Canon EOS-1DS Mark III review

Okay, let’s get one thing straight – the EOS-1DS Mark III isn’t just a studio camera. The S on this pro camera is also filed under the headings of Sports and Safari.

Give it the once over, and you’ll find an Integrated Cleaning System for dirt elimination, live view mode, and a viewfinder that constantly reminds you to go out and buy that wide-screen TV you’ve been drooling over.

Tough guy

This tough, lightweight Canon is, therefore, equally at home rigged up on Silverstone’s Stowe corner or thrown around on the back seat of a safari jeep as it is capturing the bride and groom for the mantelpiece or double-page fashion spreads. The reason? Well, at a sports-friendly 5fps it delivers a 14-bit depth resolution from a 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor and produces files that convert to over 100MB uncompressed 16-bit TIFF.

In fact, the resolution is so high that to match it on medium format with digital, you’d be looking to spend around £14k. The 1DS Mark III isn’t cheap but at £6k, it looks set to consign Hasselblad to the history bin.

Options, lots of options

Upgrading from a 40-D, the controls are well laid out and familiar plus there’s no scrolling tedium on the menu screen. Techies will love the 56 manual options which one boffin worked out equates to more than 20,000 different combinations. Aspiring pros meanwhile will be grateful for the My Menu pre-set option.

The auto-focus has been freaking out the testers because the traditional 45 focus points have been reduced to just 19. Don’t worry, they’re all still there, just hidden by a clever bit of technology that increases the surface area of the shot by grouping focus points for sharper images of moving subjects.

The other clever-clogs bit of tech is that the light metering has been divided up into 63 measurable areas. If the camera is in portrait for example, the sun is still in the sky but the body has been turned on its side so all the light metering will shift to compensate.

Launched to coincide with 20 years of the EOS system, every lens and accessory produced over the past two decades still fits the Mark III so putting all your old Canon lenses on eBay in order to afford this wizard of camera technology is not an option. You’ll need to open a savings account like the rest of us.