BIG GAME

Suppose you sat S down and listed everything you wanted in an interchangeable lens camera, even if you were unlikely to ever need much of it. Suppose you went for the highest spec possible. And suppose you decided that you wanted an optical viewfinder and most of the benefits of a mirrorless camera. Pie in the sky? Nope, right now, that camera is Canon’s EOS-1D X Mark III.

Being a top-end DSLR it’s aimed at a fairly niche sector of the market – namely professional sports, press and action photographers – but really, why should they be the only ones to enjoy what is currently the most capable ILC money can buy? So we’re saying this is the camera for anybody who wants a camera that can do everything and do it well. OK, so you’ll need to have fairly deep pockets, but in return you’re getting a camera that won’t say no, regardless of what you ask it to do.

And, interestingly, it’s both reflex and mirrorless. Not a true hybrid design, of course, but Canon has gone a long way to making its performance in live view – i.e. with the reflex mirror locked up – on a par with anything currently being offered in the mirrorless world. So, for example, the maximum continuous shooting speed is 20fps and the capabilities of Canon’s much-lauded Dual Pixel CMOS AF extended to pretty well match everything that’s available when shooting with the optical viewfinder, including face/eye detection and adjustable tracking. On the video side, there’s some of Canon’s Cinema EOS camera DNA in there, including RAW shooting at 5.5K, 10-bit Canon Log (both internally) and uncropped 4K DCI at 50fps with ALL-I compression (go to the Making Movies panel for the rest of the 1D X III’s video story).

It is quite a remarkable combination of functionality and performance, so much so that it does transcend the traditional notion that Canon’s pro-level DSLRs are niche products. They have been, but not this one – it’s still a speed machine, but it’s a whole lot more too.

UP TO SPEED

A number of elements combine to make the EOS-1D X Mark III the fastest DSLR ever (actually the fastest SLR ever, as nothing in the 35mm era came close). Firstly, there’s the new DiG!C X processor – which, incidentally, does virtually everything on its own – and is more than three times faster than the Mark II’s pair of DiG!C 6+ engines. It’s a massive 380 times faster when it comes to continuous processing speeds. Separate ‘blocks’ handle various duties such as