Canon announces EOS-1D X: full-frame 18MP, 14 fps, 204,800 top ISO, $6,800
engadget.com> Canon has also eliminated the 4GB clip limit, though individual clips are limited to 29:59, in order to avoid European tax rates affecting HD cameras that can capture single HD video clips longer than 30 minutes
What is that all about? Why a special tax rate? Can't the camera just save 29:59 clips and then stitch them together...
It's a duty that goes back a long way (back to the start of the VCR revolution) because the EU wanted to protect its own manufacturers from cheap technology coming from abroad. So they (we) enacted a bunch of laws that place quite high duty (up to 15% IIRC) on some technologies.
Let's hope that Canon will allow a hack to escape from their labs to rectify this bug after the camera reaches the end user.
A tax on an integer seems to be a bit silly.
Import duties on silly things are a problem the world over. I've recently read about the chicken tax in the USA, it's mildly mind-boggling.
Why not just even openly post it and make a note on their website that it is only for non-EU customers and also mention the reason and put a link to the exact law. Would that get them off the hook?
It might, or it might get them in trouble. In their position there is no upside from doing it that way but plenty of potential downside.
For instance, one way in which that could be struck down is to use that message as a pretext to levy the fee anyway on this camera.
Or why not ask their EU customers to pay the extra 4.9% it would cost to sell it as a camcorder?
That would not only get them off the hook but also encourage their customers to abolish this ridiculous law.
On the other hand when you are filming something do you really have a scene in a film that is longer than 30 minutes? Realistically your scenes are much shorter so the utility of having a camera that could shoot longer is probably low.
Say a concert? (I don't know anything about cameras, I was just thinking about that same thing and realised there are probably some uses for scenes longer than 30 minutes.)
Like a homemade porn? ;) Or documentary of a lecture
It's a 4.9% tax, designed to target pro camcorders. Story from 2007: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/07/17/tech-eu-cameras-tra...
I had a HDD camcorder that was crippled. You could only mount the hdd in it as read only in the EU model, but r/w in the US model.
Apparently if they made it r/w in the EU it'd be classed as a VCR and have a big tax applied or something, so they had to cripple it.
These sort of laws need to go away.
Some better info here: http://www.dpreview.com/articles/5149972341/canon-eos-1d-x-o...
Gigabit ethernet built into a camera, wow!
With that ISO range, they've effectively eliminated the need for flash on 80%+ of photographs. Obviously, you'd still want flash for fill and studio situations, but sports photographers, and everyone else, even (maybe) concert photographers, can probably get away without! Amazing.
At 1D X's price range, all flash use is strictly on purpose - no one would have used flash on a 1D because it's too dark, it's all for the effects it enables with bouncing and gels and all sorts of expensive gadgetry.
The technology filtering down to consumer level in a couple of years is pretty exciting, though as elithrar noted, the exposure is going to be difficult as it's hard to tell between "dark area you want to see" and "dark area that's the background".
At 11 stops up from ISO 100, you're getting to have a great deal of noise at the max ISO I would have thought even at full frame.
> At 11 stops up from ISO 100, you're getting to have a great deal of noise at the max ISO I would have thought even at full frame.
You'd be surprised how clean some of these things are, especially so if you don't plan on blowing things up big. Plus, with NR software these days, you can easily get usable 12,800 ISO & 25,600 ISO shots if you expose them well.
The real trick to shooting in low-light is nailing the exposure; too dark and you'll have dirty highlights, too light and you'll have blotchy, noisy shadows.
I'm still using a D70s as my primary camera, but I have to say, when Nikon released it's first camera that supported ISO 6400, they made available full resolution JPGs. You could see a bit of noise if you looked really hard for it, but, it effectively wasn't there. I can only imagine that 25,600 ISO is almost just as good as that. And, quite frankly, it's simply amazing.
Sweet. I've always wanted to look inside people's pores.
I use a Nikon D7000 - it's already quite capable of producing clean files up to 5000, 6400 at a pinch, and of getting perfectly sharp pictures of the cars running in night qualifying at Le Mans earlier this year (admittedly with pretty fast glass). No way I'm pointing a flash at a live race track at night, even if there was a way to make the results look even slightly natural.... So, IMHO, that milestone was crossed some time ago and has been in the high-end consumer space for at least a year now.
What this has primarily done for me is to make non-studio flash for fill and separation, depending on the situation - to control the subject to ambient ratio, in other words. I do still use it for other routine work, but only where it makes the resulting shot easier to take and get a high-quality result.
Calling full-frame sensors 'oversized' is a reason why engadget shouldn't try to do photography news.
I don't think they meant it that way: they said "uses oversized pixels to battle noise". The original press release stressed the fact that the pixels increased in size even as their number increased (because of more efficient layout). This is just flowery prose.
"oversized" is different to "larger"
It means "larger than the usual size".
Glad they didn't try to make a jump in the MP race (my 3-yr-old 5dII has 21.1 MP, but of course, only 3.9 fps)
ISO/noise-reduction is the most important thing to me as I don't like using a strobe. However, as I like having a reasonably portable camera, I hope they make an upgrade soon to the 5D line. How many non-sports/war shooters need this kind of frame rate anyway?
Love the ISO range and the recording and transmitting abilities.
I'm still waiting for something with a high-dynamic range out of the box, preferably with wide spectrum coverage. I'd love to see how post-production goes with a little near-infrared and low-ultraviolet information in the mix.
This is a major step upwards, but I think I'm going to pass for now and wait another five years for the next major step upwards. The difference between shooting 12MP and 18MP and the difference between shooting what I have and ISO 204,800 just isn't enough for me to make the jump.
IMHO it's interesting that they continue to use CF cards in their pro bodies. Some expected the switch to smaller SD/SDHC/SDXC cards.
But I wonder why they decided to announce the 1D X so early? I suppose this will hurt their pro body sales for five months. (The new body will not ship before March 2012.)
CF, while older, is significantly faster than SD. This is inherent in the number of busses in the design - SD communicates over a few wires, CF over many more, effectively increasing its bandwidth. My guess is that we will see CF until we SATA to mini SSDs or similar; it will take a real revolution in digital storage to dethrone the current king that is CF, SD will never be as fast.
This much leadtime on a prominent release is common, and right now the only camera that the 1D-X is going to cannibalize is the 1DmarkIV, which was already becoming quite scarce _before_ this announcement. Canon Direct lists it as out of stock, same with B&H. Adorama and Amazon seem to have a few each, though. Still, what sales are being hurt here? And mind you, we're talking about a relatively massive investment, you could buy ~10 T3i's for this sticker price, not an investment made lightly or made often - Canon probably doesn't mind waiting a few more months, and if you are in the market for something like this you are paying attention to the rumor mill anyways.
Just think, wouldn't you be pissed if they HADN'T given this much lead time, and you went and tracked down a now-rare 1D-IV, only to see this come out a few months later? I know I'd be quite irate.
Just my 2c...
CF cards allow faster writes and can keep up with higher FPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_memory_cards#Tech...
Which is a real pity. It's not a rugged interface that's designed for repeated loads and unloads but a miniaturisation of PCMCIA. The cards are more crushable than SD, the contacts can bend (happened to me...), the holes can get blocked. None of this is ideal when you need to make a quick card change to get that shot in front of you right now. Whereas SD with rolling ball contacts is about as close to indestructible as any physical interface is likely to get.
I understand why they're still making CF cameras, but I wish the effort were going into either optimising SD or producing a rugged, fast, generic replacement.
why they decided to announce the 1D X so early?
Because they are announcing something that looks likely to be a pro 35mm video camera on November...same day as Red releases Scarlet and Nikon releases...something.
Red is finally setting a date for the Scarlet? Very cool.
Nov 3rd announcement, promised to ship shortly thereafter. Details always available here: http://reduser.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?31-Recon
The ISO range is nice–as is having a full frame on a fast camera–but there aren't many people who need 14 fps (sports & wildlife photographers).
Personally, I'll wait until the 5DmII successor arrives. I like the images and video it produces now and I don't need the tougher body of the 1 series.
Awesome. The digital imaging space keeps moving so fast due to the heated competition between Canon and Nikon. I upgraded to a 7D from my old 40D this year and it feels like there are way more than two years' worth of improvements in there.
I always thought there was tic-toc collusion amongst Canon and Nikon --ie. Nikon ups the FPS, Canon ups the MP; Canon ups the FPS, Nikon ups MP or ISO, or something else. Or one has nice Lens aperture but the other one's lenses have less distortion, etc.
These two companies seem to trade-off on features every other generation (tic-toc). I think they had a common history, some decades back.
"Their friendly rivalry" speaks to this, in a way. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20071226a7.html
This generation will likely be different. Nikon will probably announce the D4 early next year, and the D800 very soon.
If a 5DmkIII arrives early next year then both the full-frame series for each company will be updated.
1dx seems pretty evolutionary, it is likely that the D4 will also be similar.
The 7D is a semipro camera
As is the 40D. A lot of the photojournalism professionals I knew used it as a backup, or primary camera if they needed a 1.6x crop.
It says they now have 2 video compression formats but doesn't mention the data rate or format. Anyone know?
It's too bad this won't result in a price drop on the EOS 5D Mark II.
5d2 currently has a $100 manufacturer's instant rebate, $2,400 on Amazon at time of writing. Amazon says the rebate ends 10/29/11, a bit more than a week out. I doubt it'll drop much lower than that in the year or so between now and Photokina (Sept. 2012) when Canon will most likely announce the 5d2's successor.
I get the impression that full frame is never going to get cheaper than ~$2,500.
But what about my iPhone 4S camera ? Please someone offer me comparison [jokes] :)
These guys did a iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII side by side comparison. http://vimeo.com/30606785
Apple announces iPhone 4S: fit-in-your-pocket 8MP, 30 fps, 73% more light, starting at $199 on a monthly contract.
Given that 1% create, 10% curate and 90% consume, unless you're in that high art 1% of photographers, the iPhone 4S is your man. Or woman.
Note that the 14 fps in the title for the 1D X refers to the amount of still pictures (18 MP, JPEG) it can take per second. iPhone 4S's time between photos was well publicized (and impressive for a mobile phone camera) at around 0.5 s, or 2 fps.
A camera you carry all the time is worth more than one sitting at home.
Well, a camera that can't take the picture you want is as useless as the one sitting at home. And iPhone may be, in some cases, a camera that simply can't do what you want. It's a cellphone. Of course, you won't carry a DSLR camera with you all the time, and even that isn't enough, think about lenses, flash, tripod… but iPhone won't magically replace all that, when you actually need it.
> It's a cellphone.
Not so. It's a magical device, especially to those of us who remember the world prior to the beeper.
This.
It's a digital swiss-army knife. Right now in my pocket I have an 8mp still digital camera, an HD camcorder, the world wide web, email, instant messaging, news, social networks, books, notes, digital storage, music player, video player, gameboy, etc etc etc. You couldn't fit a single one of these into you breast pocket in the 90's - I tried, and that walkman ripped that pocket right off!
Oh snap, you mean this crazy thing makes PHONE CALLS too?!
wow - can't take a joke around here obviously
I thought your comment was valid.