New Super Canon

You probably haven't heard this, because it's hardly been mentioned on the web at all, but Canon has come out with a successor to its top pro camera. It's called the EOS-1D Mark III. It appears to be a careful and thorough top-to-bottom revising of the Mark II, with no major changes or new design directions but lots of refinements and detail changes. The best summary of what the new camera offers can be found at Rob Galbraith's site, which is also hosting a .PDF download of Canon's excellent 63-page white paper on the camera's design and function.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by pete g: I got to handle the Mark III for a few minutes last weekend at the Canon booth at the Southwestern Photojournalism Conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

It's a very nice camera with many thoughtful features. You can imagine the crowd behind me, so I didn't get to look at the Mark III as closely as I would have liked.

One amazing feature that hasn't been talked about is the ability, via custom function, to fine-tune and save settings for the back- or front-focus of individual lenses. For example, my 20D doesn't like my EF 20mm ƒ/2.8; it's constantly back focusing. With the Mark III, I can tune the focus and then save it as a preset for that lens.

The viewfinder is big and bright and 100%. The focusing squares have a newer, better layout, and the literature Canon was handing out says there's a processor dedicated solely to AF.

I snapped a few shots of the room at ISO 6400, and from what I could see on the very nice 3" screen, zoomed in, the noise, especially in the shadow areas, was minimal.

Based on my 4-minute evaluation, this is going to be an important camera for certain types of photography.