LALightPhoto
Posts: 53
Los Angeles, California, US
Well ... sort of. Took delivery of my 5D Mark III's a couple of weeks ago. I'd been shooting Mark IIs for a couple of years. For anyone who is a Mark II shooter and who is wondering... Here are my impressions.
1. The MarkIII focuses dramatically faster. This is a night and day difference and in my mind the best reason to buy the Mark III.
2. The MarkIII sensor is dramatically better in low light situations. I'm getting very useable raw images up to 6400 ISO.
3. The Mark III has a much more intuitive menu system. I use a lot of custom functions and with my Mark II I always had to go back and check the manual for the toggles. The Mark III uses pictographs.
4. I don't know that I'll ever use it ... but the electronic level is slick.
5. The shutter is much quieter and sounds more solid.
6. It's a tactile thing, but I like the way the Mark III feels in my hands.
I'm not a big believer in switching camera makers if you're an experienced shooter so if you're a Nikon this is in no way trying to convince you to be a Canon. But if you're a Canon and you're wondering if the Mark III is worthwhile rent one, borrow one, steal one (just not one of mine) and shoot it and you too will be in love.
LALightPhoto
Posts: 53
Los Angeles, California, US
I do think it's sort of funny that any time someone posts about a brand (and it is particularly true of Canon, the very next post is always a snarky Nikon remark).
Kaouthia
Posts: 3,080
Lancaster, England, United Kingdom
I do think it sort of funny that when you buy a Canon, you trade in your sense of humour.
It wasn't a "snarky comment", it was a joke. Hence the at the end, although perhaps it was a little too subtle.
The next line was in fact serious. I couldn't give two shits what you shoot, as long as you're happy with it.
I also use Canon DSLRs from time to time, and they work just fine with my Nikon lenses too, so there's no reason to exclude Nikon users from renting one of these, especially for those shooting video (at least, not after April when Canon release the firmware update to give it features the D4 and D800 already have).
WMcK
Posts: 5,191
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Neil Snape wrote: Film modes, better but they need to have raw uncompressed now. It'll come long after they have lost many to Nikon rightfully justified.
Is Canon compression not lossless? If so uncompressed shouldn't make any difference.
Or is the Mk III using lossy compression?
Is Canon compression not lossless? If so uncompressed shouldn't make any difference.
Or is the Mk III using lossy compression?
I am a beginner with the film stuff but currently from the last few days webinar at CreativeLive, they said it has a bad choice for a compressed format with H.264 taking away from the edit quality, if tweaked. Nikon have raw output, Canon will with the update in April.
Kaouthia
Posts: 3,080
Lancaster, England, United Kingdom
WMcK wrote: Is Canon compression not lossless? If so uncompressed shouldn't make any difference.
Or is the Mk III using lossy compression?
They all use lossy compression (h.264, motion-JPG, or some variant). 1920x1080 @ 8BPP uncompressed would be about 143 Megabytes per second (at 24p). Even compressed (losslessly), it would still probably be about half of that, so you're looking at extremely high filesizes.
The D800 & D4 offer a clean uncompressed HDMI output, so you can record straight to external devices like the Atomos Ninja, and encode realtime to broadcast quality ProRes or DNxHD, onto fast hard drives.
The 5DMk3 doesn't offer this at the moment, but it will do after the new firmware comes out.
London Fog
Posts: 5,003
London, England, United Kingdom
The D800 is without equal at this time, but maybe not for too long. Maybe the big C will unleash their mega weapon soon (3D?), I have some cracking L lenses waiting for it!
LALightPhoto wrote: I do think it's sort of funny that any time someone posts about a brand (and it is particularly true of Canon, the very next post is always a snarky Nikon remark).
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