EOS 5DS Live view

[bob s]

I have some very specific questions on the live view functionality of the 5DS that I am hoping someone with a 5DS can answer for me.

1) Can you view the image on the PC without any camera menus?
2) Any idea on the frame rate sent to the PC? I assume live view uses a fixed HD resolution?
3) Can you crop the cameras image before it is sent it to the PC and if so by how much?
4) If you can crop the image, is there any means of selecting the area that is cropped before it is sent to the PC?

I know there are all strange questions but my hope is with the hi resolution sensor I might be able to digitally zoom around the image with a PC and use the setup as a sort of low magnification microscope. From doing some calculations with the sensors resolution and a 100mm Marco lens, I know the camera would be perfect for my needs IF the cameras firmware will allow it.

Thanks very much for any relative information.

 

[Zeidora]

Tried on 5DsR, but should be the same.
1 Yes.
2) looks like continuous movie to me, so I would *guess* >24 fps.
3) you can use the magnification function on the physical camera up to 16x and move the magnified live view area around with the joy-stick. You can also select 1.6x crop mode both on camera and in software, so you get up to 1.6x16 ~25x magnification. Although software displays location of magnified area and has magnification buttons, I can not change the magnification. Sometimes, I could change magnification down to 1:1 in software, but not always (no idea why) and never up.
4) move area around with camera joy stick, or with yellow arrows at edge of image area in software.

What you did not ask for, but anyway, I used the tethered shooting on a 4k display (NEC PA322: gor-ge-ous!) but the Remote shooting window cannot be made larger than 2560 x 1440 pixels. You can scale the display resolution down, but that's not the point of a 4k display.

The image on a dedicated stereomicroscope (use Zeiss Discovery V20 with planapo 0.63x and 1.5x) is WAY superior. The magnified image has significant movie grain.

 

[bob s]

Thanks Zeidora.
My hope is to use live view for some live inspection work (of circuit boards) and then document with photos. Lighting wont be an issues so I am hoping the "Movie grain" wont be too bad. For the photos I expect that I may need to do some focus stacking. Hopefully Cannon will work on the firmware to get some of the magnification bugs out but in general it sounds like it will do what I need it to do.

 

[Zeidora]

How much mag do you need? Or how big/small an area do you want to get detail from? With MP-E 65 mm, at 4:1 you max out the resolving power of the lens at f/2.8 on 5DsR, so you can resolve around 10 µm. See my other post here
http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php?topic=27058.msg534841#msg534841

Re focus stacking, depth of field is minuscule, so you will benefit from computer controlled motorized focusing stage (Cognisys StackShot). For software, forget about Photoshop. For those kind of applications is worse than useless. I have both HeliconFocus and Zerene and like Zerene a bit better because it tends to produce fewer edge artifacts.

Re processing, see the post above re computer power required to crunch the numbers.