Messages

1

EOS Bodies / Re: first pic of canon mirrorless?

« on: July 21, 2012, 04:12:19 AM »

By my rough calculations the EF-M lens mount would be about 15% smaller than an EF or EF-S mount and it looks more like a regular 22.3 x 14.9 APS-C sensor rather than the 18.7 x 14mm G1x sensor.
...

How can that be a 22mm lens if the front element is only 14mm across?

2

EOS Bodies / Re: first pic of canon mirrorless?

« on: July 20, 2012, 07:00:45 AM »

If you preffer a retro-like look for your cameras there is the Fuji X100

Now that's ugly. There are modern cameras that aren't retro or ugly, some of them even Japanese.

3

EOS Bodies / Re: first pic of canon mirrorless?

« on: July 20, 2012, 06:31:01 AM »

It certainly won't be called "M", since it's a more direct competitor to Leica's system than the Olympus OM was back in the 70s, and Leica gave them huge grief over their original name of "Olympus M". If the Japanese text says the name "M" is part of the rumor, this alone tends to discredit it.

As for the ugliness, it sure is, but there's no evidence either Canon or Nikon understand how much damage the ugliness of their cameras is doing to their businesses.

4

EOS Bodies / Re: Focus screen for 1dx.

« on: June 18, 2012, 04:19:28 AM »

I wonder why Canon has chosen to do this.

I don't see it as an attempt to shut out Zeiss. They go so far as to point out in the manual that you can selectively disable the peripheral illumination and chromatic aberration corrections per lens, quoting the usefulness with third party lenses.

Maybe it's cluelessness.

Maybe there is an Ec-S II in preparation, with the correct AF area marked or no AF area marked, and better than the old one.

I wonder if katzeyes will do one for the 5D3 and 1Dx like they do for the 7D?

I can't see the point. I don't want to lose spot metering and walk around with a table of exposure corrections for centre-weighted:

http://www.katzeyeoptics.com/item--Canon-7D-Focusing-Screen--prod_7D.html

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EOS Bodies / Re: Focus screen for 1dx.

« on: June 15, 2012, 03:21:20 AM »

The screen which most preferred for Zeiss on earlier 1 series cameras was the Ec-S. That's the one I use with Zeiss.

While you can still fit it to the 1DX, it is no longer supported in firmware. This means the camera will not meter correctly with it.

See page 327 of the (leaked) manual.

You will have to wait to find out whether it is possible to manually focus an f/2 lens with the 1DX's stock screen, other than using the electronic focus confirmation. It was not with the 1DS Mark III's stock screen. Electronic focus confirmation worked but many found that ergonomically less convenient than the Ec-S.

6

EOS Bodies / Re: The Last Flagship DSLRs

« on: June 12, 2012, 05:40:17 AM »

Add to that the resolution of EVF's, which is actually rather low, and often involves cycling the full set of pixels between red, green, and blue channels, results in far less than ideal results.

265,000 hits on a Google search for "temporal dithering headaches".

7

EOS Bodies / Re: Canon EOS-1D X Manual Posted

« on: June 12, 2012, 05:35:07 AM »

The Ec-S isn't supported (p. 327). You can fit it, but it won't meter properly.

So its omission from the "Technical Report"

http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php?topic=3078.msg65361#msg65361

wasn't a mistake.

8

EOS Bodies - For Stills / Re: 5D Mark III operating temperatures at high altitudes

« on: June 02, 2012, 02:28:34 AM »

Is anyone aware of what the operating temperatures would be for a situation where the Mark III would be taken to an elevation of almost 4 km (2.5 mi) and used straight out of the bag?

I have no idea how the camera would do, but if you mean going straight from sea level by plane or land humans don't do well at all. Google "altitude sickness" and read up on acclimatisation. It can be fatal.

At a rate of altitude increase safe for humans (days), your camera will have time to equalise its temperature with the outside. The pressure, of course, is instantaneously equalised, since your bag is not a pressure vessel. I think we can assume that a 5D Mark III will not explode at 4000m. In fact I'd guess it's been built to handle shipping by air at 10,000m.

9

Canon General / Re: Official Discontinued List

« on: May 22, 2012, 05:29:49 AM »

I am a little surprised at the 24mm & 28mm.

I think I read somewhere, maybe this site, that the reason the new ones had to be developed in the first place was that some of the components for the old model were no longer in production but stockpiled, and the stock was destroyed in one of the natural disasters.

10

Lighting / Re: Updates on the 590ex?

« on: February 29, 2012, 04:03:23 AM »

Sounds implausible to me. The "58" in 580 is the guide number in metres. I can't see Canon bringing out a new flash with a GN of 59m instead of 58m.

11

EOS Bodies / Re: 1D X Delay, Weight, Number of Shots ***Official***

« on: February 28, 2012, 06:57:05 AM »

I wonder how much the new battery regulations in Japan are affecting it as well.

The old battery is said to have 90% of the capacity of the new, so not at all.

12

EOS Bodies - For Video / Re: Why the hate for video capable DSLRs?

« on: February 27, 2012, 05:00:38 AM »

Performance per-watt continues to go up for mobile devices.

Not as fast as Canon is adding features, it seems. According to information in the following thread, the 1DX weighs 10% more and has 37% worse battery life than the outgoing model.

http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php/topic,3650.msg76993/topicseen.html#new

I don't claim that's all due to video, and in fact in that thread I speculate that much of it is not, but I do think the marketing department would consider this less acceptable if video weren't in consideration.

(Edit for typo above)

13

EOS Bodies / Re: 1D X Delay, Weight, Number of Shots ***Official***

« on: February 27, 2012, 03:51:02 AM »

For comparison, the specs for the 1DS Mk III are:

1390g including battery
1800 shots at 20°C

That is a 5fps camera with slightly higher resolution.

Presumably the weight and extra power consumption are due in part to the extra CPU which handles RGB metering and scene recognition, a feature I would never use.

14

EOS Bodies - For Video / Re: Why the hate for video capable DSLRs?

« on: February 25, 2012, 11:49:18 PM »

While that could be a legitimate complaint, it's not inherent to the inclusion of video tech; it's just a design error.  They could easily have put some stills-oriented button there instead.

A previous poster described in detail how the design process worked, and why it is more difficult to design a product to do two different things.

It's only burning the extra juice when it's processing video.  When processing stills it should be no worse than it was before.  Embedded CPU's like this don't burn a lot of juice just idling.

But it's not idling, and not halted. That CPU does things other than video. They had to use a bigger CPU, which has more gates and burns more power when it is doing those other things.  In some alternate design for the 1DX, there might have been a 4th processor dedicated to video that could be halted, but that isn't what we got.

The extra demands of video will push Canon to design more efficient processors and higher-capacity batteries.

I don't want a different, heavier, higher-capacity battery. I want to use my old ones. (Kudos to Canon, I can with the 1DX, but they are suspiciously silent on how many shots it wil last with an extra CPU on board, bigger than the old ones.) If there is new battery technology, I want smaller and lighter, not the same size with more capacity.

The demands of video will push canon to design faster processors, meaning better/faster in-camera JPEG (if that's your thing).

It's not, but I will admit it is for roughly the same people for whom video is. No raw video for them yet with current CPUs.

If someone with real chip-design experience wants to chime in with an explanation of how video capability limits stills IQ at the sensel level I'd love to read all about it.

Wasn't sensor heating and noise already mentioned?

Note that even the Leica M9 (a stills-only camera, if ever there was one) scores worse on DxOMark than the 1D4 for low-light, DR and color depth.  Sorry folks: just not buying it.

Strawman.

15

EOS Bodies - For Video / Re: Why the hate for video capable DSLRs?

« on: February 25, 2012, 09:38:19 PM »

I have yet to see a defect in current DSLRs caused by the addition of video.

Wait a few weeks and I suspect you will, in the form of the Canon 1DX. Look at the position of the "movie" button on that. Maybe the testers' thumbs are shorter than mine, but it looks to be exactly where my thumb sits on the current 1 series bodies. That compromises steadiness and convenience for stills. If so, it's a catastrophic design error.

Putting faster and more CPUs in cameras to handle the video decreases battery life. Battery life is one of the biggest differences between good stills cameras and bad stills cameras. The 1D Mk IV has significantly worse battery life than the Mk III and the only extra thing the CPUs have to do is video.