The Canon 5d Mark III that everyone has been waiting for has been announced. The camera brings a handful of improvements including speed, greater resolution, more processing power, and more options for shooting HD video. The full-frame sensor has been upped to 22.3 Megapixels and shoots up to 6 frames per second with a 61-point AF system. What’s great about the new sensor in this camera is that the pixel pitch is smaller, which allows for better low light performance.
For a handful of years I’ve shot on my trusty Canon 1d Mark II but it’s dated. Jumping up to the 1DX would be ideal, but it’s $7000 price tag is unfortunate. So what do I think about the 5d Mark III? The Canon 5d Mark II was an amazing camera, but the 5d Mark III is even better. Coming in at $3500 for the body I don’t see it as being unreasonably priced.
Is the 5D Mark III what you hoped for—would you buy it?
Spec list:
Price: $3500 (body)
Sensor: 22.3-megapixel, full-frame (36.0mm x 24.0mm) CMOS
Processor: Digic 5+
Max ISO: 25,600 (standard), 102,400 (expanded)
Max Image Size: 5,784 x 3,856
Video: 1080p (24/25/30 fps), 720p (24/25/30/50/60 fps)
Display: 1.04-million dot, 3.2-inch LCD
Images via Gizmodo
You may have noticed that I’ve posted quite a bit on the subject of SSD drives over the past couple years. The speed this technology can afford has the potential to finally set us free as artists so that we can focus on our work and not beach balls and hourglasses. The main bottleneck of modern computers is the hard disk drive, which has inexplicably been frozen in time at speeds which have remained constant almost as long as I can remember. Remove this bottleneck and a whole new world opens up.
The problem with SSD so far is it’s failure to truly deliver on it’s promises of speed. Sure, 250MB/s is fast, but only marginally quicker than a standard HDD. So I was excited to see the announcement from OCZ that a new version of their Z-Drive, the “R2” is due out soon.
The original Z-Drive was somewhat of a disappointment but — at least from the specs on this one — they seem to have learned some lessons from that initial attempt. The new model sports an 8 way RAID 0 setup (basically like 8 SSD drives in RAID 0 on a hardware controller — beats the heck out of my setup) — and speeds around 1.4GB/s. In case you didn’t read that correctly: 1.4GB/s. Insane speeds. And that’s both ways, read and write.
Imagine having this thing set up as your Photoshop swap drive (or, as the Engadget article suggests, editing raw 1080p footage in real time). In PS, I’d imagine you could tear through 24×36″ @ 300dpi with hardly a delay. And at 2TB (the largest possibly configuration), the Z-Drive is truly massive for an SSD. You could fit your entire OS and your data on there for quick file open/saves. And with 1.4GB/s of overhead, I wouldn’t think twice about using the drive as my OS and swap at the same time.
Now for the price (which hasn’t been announced yet): expect ridiculous. The original model ranged from $1500-$2700 and I don’t see this one coming too far down from that. But for performance like this, you have to pay. And when you consider the potential cost of eight SSD drives totaling 2TB and a hardware RAID controller the Z-Drive starts to sound a bit more affordable.
OCZ Product page
Further reading at Engadget & Hot Hardware
