Big Announcements Coming Next Week [CR3]

[jrista]

KR says: "12 channel parallel readout."

He also says 1080/60p, 7 FPS, ISO 100-16,000, and some other stuff that doesn't match any of the other rumor sites. Shrug, it's all guesswork at this point.

7fps (for full frame mode) would be nice but I do not believe it even for a dual digic 6!

Isn't the original 7D strapped with dual Digic 4? That was 8FPS and 18.1MP The 7D2 is Dual Digic 6 and 20.2MP with 10FPS. Seems to me there's more headroom in those processors to allow a couple more FPS than 5 even with 50MP. I suspect it's more an issue with the shutter assembly than the CPU power. This of course is assuming the rumor specs are ACTUAL specs. the 5D3 only did 6FPS at 22MP with a single Digic 5+. They save the super high end shutters for the 1 series.

There is more to slower frame rate than simply whether you have the bandwidth or not. The higher your operating frequency in an IC, the more noise. At a slower readout rate, you can run the ADC units slower, which will introduce less noise. This is actually one of the big reasons serious astrophotographers get CCD cameras...most have a "high speed" mode and a "high quality" mode. The high speed mode usually has a readout frequency for components of 8-10Mhz, while high quality mode drops that to 800khz-1mhz. The difference in read noise can be quite significant, resulting in stops more dynamic range.

For a "top IQ" camera, I am honestly a little surprised by the 5fps...but Canon is probably trying to stay competitive with the D810. Still, better 5fps for the 5Ds models, than 8-10fps.

The increase in readout channels would also help there...as that divides up all the pixels to be read out among more ADC units, allowing each one to be reduced on operating frequency even more. Still, Exmor trounces Canon in this area...with column-parallel ADC. I still think Canon will have a problem with read noise...increasing parallelism from 8 to 12 is nothing.