Canon 5D MKIII – my thoughts

Hey Vince, Can’t agree more with your post. Though the idea of having 100,000 ISO is pretty interesting. It feels like the 5dm3 is more of a “fixed for video” 5dm2. About 6 months ago I was dead set on getting this camera, and super excited about it! With the Scarlet, c300, 1DX, it seems like there are more options to get a system that is tailored towards what you do. I think I’m sticking to my Scarlet for video. But hrmm I might replace my 7d with a 5dm3 =)

Thank you for your thoughts. What’s your take on the Magic Lantern hacks, especially the new one coming out that will give the 5D MKII full uncompressed HD out? If it works well, I’m most likely just sticking with the MKII.

Also, how does the MKIII compare to the D800? I’d love to see your side-by-side review. Thanks again.

D

Great review Vincent. I agree with everything you said… but will still probably upgrade my MKII once the price goes down! I just picked up the VAF-5D2 and I’m LOVING the way it deals with aliasing/ moire. It truly is making it a different camera altogether!

I’m just waiting for something better than USB out. Am I crazy. I’ve checked the “specs” with no real info from Canon. I just want a faster output on the body. That’s it. I like the mkii just fine. No upgrading here.

I’ve been waiting for this camera forever now and had plans to buy it right after release….but.. i can help but feel like something bigger and better is laying in wait..decisions. Nice review Mr. Laforet! I have been reading your blog and watching your videos for along time now, keep up the great work! 😀

I can’t help my self being slightly disappointed by this release.
But i think we always are because our expectations always fly higher.
This camera is tragic fantastic.
Do you remember lowlight from the 5d2? This is even better. Great camera.
Can’t wait to shoot Berlin in those tipical freezing night of the Capitol.

I was expecting something better from Canon… I guess I got let down this time. Can you confirm whether the HDMI signal out is still 480p like Mark 2?

I have been using my 5dmk2 for still photography as well as video work, and I have to say, as soon as I saw the specs for mk3, I pre-ordered it in a heartbeat. Here is why:
1. Better AF. You have no idea how many times I have said to myself, only if my 5D had a better AF system. And now that has been answered. It got 1dX’s AF system. I mean, come on, what else do you want?

2. 22megapixel, but brand new sensor like 1dx. I say thank god! I much rather have 22m quality pixels, than 36m lesser quality pixels. I mean the c300 only has 8mega pixel. What does that say?

3. Headphone out?! what?! Manual controls of audio while shooting?! What?! Touch sensitive wheel?! I mean these are features that I have been wishing for on my 5Dmk2 when doing video work.

4. Better moire, aliasing and jello. Yes!! Please! Another thing I have been wishing for on my 5D.

5. new compression algorithm

6. more than 12 mins clips. Yes!!!

I completely agree with Vincent, small changes, but VERY IMPORTANT changes.

I don’t care about D800. I have committed to the Canon system, don’t think I will switch. As Vincent, Shane Hurlbut and many have demonstrated, 5d Mk2 is plenty for real film/video work. I really don’t see what D800 can offer me that I would want.

This camera will not make you a better photographer, but it sure is going to make life much easier for a photographer/filmmaker.

Paying $1400, in relation to the $2500 I paid for my 5dMk2 way back, for all of the new features. Heck yes! The AF alone worth 3/4 of that.

I don’t see the point of waiting for the C DSLR, for myself at least, unless it’s a 5dmk3 shooting 4k with 1080p120fps overcrank, no jello and no moire. I am willing to pay another $1k on top of the 5dmk3 price.

Vincent, I randomly got into DSLR shooting when I got a 5DMK2 1 year ago. Even at that time I was very impressed and motivated by Reverie (2 years after you released it). It´s been great following you on your blog over the last year – and I have learned a lot. I think many people (me included) would have loved if you actually did make a 5DMK3 video 🙂 Your writeup of the 5DMK3 is much appreciated. It looks like a great camera, but clean HDMI output and 1080p 60fps would have made it a killer.

Cheers from Norway

They haved missed one more option : a Keypad to use this 5DMARK III as mobile phone !

We really don’t care about the video capability.
If you really want a great video Camera, you just have to buy a real one.
A 5DMARK III will always be messy to use as Video Camera unless you have all the tools for stabilization and handmount… and it will be more expensive than a great video camera for the same results.

Does anyone think it likely that Magic Lantern will correct the clean hdmi out problem?

5d3 = 5d2n. Yawn. D800 is much more ground breaking for both video and stills. 3.5 years and the result is 5d3 specs?!

canon becomes kodak soon, with their marketing strategies and half baked cameras. From now on all they do is protect C300….

how sad, canon.

I’m a little sad that today I didn’t get to watch a Vincent Laforet video with the new 5D.

For some reason it just doesn’t feel like Christmas day without it.

Dave

I’m a student learning photography and video with a 5dmii camera. Really cool camera. Your video was way better than the nikon 800..and they copied you but with a motorcycle.

for whoever says “Yawn” there are 10 other people getting on the preorder list… amazon even put up a notice saying quantity is limited here http://amzn.to/Canon5DMkIII

@Jan Sicilia,

My take would be spend less on the camera and more on lenses etc. . If the occasional gig comes up where someone is willing to pay for a C300 then rent it. You’ll be able to sell a 5D III easily if it doesn’t work out. It also will make a good B cam for the C300.

I really like the C300 but $16K is a lot of dough for most. I think most potential Scarlet buyer would find the C300 friendlier on set and in post and cheaper ultimately. (I own an EPIC so I think I get to say that). You have to be sold on 4K to get a Scarlet. If you’ve got a real budget for a bit bigger movie you’d probably go with EPIC. Same if you were a hard working music video shooter.

I’ve handled the C300 and the ergonomics are very nice. I personally wouldn’t be putting a lot of rig on it. It seems like it’s made to shoot right out of the box.

But you can make KILLER stuff with lesser cameras. To me, start there and let the marketplace force you into a more expensive camera.

One exception to that idea. If you’re doing a low budget movie then buy the C300 and sell it when you’re done. Keep it for a few months if needed, but don’t get caught holding the bag when the new one is announced. I can barely give away my RED ONE right now – yet the images are still astounding. The market is very “camera du jour”.

I’m still pretty curious about that D800 uncompressed 1080P out.
Also, the FS-100 might be the most underrated video camera out there right now. I shot one for two weeks. All around workhorse and great in low light. And it HAS 1080 60P.

Vince, i’ll bet real money the headphone jack is thanks to Nikon’s announcements on D4 and D800.

I suspect the internal politics at Canon over Video V DSLR sections have still dictated the 5DIII is still a little under featured.

Would you know if the 5DIII and 1DX pixel bin like the GH2 instead of line-skip and what method the Nikons use.

If Nikon still line-skin, then to me it’s a no-brainer the 5DIII & 1DX will be video winners.

As an aside, the headphone out is most welcome, I can actually hear the interviews etc, huge deal to me! I don’t need cinema quality sound, just good sound.

THAT A HUGE LENS!

hi vincent ,
questions that are bothering are … what’s the colour space is it 422. ?…..can we record on external recorder, with 422 ?…. and is there line skipping when it captures video ?….
thanks

VIncent, thanks for posting. Not sure if you’ve read, but agree wholeheartedly with Stu Maschwitz who tweeted
‘All three of the Canon 5D Mark III videos demonstrate two undeniable facts: • Dramatic reduction in moiré • Canon needs @vincentlaforet

Vincent, I don’t know if you noticed but the images from the 5D Mark III is 5760 pixels wide. That is, it is exactly 3×1920 pixels wide.

I don’t think that this is a mistake and I suspect that this may allow Canon to be smarter when generating video data from the sensor and may be why they are able to attack moire and other artifacts more effectively.

I’d love it if someone could do a more technical analysis of what their sensor size choice means for video.

This small detail may more than compensate for the lack of clean HDMI out.

@Joel Kaye,

I agree with you about the lenses, my first investment was precisely that. I bought a 7D with 3 very fast Canon primes and a zoom. In most cases, that has been more than enough but as I get more experienced and I get bigger clients, buying a higher end camera seems like the next step for me. The thing about my situation is that rental is not so readily available to me because I live and work in Guatemala City and I often find myself making a better living when I use my own equipment. I’ve had access to a RED ONE and a Sony F3 but I often end up paying a lot more than I’m willing to. The way I feel is that if I’m gonna be paying those prices, I might as well buy the camera. It turns out being the same to me, I just get to keep the goods afterwards.

Well, for now I think I’ll hold out just a little longer and see what the 5D mkIII is capable of. After all, before the C300 came out, what I was really looking forward to was the new 5D so I guess it’s all good. Thanks for the reply man, I appreciate it!

If the camera uses 3×3 pixel binning to get a 1920X1080 bayer matrix, and then debayers from that, as suggested above, then the final image will be very soft. Debayering consumes about 30%-40% of image resolution in each axis. That’s why most single chip 1080p camcorders scale down from 3-4 megapixels. 1920X1080 binned and debayered would be a lot closer to 720p than 1080p.

The 5DII had full resolution on the horizontal axis and a 70% resolution reduction on the vertical axis, also a lot of aliasing on that axis.

Looks like the 5DIII will solve the aliasing issues if it pixel bins rather than line skips–at the expense of a HUGE resolution loss. Any idea if this is true? The resolution numbers (3x1920x3x1080) are too convenient to ignore. But 720p video isn’t enough–not compared with the C300’s super crisp video.

Hi Vincent,

Thanks for your post but I am concerned about the fact that you are a canon man even as you said yourself, having a contract with them, how does this qualify your products’s evaluation as objective.

Hi Vincent,

Happy to hear that you’re working on your first feature film. I’m assuming that you can’t say too much about it for the time being. However, can you at least tell us what genre it falls under?

Can’t decide which one to buy D800 or Mark3 , Nikon D800 offers an uncompressed HDMI output and that is what got me thinking…

Dawgg,
If you have 3×3 pixels you don’t do the normal debayering. You might not even need debayering. You take each component by separate (RGB) and bin it in one pixel. You’d get 3 Red samples, 6 Green samples and 3 Blue ones. Let’s remember that the C300 simply has 2×2 pixels and do this, and has zero moiré. I’m assuming the 5Dmk3 moiré is an artifact of the low pass filter, and it’s effect on pixels at the block boundary (i.e. between 3×3 blocks).

@Fabien,

name one real video camera with a sensor this size ?

go on.. i dare ya ?

Hi Vincent,

Do you know if the new Canon Digital Lens Optimizer (DLO) function
in Digital Photo Professional version 3.11.4 (DPP 3.11.4) will be
backward compatible with any Canon cameras or files beside the
5d Mark III?

Thanks.

Sorry Vincent, but I am a bit disappointed just like many others that you are not on the case for MK3.
Mobius was the best of all the promos produced for c300 and when I heard about 5d3 I was so excited to come back to your blog looking for that tingling feeling you gave me with REVERIE, years ago. You were the reason I got in to cinematography, instead of acting, to dream of achieving something so visually stunning one day…
I come back for that tingling feeling and nothing, no tingling, all I hear is HDMI this – Compression that, I know all of that, sounds great, but I believe what I see, not what I read.
Couldn’t you now just take a chopper, I am sure canon will pay for it, and make continuation of the story, just add some helicopter shots and we will all be happy to have that canon-love feeling again, otherwise I even feel like saving for another year or 2 and buy c300, mk3 is nice, but is it really the answer to my need of love for the camera? I love c300, when in fact to my budget and place in life I should love mk3… Ow Vincent what have you done?!

Although the Nikon d7000 has autofocus when shooting video, it appears that both the high end Nikons and the 5D Mk III and 1DX also omit this option. When shooting a wedding, the absence of video autofocus is a major limitation. Canon USA offer no explanation and admit they have no idea why Canon engineers omitted video autofocus.

Well, your take is fascinating as usual, Vincent. However, with all due respect, I think maybe you’re off the mark on this one (ha, ha, off the mark iii, I suppose!).

Canon has released the last stills camera anyone will ever need for any purpose, prosumer or above. One of a few reasons to pick the 1dx over the mark iii is the high frame rate, but really, who but the most demanding sports photographer needs 11 fps?

Reading all the commentary here and elsewhere reminds me of the story of the blind men inspecting the elephant. How many posts have I read where someone has said, “Oh, it doesn’t have feature A. Dealbreaker!” Or, “Oh, it doesn’t have feature B. Dealbreaker!” (Someone on this board even said he’d bite at $2999 but not $3499. Really? $500 bucks is the tipping point? Good to know; I’ll have to tell my accountant.) It doesn’t have this, it doesn’t have that; it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary; disappointed… where have I heard all that before? Oh, yeah, the iPhone 4s, and we all know what a sales loser that was.

We live in an age of absolutes, I suppose, and Canon has proved the adage “No good deed goes unpunished on the internet.” People examining the whole elephant, however, are jumping on this thing like nothing before. Anecdotally, pre-orders just at B&H number over 10,000. So, while the internet pundits pound the perceived flaws, omissions and disappointments of the mark iii, content creators are snapping them up. Now, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, the mark ii.

And the most petulant among us cry, “It doesn’t have interchangeable focussing screens / 33 MP / 7 FPS / 3,000 layer RGB psychically holographic metering / (insert beloved feature here)? F that! Worthless piece of junk! Nikon here I come! I’m rebuying everything!” A cri de coeur that warms the hearts of marketing vice presidents everywhere, I’m sure, even as the older among us remember the annoying kid in high-school photo class who made heart-breaking photos with her parent’s Brownie.

The mark ii was an important camera for many reasons, but for one in particular; it urged Canon to jump into the high-end video market with both feet. They now have a vertically integrated ecosystem of cameras and lenses that can cover 90-95% of video/film production. (Maybe 100% if we recall that the #1 box office attraction in the US last week was shot largely on 5D mark iis. So much for the perceived need for 4K. Story trumps form, blah, blah, blah.) People can own L glass and have that investment migrate up and down the system, and rent the Cine lenses as needed. The mark iii and 1dx are perfectly affordable B cameras for high-end, and A cameras for everybody else. Oh, did I mention they’re kick-ass stills cameras? And with the advent of the 4K Cine EOS and a seemingly probable 4K version of the C300 (I mean, you’ve gone this far, why stop?), there is no point in this system that bars entry and is not functionally interchangeable with any other. Nikon has nothing like this. Nobody has anything even remotely like this.

This is long and probably pretty boring, but I suppose my point is this: when looked at dynamically, what Canon is doing is genius. They can’t be everything to everyone, but they’re doing an astonishing job of spreading the stills/motion goodness around to as broad a market as possible, and they are serious about it. It’s a big elephant. It’s only if you have your hand on just the elephant’s tail that things tend to smell a little shitty.

Hello Mr. Laforet,

As a fan of “MOBIUS”, I’m looking forward to you new feature film! I have a quick question if you would be so kind. In an earlier post you mentioned the 5D3 seems to be superior for video than the 1-DX. From what I can find, the 1-DX seems to have the same exact specs – including superior ISO to the 5D3. Were you referring to the new headphone jack in the 5D3 to make this statement, or did I miss something important reading the spec sheet? Thank you in advance,

David

Vincent, love your work… Thanks for always inspiring. I’ve been searching for hours for the answer to this question:

Which will provide better video (1080 @24/30), the 1dx or the 5dmkiii? Which is better video in low light too? Or are they the same basically.

My biggest qualm with the dslrs is the jittery footage when walking around (yes there are stabilization options but those don’t always fit in my bag.

Thanks! Keep it up

@Da, not true… aperture is live durning recording… I saw the camera at PPI your thinking of the D7000…. And from the test Ive seen the D4 will remain the lowlight king with a clean HDMI to boot

I am a bit disappointed with canon, seriously, a bit higher price and few misses. I wish it had build in gps, no, you get that thing that you connect to USB, this camera does not have flash, so using both flash and gps is out of a question. What if you want to use gps and maybe that wireless unit, first of all it looks horrible, second there is only one usb port on the camera, so how to connect both? How about using old usb 2.0 technology? USB is less than 500mbit speed, while they included 1000mbit port on that wireless transmitter, so how can you transfer gigabit data over usb 2.0 interface? whats the point of even using gigabit on that device? and shape of that wireless transmitter, ugh, so ugly, like a brick, at least they should make it look like a part of a body or that grip that they used in the past. but then it would not be universal in between cameras. I don’t know, just seems like canon did so many shortcuts and they did not hold to that name that d5 mark ii used to hold.

With release of that nikon high mp camera urgh… 🙁

Ehh, will still love my Mark II…

In some of the docs for the 5d m3 it mentions that the lineskipping is no longer done so as to elimnate or greatly reduce moire. My concern, if lineskipping is no longer done that means during video recording a smaller section of the sensor is being used. How does this affect the beautiful depth of field we enjoy from the full size sensor. I realize we have a Full Frame sensor in both the M2 and M3, but if the M3 is only using the center or some section, it would be a reduced size optically. Your thoughts? Or is it still line skipping to take advantage of the size?

Hi Vincent,

I’m planning to upgrade from my EOS400D. I do mostly landscape, architecture, and some events/concerts.

Is the 2 grand difference between the Mk3 and Mk2 5D worth it, for the kind of photography that I do?

The C300 is in effect the Canon 5D MKII all grown up – but a pure video camera (not a still camera.)

I picked up the C300 in January upgrading from the Panasonic AF100 and recently upgraded my 5DMII to the 5DMIII. No regrets as the two have their specialties yet share lenses, CF cards, etc., working well together. For me, Canon has provided a powerful and reliable solution. I don’t have to worry about the logistics lending more of my brains processing to creation.

I’ve found the 5DMIII’s 61pt AF, 6fps, silent operation, HDR mode, expanded bracketing, faster processor and improved video well worth the upgrade. Perhaps this is more subjective but I see a richer color space over the 5DMII. All good stuff.

Thank you for inspiring Vincent!

Happy shooting

hello Vincent, I picked up a 5D mkII in July but had not shot any commercials yet with it till last month. We shot a completely virtual set commercial, all on greenscreen. the VFX supervisor and me where a little worried at first at the compression, but it turned out that the ALL-I codec worked beautifully in after effects to pull the key. We edited the native H.264s in Premiere Pro. A LOT of how we treated the camera and files had to do with stuff I read on your blog so I have to thank you for it. I am very proud of the tv spot we made. Here is the link, hope you can see it, it’s only 20 seconds long! https://vimeo.com/49270513

@Vincent Laforet, Thanks Vincent! you made my day with your comment!

Thanks for the write up Vincent! The improved af and higher iso capabilities of the mk3 make it well worth the upgrade in my opinion!

@Vincent Laforet, it’s nice

Agree with Steve Fuller. The AF, metering and especially high ISO capabilities of the mark iii over the mark ii (and to some extent even over my 1d iv) make me want to throw my mark ii in the bin now. Time to start saving up – again! Great write up.

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Spring/Summer 2015

5Diii New $2499
Like New $1500-$2100 depending on luck and patience.