dslr.ws

Canon is apparently halting the sale of their high-end 1D Mark III digital SLR, at least in the UK, and recalling unsold products so they can fix an issue with the autofocus. They won’t replace sold units, but they will repair them.

From the letter they sent to the dealers, the issue is apparently in “the adjustment of the AF Sub Mirror,” and Canon states that they believe that the issue only affects “a minority of the units in the market at this time.”

The phenomenon resulting from this problem (especially in high temperature) is that the optimal focus point is uncertain in AI servo mode, or that the tracking performance of AI Servo is not accurate.

It sounds like the firmware update that Canon released for the 1DMkIII a few weeks ago — which claims fixes in the autofocus system — may not have fully addressed the 1D Mark III auto focus issues that had been reported a while back. There’s no guarantee that this recall is related to that previously reported auto focus issue, but it seems like a good guess, and we’re all about making guesses around here. Facts? Facts are for the uncreative people of the world.

The Online Photographer has a list of the top 10 camera recommendations for fall 2007. Six of the ten are DSLRs, along with one digital point-and-shoot, two 35mm film cameras, and the Phase One P45+ medium format digital back.

The DSLRs that made the top ten are — in order listed on the site, though it’s not clear if that’s an actual ranked order or not — the Pentax K10D (“pretty much the camera with the mostest at the moment for the serious amateur and artist”), the Nikon D80 (“the D80 really feels right — a sort of baby-bear camera”), the Canon 5D (“the 5D provides exactly what many art and landscape photographers most need”), the Olympus E-510 (“the most feature-laden of the amateur DSLRs”), the Fuji S5 (“high dynamic range and very accurate color, and this makes it the #1 choice for the most numerous type of professionals and semi professionals, namely, wedding and portrait photographers”), and the Canon 1D Mark III (“simply a technological wonderment and a superb piece of engineering and design”).

The article also mentions a few other cameras in passing (e.g., the Nikon D3 as upcoming competition for the 1DMkIII), and is a good read overall (as The Online Photographer always is). You should click that link up top and read it all for yourself.

Steve’s Digicams has a review posted of the new Canon 1D Mark III. I’ve linked you to the conclusions page since that’s where the actual review starts; all of the earlier pages are more specifications and controls, and don’t really help from a review point of view.

The camera gets a very good review, although it is an extremely short review once you’ve taken out all of the basic stats about the camera that are available from spec sheets and press releases. The most review-like part of the review is the discussion of ISO noise:

The Mark III’s image quality at high ISO is very good. The image noise appears more like the effect of film grain than the imager noise of lesser consumer cameras. ISO 100 produces images that set a standard for what “noise-free” should be. Traces of noise appear at ISO 400 in shadow areas. At ISO 800, a barely-perceptible amount of noise begins to affect highlight areas.

And, no surprise, they like the 1DMkIII:

The bottom line – They say that you get what you pay for, and in the case of the 1D Mark III, it’s very true. We’ve become accustomed to a trend of new digicams replacing their predecessors with a combination of more/better features and lower price. This camera will not disappoint – the Mark III is an excellent value for the pro who needs its increased resolution and improved performance, and to the extent that the Mark III enables them to earn more income, they will buy it.

Well, there you go — you should buy it! And buy me one while you’re at it, I promise to speak highly of you for at least 7-10 days after I receive my free camera!

Yes, the website is called Pocket-Lint. It’s a real site with a real review just posted of the Canon EOS 1D Mark III. They actually have a surprising number of critical comments for a camera that’s generally very well-liked, which makes it a review well worth reading (in my opinion, much more so than the “reviews” that just tend to list a lot of specs and say it’s a great camera).

For starters, they say that while the camera has a much larger LCD than the 1D Mark II, everything tends to look underexposed on it. Then they go into focusing issues, which may or may not have been addressed by the new firmware that Canon released a few weeks ago:

For a kick off, the system would regularly try to focus on a background rather than the intended subject, even when the subject is large in the frame. It would also switch between trying to use s single AF point on one half press of the shutter release, then grouping if a refocus was initiated. Again things were not sure footed enough for me to be utterly convinced the focus was spot on where I needed.

Add to this a hit and miss performance when using the servo focus system when tracking moving subjects and it is rather disappointing. However, the bright, large viewfinder is super to use and the addition of a Live View mode, where you can use the large screen to help compose a shot, adds greatly to the usability of the Mk III.

They are disappointed that the 1DMkIII only has four exposure modes, although I’m not sure what else it should have. It has program, aperture priority, shutter priority, and full manual mode. Doesn’t that pretty much cover everything?

They also report that the image quality results are “mixed,” which is the first time I’ve read that in a 1D Mark III review. They love the metering results, although they complain that images tend to look soft with the default settings. My guess is that Canon is just giving you unsharpened images so that you can manipulate them in Photoshop however you want, which is generally preferable to cameras that oversharpen images in-camera, which isn’t something you can undo later. So my gut tells me that this is actually a benefit rather than a negative. As long as the detail is in the image — even if unsharpened — that’s good image quality as far as I’m concerned.

They love the high ISO noise performance, stating that “the new sensor and the DIGIC III image engine works wonders leaving image noise at levels, even at ISO 3200 that would be the envy of other as ISO 800.”

They wind up giving the Mark III an 8 out of 10, although it’s possible that with the latest firmware revision it would have already gotten a higher score:

he Canon EOS 1D Mk III looks unrivaled in terms of its burst shooting prowess and noise performance at higher ISOs. Ditto its handling, which, despite the weight is superb to use and easy to control thanks to very clear and simple to navigate menus, despite all the custom modes and adjustments on hand.

Overall, the good stuff is tempered by a couple of disappointments that include the LCD-exposure assessment issues and the focusing performance, which Canon have already started to address with the aforementioned firmware updates.

There are no sample images in the review, but it’s probably worth reading the full review for all of the details.