If you have not heard Canon just announced the 1ds Mark III with a new 21 MP sensor and, but of course, I have a few rambling thoughts about it. First off here are the basic new stats to get that out of the way:
• A maximum shooting rate of 5 fps, for a Canon-specified 56 Large Fine JPEG frames, or 12 RAW CR2.
• An ISO range of 100-1600 in 1/3 step increments, plus L (ISO 50) and H (ISO 3200).
• Promised much faster CompactFlash write speed, owing to the EOS-1Ds Mark III's support of the UDMA protocol utilized by newer CompactFlash cards such as Lexar's 300X and SanDisk's Extreme IV and Ducati Edition lines.
• The ability to configure a Speedlite wireless flash setup via menus in the camera (when the attached flash is a 580EX II).
• Most everything that's found in the EOS-1D Mark III, including dual DIGIC III image processors, 14-bit A/D conversion, JPEG, RAW and sRAW file format options, 45-point autofocus system, 63-area ambient metering, E-TTL II flash metering, 300,000-cycle shutter, 3-inch (diagonal), 230,000-dot rear LCD, Live View, Highlight Tone Priority, High ISO Noise Reduction and more.
• The Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III professional digital single lens reflex camera is scheduled to begin shipping in November and will have an estimated selling price of $7,999
So what gets me all hot and bothered is this tid bit:
"The ability to configure a Speedlite wireless flash setup via menus in the camera (when the attached flash is a 580EX II)."
In my dirty little brain I hope this means you can finally sync the damn thing to strobes faster then 250 of a sec. This slow sync is the reason why all my sport shooters have to go medium format so they can sync up to 800 ad really freeze the action. If this solves this it could be a very big win for people.
Now what makes me cringe is that the pixels have almost doubled. Why o why would that make me cringe? Another reason people go with a medium format solution is that it's just sharper. No debates. Medium format is just sharper. More glass makes for a better image. Even the 1ds Mark II was out resolving the lenses and producing softer images. Now we are gonna use the same lenses with a chip that has almost twice as much detail? Hmm... Me thinks there will be some very soft images coming around soon.
Still pretty sweet though and if I fell in a pile of money I'd buy one. Anyone wanna rack a big old pile of that stuff up for me?