The Canon 5D Mark III has been announced and is already up for pre-order at B&H and Amazon. $3499, availability said to be late March.
Canon has shown restraint with the megapixels, which is nice. But they seem to have shown restraint everywhere else as well. Although the 61-point autofocus system (same one as the 1D X) is probably enough to get me to upgrade.
- 22.3 Megapixel, full-frame CMOS sensor
- 61-point AF with up to 41 cross-type AF points
- DIGIC 5+ processor
- Up to 6fps shooting speed
- ISO 100 to 25,600 standard, 50 to 102,400 with expansion
- HDR shooting in-camera
- Full HD Movie shooting with ALL-I or IPB compression
- 29mins 59sec clip length in Full HD Movie
- Timecode for HD Movie shooting
- Headphone port for audio monitoring
- Transparent LCD viewfinder with 100% coverage
- 8.11cm (3.2”), 1.04 million-pixel Clear View II LCD Screen
- EOS Integrated Cleaning System (EICS)
- CF and SD card slots
- Silent control touch-pad area
- Dual-Axis Electronic Level
What about video? From the product description (emphasis mine):
Full HD video recording is supported in multiple formats, including 1080/30p, 24p, 25p; 720/60p, 50p; 480/60p, 50p. While recording video, a 4GB automatic file partition is employed in order to gain longer continuous recording times, up to 29 minutes 59 seconds. Both All i-frame and IPB compressions are supported as well as the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec. Embedding the timecode is also possible…
Video performance is further enhanced with the ability to manually adjust your exposure settings and audio levels while recording. By employing Live View, you can view your recording on the LCD and make settings changes with a dedicated menu tab on the fly. The DIGIC 5+ processor also dramatically improves video response times and helps to reduce color artifacts, aberrations, and moiré.
Sounds good. We’ll have to see. The Verge writes (again, emphasis mine):
Unfortunately, there’s still no option for clean HDMI output (which allows the uncompressed video footage to be captured on an external recorder)—when we asked about this, Canon’s reps said “not yet.” However, it does sound like the HDMI signal output won’t downsample from 1080p to 480p when recording, thanks to the DIGIC 5+.
I know the lack of a clean HDMI out upsets a lot of people, but personally I’ve never been a fan of the outboard recorder workflow. The 5D Mark III’s updated autofocus for stills, 720p60, manual audio levels and headphone jack, and the promise of reduced moiré may not add up to “revolution: part 2,” but they may well be worth the upgrade for many.
The bummer for me is the lack of an articulated LCD, but I imagine this has to do with weatherproofing requirements.
More thoughtful analysis to come of course! And I’ll let you know when and if I pull the trigger and order one.
Update
on 2012-03-02 06:57 by Stu
I’m not sure where in the short film handbook it mandates accordion music, but if you want to convince me you’ve improved moiré, cobblestone streets are the way to do it.
More sample movies and stills.