Canon EOS 1D X Digital Camera Review

Shooting Modes

The Canon 1D X offers just the basic PASM shooting modes, with options for bulb and custom shooting modes as well. The modes are visible on the top plate's LCD, as there's no physical mode dial on the camera.

Manual Controls

Most of the main shooting functions you might require are available on the body of the 1D X, preventing the need for most trips to the menu. The camera has dual control dials, including the rear dial as well as the one on the top plate near the index finger. You can also easily adjust ISO by holding down the ISO key (closest to your hand near the top plate's LCD) and adjusting the rear dial.

The front of the 1D X features a set of buttons, one for depth of field preview and a second customizable button, for both landscape and portrait grips. This makes it easy to transition between both grips quickly, without any real loss of control. The buttons can't assume every function under the sun, but they can be used for some pretty useful tricks, such as switching to specific autofocus functions.

Focus

We found the Canon 1D X's 61-point AF system to be quite sensitive, even in low light. We test focus at two light levels—40 lux and 10 lux—and found the camera was able to easily lock onto the high contrast subject with great accuracy and generally quickly. When using the rear LCD to focus with contrast detection autofocus the system was much slower, but that was also true in bright light as well. We also found the contrast detection autofocus had trouble locking in at the 10 lux level, as a few times it would get close, but give a red box indicating focus wasn't achieved.

The Canon 1D X offers an incredible amount of focus options for sports and news photographers. The camera puts its 61-point AF to great use, with a veritable ton of options for achieving focus. One of the big areas of improvement is the ability to fine-tune focus tracking. The 1D X offers six built-in "cases" that offer adjustable settings for tracking sensitivity, accelleration/deceleration, and autofocus point auto-switching. You can adjust all these presets to you liking, letting you fine tune performance to whatever event or sport you're photographing.

Canon also has claimed that the system intelligently figures out focus distance across the frame to better track subjects. It does this by calculating subject distance at a variety of points, so that if you're tracking a subject and the AF point you're using moves onto an obstacle in the foreground (or off the subject and onto the background), the camera will ignore the change if the focus distance change is dramatic. Similarly, the camera can also detect panning using a built-in gyroscope, letting it better follow a moving subject as you pan the camera to follow it.

Recording Options

The Canon 1D X lets you adjust image size and quality in more ways than just about any other camera. The camera has a maximum resolution of 18.1 megapixels, with options to shoot in RAW, JPEG, and RAW+JPEG. The camera lets you shoot in a reduced resolution (for both RAW and JPEG) if you want to keep file sizes down or don't need an image for more than web resolution. The Canon 1D X also lets you set compression quality for each of the four JPEG sizes, adjusting them on a 10-stop scale.