black(so why change it whenmagnifying ?)

Auto Iso has undergone improvements but is still not perfect. I never used to use it but
http://www.canonrumors.com/2012/05/canon-eos-5d-mark-iii-ai-servo-af-point-issue/http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1099852/9


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will consider it now for Birds in Flight. In Av or Tv mode you can now use exposurecompensation and also rely on the camera to automatically set the Iso to as low as possiblewithout inducing camera shake. You can now set a minimum and maximum Iso andshutterpeed, but Canon have missed a trick here. The minimum shutterspeed only goes upto 1/250 sec unfortunately. For action such as BIF , If only you could set it to any valueyou could set it to say a minimum of 1/000sec and the camera would maintainshutterspeeds of over 1/1000 sec at the selected aperture by adjusting the Iso.

The mkIII shoots at 6 fps which is quite an improvement over the 3.9fps of the mkII but I

suspect that Canon could have made this even faster with the Digic 5 processors fitted andthe improvements made to the shutter which is now carbon fibre .I will be really cross if Idiscover that frame rate has been hobbled due to the demands of video.

Like the 1Dx and previous 5DII, the 5DIII cannot autofocus at apertures wider than f5.6.This means that a 500mm f4 lens cannot autofocus when fitted with a 2x converter as theeffective widest aperture available becomes f8.Also an 800mm f5.6 cannot focus with a1.4x converter for the same reason All 1 series cameras prior to the 1Dx could focus to f8.This is a shame, as telephoto shooters are already missing a little reach on these full framecameras due to lower pixel density than crop cameras. If the 5DIII had 36 Mp like theNikon D800 then this would not matter so much as images could be cropped harder on thecomputer to compensate. With subjects that do not allow a close approach this is a minus,

but we must not forget that only a few years ago we only had cameras with around 6Mp toplay with and still managed somehow !

Should I upgrade to a mk III ?

In summary, when viewed in its own right, the 5DIII is a sensational camera with just afew minor negatives and is generally a joy to use. I would go so far to say that this isCanon's nicest camera to date and once you try one you will probably want one. Althoughthe image quality and noise performance are excellent, only the noise performance isimproved over the 5D mkII and then only by a small margin.

When deciding to upgrade or not, the primary question you need to ask yourself is "Will Itake better pictures as a result of the upgrade? " If you only shoot landscapes or macro or

product photography in a studio and manually focus a lot, I don't think that I couldrecommend the considerable cost of upgrade from the 5DII as your results will lookidentical to those taken with a 5D mkII.

However, for those shooting action such as wildlife or sports, the big improvements to theautofocus system and also weathersealing will probably justify the cost of upgrade alone.Some users claim that the 5DIII now has better autofocus than a 1DmkIV but I have yet toform an opinion on this as I have had the camera just a few days.I will report back later onthis.More reliable autofocus will equate to more pictures in focus and may enable you to get ashot that the 5D MKII would miss. Also, for me, the 3 fps silent mode is really a majoradvance as it will really make the difference between getting more than one shot of a shysubject before it is scared off. Also the small matter of a lock on the mode dial will alsoget me more shots as I have missed sudden opportunities in the past due to the dial havingmoved inadvertently and messing up my exposure.

The remainder of the differences I would class as "Nice to haves" rather than essential butthey do make using this camera such a pleasure. It is very hard not to fall in love with it asit is very capable in every department and as such is very easy to live with.


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canon 5d mark iii early impressions

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