Neeneko said:
jrista said:
I'm sorry, but I have to smite you, my friend. If I could smite you ten times in a row, I'd do that, too. You don't seem to get that for the last several years, the ENTIRE time we've all been waiting for this camera, we all heard nothing but "LESS MP, BETTER ISO!! LESS MP, BETTER ISO!! LESS MP, BETTER ISO!!".
You do realize there is more then one person on the internet, no?
Sounds like you were listening to the people who agreed with what you wanted and took that for the whole community. Believe it or not, but Canon has multiple types of customers who have been asking for a variety of things, some of them wanting 'better ISO, less MP', others wanting 'more MP' and *gasp* these are not the same people!
Your assuming I fully agreed with the "Less MP, Better ISO" crowd (which, BTW, IS what MOST professionals were begging for...obviously there are outliers.) I personally was hoping for about 28mp, a stop or two better DR, and better AF (although I never dreamed of 61pt AF!) I personally wanted more MP, and the same level of ISO would have been fine as I'd mostly use a full-frame camera for landscape photography. I was hoping for a modest boost to mp that wouldn't make better DR impossible, not a revolutionary boost to 35mp or more that could have left me with the same DR and noise limitations. However despite not getting what I wanted, I'm PERFECTLY HAPPY with what Canon's given us. It was not a reduction of MP (which was certainly a plausible outcome, given the 1D X), and it appears to have been improved in ways I never imagined.
Neeneko said:
Simply put, the 5D III is a FANTASTIC camera from a specs standpoint. Canon listend to ALL of their users complaints, and fixed just about all of them, from what I can tell! Like the 1D X, it STOPPED focuing on megapixels, megapixels, megapixels, and STARTED focusing on WHAT PEOPLE FRIGGIN ASKED FOR!!!!!!!!! We just got a whopping TWO STOPS of NATIVE ISO improvement!!! The Nikon D4 didn't change native ISO one tiny bit, and neither did the D800!!
No. They listened to some submarkets and ignored others. Right now the people who were paid attention to are riding high and many, like yourself, seem to delight in bashing those who are not thrilled. Congratz, you are on top, I am sure your epeen is very large.
Canon
so far (remember, its likely we'll see more cameras from them by the end of the year) HAS LISTENED to their customers. Whenever I'd meet a gathering of Canon users, online or in real life, the most vocal groups were those who wanted better ISO (and more than a few were plenty happy to see that improvement accompanied by what they believed would be a necessary REDUCTION on megapixels.) There is an intriguing tendency about the people who are largely satisfied with what they have:
they aren't overpoweringly vocal! When it comes to resolution, Canon users in general have seemed pretty satisfied with 21.1mp on the 5D II and 1Ds III. It was the highest resolution sensor for a long time, and only relegated to second highest relatively recently...so they complained about what wasn't good: ISO.
The only reason the most vocal complaining is about megapixels
now is because of the release of the D800. Canon users are NOW GETTING VOCAL because Nikon released a fairly revolutionary (from a megapixels standpoint) high resolution full frame sensor at 36.3mp. It wasn't just 28mp, or 30mp, at 36.3mp it was a whole 15.2 megapixels higher resolution than the 5D II...a 72% increase. People want what they don't have, and suddenly, now they don't have 36.3mp in any currently announced Canon products. Ironically, thats about the only thing that really improved on the Nikon front from a stills photography standpoint (obviously there were improvements to video, however no one seems to be complaining about...or praising...that much at the moment for the 5D III). Nikon made a lot of noise about an extra stop or two ISO, but that was only expanded settings...the native ISO on Nikon cameras remained the same as the preceding models. The Nikon AF system remained the same. The frame rates remained about the same (or increased by 1fps in some cases). Metering systems did not change, etc.
Now contrast all that with the 5D III. The megapixels were improved by a small amount, but on top of that, it was given the RADICALLY improved top of the line AF module of the 1D X, a two full stop improvement in native ISO (to 25,600) making it the most sensitive DSLR camera on the market outside of the 1D X, significant improvements in noise at all levels of ISO despite the small increase in resolution,
what appears to be a fairly significant improvement in DR (yet to be proven by the likes of DXO and DPR, but apparent by manipulating the sample JPEG's floating around the net are very impressive indeed), the improved metering system of the 7D, the greatly improved 100% coverage transmissive LCD VF of the 7D and 1D X (which is fantastic, btw!!), a 54% increase in frame rate from 3.9 to 6, an extra CF slot that the 5D II did not have, and a host of other improvements over its predecessor (such as in-camera HDR and multi-exposure, in-camera photo editing, etc.)
From the standpoint of improvements over their predecessors, there is no question Canon has packed a HELL of a LOT into the 5D III, as well as the 1D X for that matter. The degree of improvement is stunning, and on
all fronts, not just in the area of megapixels (which, from a factual standpoint, did still
IMPROVE.) The improvements in Nikon's new cameras are marginal at best on the stills front (their improvements on the video front are still quite impressive), with the only significant point outstanding being the megapixel count of the D800...and the primary reason we have the NEW vocal group of Cannonites...the ones trying to scratch an itch they can't yet reach, and likely to be the next thing Canon addresses for their customers.
Neeneko said:
We just got an unbelievable, entirely unexpected 61 point AF system with 41 cross-type sensors!!! And to go along with that, we got a nice boost from 3.9fps to 6fps, 18 continuous frames, and dual memory card slots (and don't you DARE complain about the fact that they are not both CF or both SD...YOU HAVE TWO FRIGGIN MEMORY CARD SLOTS, and are probably sitting pretty on 50,000 unused SD cards that you couldn't use any more once you went to the 5D II!)
Which only really matters if one cares about autofocus (I rarely use it personally), high drive speeds (I usually go a minute or more between shots) and SD support (I don't own a single SD card, and having to keep two formats around is doable, but a little obnoxious).
Granted, having to use two types of memory cards is rather obnoxious, and there could be better improvement on that front. I'm sure there will be. The simple point I was trying to make is...you DID GET IMPROVEMENT. Based on some of the videos from Canon (I believe on the EU site), customers asked for both types most often, for whatever reasons, so Canon answered their customers by putting in both types of slots. Just another example of human nature...bitch and complain when you get something new that isn't 100% exactly what you personally wanted. I would prefer two CF cards, but I have a ton of SD cards from when I used my 450D that I can now use again...rather than have them waste away on a shelf serving zero purpose whatsoever (which I believe is very probably the majority case.)
Neeneko said:
So I will not call it a bad camera, I think it will be an excellent body for the submarkets it is targeted towards, but it is not everything to everyone, and there are people who have been wanting a MP monster, saying they want an MP monster, and still want one and are kinda miffed that not only do they seem to have been ignored by Canon (I suspect such a camera is in the pipes though) but people like you are retconning things to make it sound like we were asking for what you wanted all along, which negates our existence.. and oddly enough people get kinda pissed at rhetoric like that.
I think saying they have not been answered is a bit premature. There are still rumors out there about a 40mp+ high resolution D800 competitor due later this year from Canon. It may be an HDSLR, more part of the cinema line than the stills line, but then again, it could just as likely be Canon's response to the D800. Once plans are in motion and prototypes hit the field, manufacturers don't generally make radical changes in direction. I'd imagine the 5D III has been in production since shortly after the 5D II was released, and has probably had prototypes out in the field for nearly a year. I'm sure Canon knew about the D800 36.3mp monster long before any of the public, but you still can't spin up a whole new product to compete that fast (it seems to take canon 3-4 years to produce a new version of existing cameras, let alone develop something entirely new like a 40mp sensor stills camera that is still deserving of the "professional grade" title.)
As for retconning....well, your assuming what I want personally is the same as what most vocal Canon users have wanted (which is not the case, as I mentioned above.) I don't think I'm rewriting history at all. Canon users (not just a submarket, the larger market in general, but particularly professionals...who live and die by their gear and the quality of their work) have been very vocal about wanting better ISO performance, and they became only more vocal after Sony Exmor started blowing Canon (and pretty much any other) sensors out of the water from a read noise standpoint. There were legitimate reasons to be vocal about it as well...Canon sensors had improved, but usually at some cost (the 5D II sensor has very high low-ISO read noise at 27 e- which could sometimes produce fixed-pattern noise even in the low midtones (making it visible even without exposure adjustment), and the 7D, while it has lower read noise, is still considerably noisier than the competition at high ISO.) Canon did have an MP monster, all things being equal, at 21.1mp. The next highest resolution sensors at the time were about 10-12mp, so a 21.1mp camera was truly a revolutionary MP monster (being some 72% larger than the next highest MP DSLR sensor at the time...which is more than the 51% improvement the D800 has over Sony 24mp sensors.) Canon users, for a long time, did not need to complain...they already had the best, and claiming they have been begging for a new record-setting MP monster as vocally as they were asking for better ISO performance is a bit misleading itself. I don't deny that there are different groups of people asking for different things from Canon, such as myself, who would greatly prefer improved DR over anything else in a FF camera...but I
know I'm a
minority. That's nothing to mention the fact that most people who have done any printing themselves know that 21.1mp (let alone 36.3mp) is more than enough to blow photos up many times larger to multi-foot wall-spanning dimensions, without any marked loss in quality at proper viewing distances. The real power of higher MP these days comes from cropping (unless you literally want a perfect 300ppi print at 15x20 feet that can be viewed without any loss of detail from 4 feet away), however when cropping you simultaneously lose the ability to scale down and absorb noise that way as well...so uberpixels have their limitations regardless.
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