Canon EOS-1D X 18.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera top deals

Canon EOS-1D X 18.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera

Canon EOS-1D X 18.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera Reviews

This is a summary of my experience with the Canon 1DX for the first three months. My previous camera was the 5DII, used mainly for weddings and portraits. What I mostly look for in a camera is low light performance. Here's my review. 1st Day 7/20/2012: I took several photos of my 13 year old daughter in dark incandescent light at 6400 and 25,600 ISO with an 85/1.2II lens at f/2.0. I ran both photos through LR4 with +10 noise reduction. I always shoot in RAW, so some post processing noise reduction is a must. Here's what I noticed. At 6400 ISO, I could see the downy blond baby hairs on her forehead and there wasn't much noise in the dark areas, just a bit of grain. At 25,600 ISO, the dark areas had grainy noise and those little downy hairs disappeared. But, the image was totally usable. My wife really liked it. I noticed that at these high ISO's any underexposure results in a significant increase in noise. So, overexposing a little minimizes noise at the higher ISO's. The autofocus is blazing fast in good light, and in dim light slows down. It takes about 1 to 3 seconds to focus in low light, and as long as there is an area of contrast, it will focus. Low light AF is about a third stop improvement over my 5DII, which was a pretty solid low light focuser (because I had sent it in to have AF tweaked). I was expecting more, but I'll take it because it's better than the 1DIV. I borrowed a 1DIV for 5 weddings and it hunted badly in low light, about a stop worse than my 5DII. Up to 12,800 ISO, I wouldn't hesitate to use the images from the 1DX. Images up to 25,600 ISO are usable depending on how much noise and detail are desired. There is one deficiency I noticed. In Manual mode, the exposure indicator does not show up on the top LCD, but only when looking into the viewfinder. It really should. I called Canon and it turns out this is unique to the 1D's. It is displayed for Av and Tv modes, where it is centered until exposure compensation is used. When posing a group I take a quick exposure reading on the top of 5DII without looking through the viewfinder because once I put the camera up to my face, people expect me to start snapping. Well, since weddings are my mainstay, I can usually guess to within 1/2 stop anyway, so I suppose I can live without this feature. 7/26/2012 Update: I wanted to see how long it took for the buffer to fill up with a UDMA card. It got to around 200 or 300 and error code 30 appeared. It didn't go away and Canon CPS said it was a locked shutter. I sent it in for a new unit and I'm waiting for it. 7/30/2012 Update: I received the replacement, took it out of the box and snapped photos for a half an hour. When I put the cap on the 85/1.2II I accidentally pressed the shutter button halfway and got an error code 80. It went away after taking the cap back off. Canon said it wasn't mechanical, likely software or electrical. That was good enough for me. 8/8/2012 Update: I went to the park and photographed my daughter swinging using the 85/1.2II lens. This is probably Canon's slowest focusing lens because of the way it moves the entire heavy internal glass. It's meant for portraits, not for sports. With my daughter coming toward me, the AF tracked her in AIServo. To give some perspective, this is something I have never been able to do with the 5DII and 40D. The glass takes over a second to move from one end to the other. Looking at them in LR4, I had a 50% keeper rate, which is excellent given that the 5DII would have had none. This camera pushes AF very hard. I'm liking this. What I'm not liking? The AF point doesn't light up when I press the shutter halfway down until it locks focus. That means in very dark conditions, I have to guess where the AF point is so I can focus it on the intended spot. This kind of defeats the super low light capability. I could press the AF selection button to light it up, but that's a delay which defeats the element of speed and it also lights up all the AF points like a Christmas tree. It took several calls to Canon CPS because some techs were convinced it was there and just needed to be turned on. It isn't. 8/13/2012 Update: I shot two weddings. One was very dark and went late into the night. I did some portraits of the couple walking around the gardens in the dark as I experimented with off camera flash. These images are usually my clients' favorites because of the dramatic light effects. But, it's usually the end of the day and clients are tired. I have to work fast. The AF not blinking with a half-press of the shutter button was a problem. It took nearly 10 to 20 seconds to lock focus versus 3 to 5 seconds with the 5DII. After a few of these, the couple wanted to head back. With the 5DII, I half press the shutter button and the AF point blinks to let me know where it is. Then, I move this AF point to focus on a high contrast area of the face or edge of the white dress, recompose, and take the shot. Then, it's off to the next pose or location for another shot or two. With the 1DX, I was unable to locate a high contrast area without knowing exactly where the center AF point was. It was grayed out. As a workaround, I tried using the AF point selection button on the back. It lit up all the AF points and blinded that eye to the dark. Using this camera in low light now requires a minimum of 2 to 3 seconds more to lock focus versus the 5DII. 8/28/2012 Update: I shot another wedding with the 1DX in relatively good light. I did the formals at ISO 1600 as I generally do with the 5DII. I used a tripod and dragged the shutter, which results in images that are sharp, yet with the look of balanced lighting. What I noticed is that at 1600 ISO, the 1DX was maybe 1/2 stop ahead of the 5DII in terms of noise and detail rendition. I expected the images to be a full 2 stops cleaner at 1600 ISO, more like 400 ISO on the 5DII. I also noticed that 4000 ISO images weren't all that different from ones at 1600 ISO. Noise hardly changed. The lighting at this wedding was dim incandescent with backlighting from windows. At an outdoor wedding I did two weeks ago, 1600 and 4000 ISO were much cleaner in the dark areas throughout the entire wedding. So, now I'm wondering if mixed lighting affects noise. I used auto white balance for the entire day and it was very accurate. It got confused on a few images with mixed light, but even then it wasn't far off. It was a small wedding and I shot just under 1200 images, with about 400 repeats in the mix. The battery was still at half charge at the end. One issue I ran into was that on three separate incidents, with the 85/1.2II and 16-35/2.8II lens, AF quit working. Nothing would happen when I pressed the shutter button, even when I depressed it all the way to take the photo. Focusing on something else worked for the first two instances, and for the third, I had to restart the camera. I remember having this issue when I first got my 5DII and I had to send it in twice before it was fixed completely. So, I'm hoping this was operator error and not the same issue. 8/29/2012 Update: I installed the new firmware. This had a fix for error code 80 from 7/30/2012. 9/4/2012 Update: I shot two more weddings. I wanted to better understand how mixed lighting affects noise in the dark areas at higher ISO's because I had noticed some high noise levels from 1600 to 4000 ISO in my 8/28/2012 update. At one wedding, skin tones were very dark and so were the suits, and lighting was mixed. The wedding party had many people, so for group shots I used f/11 to get enough depth of field with a 35mm/1.4 lens. I went to 8,000 ISO, then to 12,800 ISO. The 8,000 ISO images looked fine with +25 noise reduction in LR4. I would not hesitate to blow these up to 11x14 or even larger. ISO 12,800 came close to looking like the 8,000 ISO with more noise reduction applied. I'm conservative, and another photographer said he would use these up to much larger sizes. What I did differently at this wedding was to overexpose the entire image by 1/2 stop by exposing for the darker areas, then bringing exposure down in post processing. This minimized noise in the dark areas, even though I dodged some exposure back into them. What I had encountered in my 8/28/2012 update - high noise levels from 1600 to 4000 ISO - was the result of underexposing the dark areas of the image. No issues with the AF freezing. 1DX colors are more accurate than the 5DII. If a scene is cloudy, the 1DX will produce an image that is cooler, not necessarily more blue, but more true to what it is. At first I thought these images had a more dead-looking skin tone and didn't like it. But, now I'm realizing it's just more accurate than what it was with the 5DII. Also, now that I've examined a couple thousand 1DX images next to 5DII images taken by my assistant, I'm noticing that 5DII images have a slightly purple tint that creeps in when I reduce color temperature of an image that was shot in strong yellow incandescent light. Not so much with the 1DX. Conservatively here's how I see the noise levels on the 1DX compared to the 5DII (for example, noise at ISO 4000 on the 1DX looks roughly like noise at ISO 1600 on the 5DII). These comparisons are AFTER noise reduction was applied in LR4 on RAW files. 5DII 1DX 800 1600-2000 1600 4000 2000 6400 3200 12,800 1DX noise looks more like film grain and cleans up better than 5DII noise. So, at times I can get ISO 6400 on the 1DX to look like ISO 1600 on the 5DII by overexposing and bringing it back in post processing. 9/24/2012 Update: I shot another wedding this past Saturday. AF froze twice, once with an 85/1.2II and the second time with the 35/1.4. 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. Canon EOS-1D X 18.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera

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Canon EOS-1D X 18.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera
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