Are 5DIII users beta testers?

[LetTheRightLensIn]

However I have been wondering if this new super complicated AF system is just proving too much for 1 Digic processor.

Shouldn't think so - Art Morris is gushing in his praise of the 5D Mk III's AF, and the examples he's posting suggest he's not lying.

to be fair he's has gushed about just about every focusing system Canon has ever released from what I recall, I always take what the Canon sponsored shooters say about things with a bit of a grain of salt

that said, he may well be telling the full tale this time

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

I'd say no as well.

It'd be very difficult for their engineering to get back useful feedback from a broad and untrained customer base.

I think a prolonged beta period of the 1Dx with 50-100 experienced users with good rapport to engineering and clearly defined feedback processes would be much more valuable than a 5DIII with the same AF in the hands of tens of thousands of "normal" users.

Cheers, Robert

and yet it ws the tens of thousand of normal users who found the 1D3 AF issues, the 70-300 IS portrait sag issues, the 24-105 flare issues, the latest DPP softness bug, instantly realized the 5D2 video needed manual exposure control, realized the histograms needed to be outlined, brought up pattern banding, found the 5D2 black dots issue, etc. etc. etc.

i actually think the ten thousand users, some very technical minded, some very picky, doing 10,000 different, sometimes extreme things, tend to paint a better, deeper picture