By site editor Dan Chung:
Canon today officially announced their latest offerings but there seems to be little to interest video shooters. The new 5Ds and 5Ds R are squarely aimed at photographers who shoot studio and landscape shots. The super high resolution sensor offers a whopping 50.6 megapixels and should have excellent stills quality. The 5Ds has an optical low pass filter to reduce moire and aliasing, the 5Ds R removes this filter to give sharper stills but with greater moire patterning. In video terms the specification of the 5Ds and 5Ds R are similar to the existing 5D mkIII. Full HD can be recorded in either IPB or All-I compression but crucially the new cameras don’t have a clean HDMI output for external recording or monitoring. There is also no headphone jack.
Disappointingly there is also no mention of Dual Pixel CMOS AF in the Canon press release – quite why this feature can’t be standard in their latest top end cameras given that it already made it into humble 70D is a mystery to me.
Clearly Canon doesn’t think photographers who will buy the new high res cameras will be serious about video capture and I think they are probably right. The trend towards stills and video convergence for studio based professionals has largely stalled – there are a few fashion and commercial photographers making good money from multimedia productions, but most do not.
Right now Canon’s most attractive offering for EOS users wanting good video without breaking the bank is the C100 mkII and not a DSLR. The high end 1D C 4K DSLR didn’t prove all that popular with news and documentary photographers. It is Sony with their hugely popular a7S who have taken over as leading maker of true multimedia full-frame cameras. The 5Ds and 5Ds R aren’t aimed at those users so we will have to wait until later in the year to see if Canon respond to the a7S directly.
One video feature that is of interest may be the built-in timelapse movie function. An intervalometer built into the camera controls the number of shots taken and their frequency. When shooting is finished they can immediately be turned into a HD movie without post processing. This feature was present on the Nikon D800, the Panasonic GH4 and Sony a7S (by use of a downloadable app) so its good to finally see it on a 5D series camera.
Also announced today was the new 11-24mm f4L lens, which becomes the widest corrected full-frame Canon zoom lens. It has taken many years for Canon to build a competitor to the famous Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 and they have decided to compete by going wider at the expense of the f2.8 maximum aperture. The lens has estimated retail price of $2,999 US. Personally I think this lens is of less interest to video shooters who are already well served by cheaper options like Tokina’s 11-16mm f2.8 and the new 11-20mm f2.8 (although these only designed for crop-sensors).
Lastly Canon also announced several new consumer models – the T6i, T6s and EOS M3 (which won’t make it to US shores at the moment). The T6i and T6s are similar in video specification to a lot of other entry level cameras. The main difference is the inclusion of Canon’s new Hybrid CMOS AF III which has on sensor phase detection points for autofocus in live view. Canon say this should have similar performance to Dual Pixel CMOS AF and should allow tracking of moving subjects. How well this works for video remains to be seen.
