Eduardo Angel Visuals

Canon EOS 5D Mk III, 5D3, 5D Mark III has arrived.

Ok. Let’s start from the begin­ning: We are look­ing at a 22.3 Megapix­els, Full Frame (36 x 24mm) CMOS sen­sor sys­tem, pow­ered by a DIGIC 5+ proces­sor. Check this arti­cle if you want to fully under­stand the dif­fer­ences between the DIGIC 4 proces­sor on the 5D Mark II, and the new DIGIC 5+ on the 5D Mark III.

Some of the high­lighted fea­tures include:
• Dual card slots (1 SD/SDHC/SDXC and 1 CF). Sorry, no XQD on this one. What is awe­some about the dual cards is that you can a) record the same data to both cards, or b) record dif­fer­ent file sizes or types to each card, or c) auto­mat­i­cally switch to the sec­ond card when the first card is full. That’s great when shoot­ing long inter­views, or con­certs, for exam­ple.
• HDR with +/- 3 stops
• Improve­ment in noise reduc­tion by 2 stops
• Mul­ti­ple expo­sure mode
• 63 zone dual meter­ing sys­tem
• +/- 5 stops (the 5D Mark II has only 3 stops)
• iFCL meter­ing sys­tem with a 63-zone dual-layer sen­sor
• File For­mats: AVI, RAW, JPEG, H.264, MOV, MPEG-4
• Full HD video record­ing: 1080/30p, 24p, 25p; 720/60p, 50p; 480/60p, 50p

All the typ­i­cal fea­tures are here: Min­i­mum Shut­ter Speed (30 sec), Max­i­mum Shut­ter Speed (1/8000 sec), 100% cov­er­age viewfinder, etc, etc, etc. As expected, dura­bil­ity on the Mag­ne­sium Alloy chas­sis has been improved includ­ing a 150,000-cycles shut­ter, and water and dust addi­tional resis­tance.

These are the specs that REALLY got my atten­tion:
• It is now pos­si­ble to check two images side-by-side for sharp­ness, expo­sure, etc at dif­fer­ent aspect ratios (1:1, 4:3, 16:9) with the new “Com­par­a­tive Play­back” func­tion.
• There’s a Q but­ton that will process RAW to JPG on cam­era.
• The new cam­era shares the same exact 61-point High Den­sity Retic­u­lar AF sys­tem found in the EOS 1D-X (for half the price).
• There’s an iPod-like but­ton to make changes in the movie mode with­out adding noise to the clips. Smart!

• The 5D Mark III uses the same bat­ter­ies (LP-E6) as the 7D and 60D.
• The ISO war keeps get­ting bet­ter. The Mark III offers ISO 100–25600 (expand­able up to ISO 102,400) for stills, and 100–12800 (up to ISO 25,600) for video. Wow! Now we really could use an iPad as a Key Light!

Here’s an inter­est­ing set of high-res JPEGs sam­ples shot at ISO 50 to 102,800. The test was per­formed under low level halo­gen lights, which are per­haps the most chal­leng­ing to dig­i­tal sen­sors and noise reduc­tion systems.

Video Fea­tures.
There are sev­eral seri­ous improve­ments on this front:
•There are a cou­ple of new video Modes: “Silent and Low Vibra­tion,” but I don’t recall see­ing them on the pro­to­type I tested.
• The video res­o­lu­tion is Full HD (1920x1080), and the video for­mat is the same H.264, which I per­son­ally love because it runs natively on Adobe Pre­miere Pro and Light­room 4, and plays extremely well with online shar­ing plat­forms like Vimeo and YouTube.
• The record­ing buffer has been extended from 12 min­utes to 29 min­utes and 59 sec­onds. The 4GB limit is finally over.
• Fol­low­ing Nikon’s D800 improve­ment, we now have a 3.5mm head­phone jack for live audio mon­i­tor­ing and a Wind Fil­ter. Other ports include USB 2, HDMI, Mic Input, and Wireless.

• The LCD screen is vir­tu­ally the same 3.2″ 1.04 mil­lion as the Nikon’s D800. With a screen this size pho­tog­ra­phers are out of excuses for not using His­tograms the way they should.
• There’s a built-in info menu while shoot­ing video, which comes super handy to quickly check impor­tant set­tings like White Bal­ance, Res­o­lu­tion, ISO, Pic­ture Style, etc.

Regard­ing audio, the changes are pretty exciting:

“The cam­era includes man­ual audio level con­trol with 64 lev­els, adjustable both before and dur­ing movie record­ing. There is also an auto­matic audio level set­ting, or sound record­ing can be turned off entirely. A wind fil­ter is also included. Sound can be recorded either through the inter­nal monau­ral micro­phone or via an optional exter­nal micro­phone through the stereo mic input.”

—Click to continue  

“The EOS 5D Mark III includes new H.264 video com­pres­sion for­mats to sim­plify and speed up post-production work: intraframe (ALL-I) com­pres­sion for an editing-friendly for­mat and inter­frame (IPB) com­pres­sion for supe­rior data stor­age effi­ciency, giv­ing pro­fes­sion­als options to help achieve their ideal work­flow. Like the EOS-1D X, the 5D Mark III also includes two meth­ods of SMPTE-compliant time­code embed­ding, Rec Run and Free Run, allow­ing video footage from mul­ti­ple cam­eras and sep­a­rate audio record­ings to be synced together in post production.”

The new cam­era deliv­ers 6 frames per sec­ond at high-speed. Burst Rate and Frames per Sec­ond (fps) speeds, are NOT the same — shoot­ing speed, or fps, dic­tates the speed at which you can take con­sec­u­tive shots; Burst Rate dic­tates how many of those shots you can take in a con­tin­u­ous burst, with­out slow­ing down. We put together this chart to com­pare the most cur­rent Canon EOS sys­tems side-by-side:

New Acces­sories:
Sev­eral new acces­sories will be added to Canon line of toys. There’s a new flash, the Speedlite 600EX-RT, which is 20% faster than the 580 EX II, and comes with built-in wire­less radio con­trol (up to 16 chan­nels in 5 groups). We have a new Wire­less File Trans­mit­ter WFT-E7A sup­port­ing 802.11 a/b/g/n, and a built-in giga­bit Eth­er­net con­nec­tion. And soon we will also have a new GPS device (GP-E2), which will be the per­fect com­pan­ion to Adobe Light­room 4 brand new Map Mod­ule.

Here’s a hands-on test with  the 600EX-RT Flash and the STE3-RT Trans­mit­ter.

The 5D Mark III will start ship­ping by the end of this month for $3,500 (body only) and for $4,300 with the 24-105mm f/4 L IS lens.

So, is this the cam­era of your wildest dreams? Canon shoot­ers: Are you plan­ning to upgrade to the 5D Mark III or are you con­sid­er­ing the EOS C300?

Feel free to share your com­ments!