4.6The Canon EOS-1D Mark III looked fantastic at the Photo Marketing Association trade show last spring. Its 10 frame-per-second (fps) speed tops the industry, the 3-inch LCD looks like a movie screen, and its live preview puts Olympus and Fujifilm to shame. On the technical side, the Mark III's electronics amount to a dual-processor computer. Unfortunately, the 10-megapixel Mark III's autofocus system malfunctions in certain situations, though a firmware patch clearly improves its performance and may have fixed the problem. Still, it's a kick in the teeth for Canon – shooters who would have jumped for the Mark III are waiting to see if the firmware fix is real, or if the next batch of bodies is better.
Picture Quality / Size Options(9.5)
The EOS-1D Mark III available pixel resolutions are 3888 x 2592, 3456 x 2304, 2816 x 1880, and 1936 x 1288. All the resolutions are available for JPEGs, and JPEG+RAW shooting is also possible. Thirteen-megabyte RAW files are available at 3888 x 2592 pixels, and the Mark III's small RAW files, or sRAW, are 1936 x 1288. Canon expects photojournalists and wedding shooters to use sRAW to save memory card space.
Picture Effects Mode(9.0) Canon's picture styles -- Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, and Monochrome – are available on all its current and recent DSLRs. In general, they do the obvious. Standard boosts saturation and contrast, while Portrait is softer and warm-toned. Landscape punches up greens and blues. Neutral and Faithful produce the most accurate results. All the styles are consistent across the camera line, so a Mark III set on Standard produces images that match Standard files from a Mark II n. Canon says the system is convenient for users who use more than one camera model in a shoot.
It's possible to edit saturation, contrast, and sharpening for each style, and to create three custom styles. Styles alter the colors in JPEG files, but in RAW files, they simply record a set of directions for Canon's RAW conversion software, and they can be overridden.
