As many of you know, I have been lucky enough to have a Canon EOS 1D X Mark III in my possession for more than a month now. People have been asking me to review this new top-of-the-line camera, but I really wanted to put it through its paces in order to do a fair review.
There are lots of photographers or tech reviewers who write reviews of a new product, basically looking at the spec sheets, or holding it in their hands for a couple of minutes. But in my mind, there is no better way to review a product than to use it as my primary camera for a while and really get to know it in detail.
Now that I have become pretty familiar with the ins and outs of this camera, it is time to share my findings with all of you.
So… on to the testing.
I took the camera out of the box and was happy to see that the body is very similar to the previous models, with buttons and joysticks right where I expect them. I was also happy to see a familiar battery and charger that is basically the same as the previous model.
The one big difference is that the new camera has two CFExpress card slots, which as many of you know, I was really hoping for. I like this for two reasons:
1. I like having the two extremely fast cards instead of one fast card and one legacy card format which slows everything down. This is really important because I always shoot RAW images to both cards for redundancy.
2. I like having 2 card slots using the same card format. I always found it frustrating to have a CFast slot and a CompactFlash slot in the same camera.
The first photos taken with the Canon 1D X Mark III were taken in my backyard. I like to use a new camera for non-client shoots for a while to build trust and familiarity with the camera and memory cards. The last thing I would do is use this camera on a paying job before I knew how to control it. I need to know that the images will be captured correctly in the camera and stored correctly on the memory cards before using it in a real-world situation.
This was also a time for me to try out the new CFExpress cards from ProGrade Digital. I had inserted a 512GB card in slot 1 and a 1TB card in slot 2, so capacity was not a problem!
The first couple of photos were of my dog, Cooper, who was nice enough to pose for me. It was my first time holding the camera and trying to the new smart controller for moving the focus point (more on that in a little bit). No fast action here, but it gave me a chance to inspect the image quality of the camera, which looked really great.
We were dog-sitting for a friend and our dog Cooper decided to play with Milo and give me some action shots. This was the first time trying the fast burst shooting of 16fps. The first thing I noticed with the 1D X Mark III was that it felt totally familiar in my hands.
Having used a 1D X and a 1D X Mark II in the past, I felt right at home shooting with the new body. The one big difference is that the new model has a touch screen LCD. I have gotten used to this on my Canon 5D Mark IV and find it very useful when shooting in the field.
Shooting at the fast burst rate enabled me to catch this shot of Cooper with all four paws off the ground. (Cooper forgets that he is 8 years old and still thinks he is a puppy).
This was my first chance to play around with the new smart controller. What is the smart controller? Canon took the back button focus button and added a new twist. This button now acts as a virtual joystick, so that if I move my thumb along the back of the button, the focus point will move accordingly. This can be incredibly handy, but also takes some getting used to.
There were a couple of times when I pushed the back button to focus and inadvertently moved the focus point to a location I did not want. But, with time, I have gotten used to this and really appreciate the feature a lot. What I have found is that the smart controller is optimum when shooting portraits, but I still prefer a locked single point of focus for sports.
My last trip, before all this COVID-19 craziness, was to Las Vegas for the WPPI show. I was not planning on bringing my 1D X Mark III to Las Vegas, but right before leaving, I had the offer to meet up with my buddy Drew, Canon USA’s top tech guy, who offered to help me customize the settings to get the most out of the new features of the camera. That turned out to be awesome, and I will tell you more about that in a minute.
While at the show, there was a rain booth set up for people to photograph models dancing in water. I saw this as a perfect time to try out these new settings.
I used the new 1D X Mark III at it’s full speed at 16 frames per second, with a Canon 24-105mm lens to capture the dancers. The super-fast frame rate of the camera allowed me to capture them at the peak of action.
The newer focus system also did a very good job of locking in on the dancers as they moved around at a fairly quick pace.
As I mentioned, Drew sat down with me to give me pointers on the new camera. And there is a lot to learn on this new piece of hardware. The Canon 1D X Mark III looks a lot like the Canon 1D X Mark II, but looks can be deceiving. What is under the magnesium alloy body is very different from the previous model.
One of the biggest differences of the 1D X Mark III is the new face and head detection. I was shown how to tweak the camera to take advantage of the face and head detection covering most of the frame. This means that once I locked in on a person, it would follow them even if they moved off-center from the lens.
I got credentials to shoot the San Jose Earthquakes game and put the camera to a test. I mounted the Canon 200-400mm lens to the 1D X Mark III and found the focusing system to be noticeably faster and more accurate than the 1D X Mark II.
I would lock focus on a particular athlete and then let the camera follow them from that point. As long as I kept the athlete in the frame, the tracking stayed on them, even if someone briefly ran in between them and me. This allowed me to capture images like this, where the Earthquake player is in perfect focus even though he is not in the center of the image.
The camera is capable of shooting 16 frames per second (fps) when using the shutter and 20 fps when in live view mode. This is great except that I can not imagine shooting a sporting event in live view and trying to follow fast action using the screen on the back of the camera. But, needless to say, 16 fps is plenty fast and allowed me to easily capture the peak of action during the game.
Even though I was shooting in RAW mode using the ProGrade Digital CFExpress memory cards, I never once filled the buffer of the camera. These cards can transfer 1600MB/s per second, which is nothing short of amazing.
I kept the camera in Auto White Balance for the entire afternoon and found it to be very accurate in the representation of the colors.
Note: Some of you may be wondering about the video capabilities of the new camera. But since I am primarily a still photographer, I will leave the video review to the experts who know that side of the business way more than I do.
My next test of the camera was in a completely different environment. My niece and her husband asked if we could take portraits of their one-year-old son. This time I was using the camera at higher ISOs indoors and going outside with different lenses.
Patrick did not move at the speed of a soccer player, but he definitely moved faster than a year ago, when I took his baby photos. Once again, the 1D X Mark III (this time combined with the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens) was tack sharp on his eyes.
After taking a bunch of portraits of the little guy on the grass and standing, they asked if I could get some photos of him in the swing. As soon as I started photographing him, I realized that this was a perfect test of the new focus system.
The following images really help tell the story of this new face and head tracking.
Using back button focus, I locked focus on Patrick and then hammered the shutter at the full speed of 16 fps. Even though his head was moving off-center of the frame, the focus stayed perfectly on him. You can scroll through the following images to see how accurate this was!
I figured that the black swing would interfere with the focusing of his face, but that was not the case.
This sequence is a perfect example of how I set up the shot. In this image (above) I locked focus on Patrick when he was dead center and the focus point was right on this face.
Then, as he was going back and forth, I just held down the back button and the focus points moved with him.
You can see here that his face is well off the center of the image, but the focus is still perfect. If I were to try this with the previous Canon models, I would have had to move the camera and lens to keep the focus point on his face. This would have been very difficult to do and would have yielded a lot less useable images.
The Canon 1D X Mark III has a newly designed 20.1-megapixel CMOS sensor which is ample for most of my photography. Do I wish for a little more resolution? Maybe. I do like the file sizes of the Canon 5D Mark IV which captures at 30.4MP, but having clean images at higher ISOs is still the most important thing to me. And I know that cramming more megapixels onto a sensor can degrade the high ISO sensitivity.
A couple of weeks ago, I was doing a portrait shoot for a young lady who was about to have her bat mitzvah. Well…until it was postponed due to the Covid-19 virus outbreak. For this shoot, I used the Canon 1D X Mark III with a Canon 600EX-RT flash mounted on the hot shoe of the camera.
Canon has designed a new low pass filter for better lens sharpness, and the image quality of the camera is exceptional, with the colors, skin tones and clarity being everything I was expecting from a pro camera. I don’t fully understand how the new DIGIC X image processor works, but I can tell you that everything in this camera is fast. From focusing speed, the processing of the image, to data transfer to the card
