Canon EOS 1D Digital SLR

[Editor's note: There are many many sites on the internet testing digital cameras these days. On any given site, you can see plenty of resolution charts, color patch strips, and side-by-side comparison shots. But not here at photo.net. We strive to give an idea of what we thought about actually using the camera, something that other sites can skimp a little bit on. Not to downplay in the importance of resolution charts, it's just that we'd rather be out shooting in the real world.]

[Editor's second note: While this camera may no longer be at the top of the pile to those who want the biggest and best, until the recent announcement (and release) of the EOS 1Ds, The EOS 1d was Canon's flagship dSLR. And for those users who need a fast frames-per-second rate and a large shot buffer, it may still be.]

The EOS 1D is aimed at sports and editorial photographers (in much the same way that the EOS 1 film camera is) who need a tough, fast, solid camera and who don't mind carrying the extra weight and learning to navigate the cameras features (very few idiot shooting modes here) or paying $4500 (street).

Some selling points:

• 4.1 mega pixel CCD sensor
• Low 1.3x focal length magnification
• Up to 8 frames per second (FPS) burst shooting
• 1/16,000th top shutter speed
• 1/500th flash sync
• 45 focus points
• Extensivly gasketed weather proof body
• 100% viewfinder
• 21 custom functions
• Firewire (IEEE 1394) connectivity

Storage

No strange storage mediums here. Just simple Compact Flash or Microdrive. I am a microdrive user and with my 1 gig dive, I could shoot approximately 400 highest quality JPEGs or aprox 200 RAW files. Unlike my Canon D30 where I shoot the RAW format exclusively, with the 1D I typically shot JPEGs. The reason for this is that I was mostly taking advantage of the high fps and buffer size to shoot action sports sequences. Shooting JPEGs let me shoot approximately 20 shot sequences. Whereas the shooting in the RAW format would have limited me to around 16 shots. For me, that was a big difference. But if I were just trying to get a single moment, and wanted to shoot a short burst to make sure I did, i probably would have shot in the RAW format. I'm a big fan of RAW, since I feel that it gives the photographer more post shooting options in the digital darkroom. There is no option to shoot a TIFF with the EOS 1D .

Power

The EOS 1D comes with both a battery charger and an AC adapter which is a nice addition considering that many companies don't include both. The battery charger can charge two batteries at the same time. Though, as I had only one battery to test with, I don't know if they are charged simultaniously or one after the other like the D30 dual battery charger. The batteries are 12v and about the size and heft of a cordless drill battery. I found that the battery lasted fairly well through most of a day of shooting, but I often wished that I had a second one. You should bear in mind that I was shooting sequences most all the time and making liberal use of the review screen. Batteries seemed to charge in an hour to an hour and a half (not a scientific test on charging times).

AF and exposure

Speed is what this camera is supposed to be all about. Eight frames per second is pretty fast. There is as small of a shutter release lag as on any camera out today, that is to say, you wouldn't notice that there is one without expensive testing tools (55ms is Canon's claim). A 21 shot buffer (JPEG) will keep you shooting one shot after the other for a decent chunk of time. I have never found a use for "focus lock" AF in my style of shooting, but some photographers swear by it. If that's your cup of tea, the 1D will perform well for you. Even up to its top 8fps shooting speed.

The 1D's AF is wonderfully fast. Just as fast as you would expect a pro SLR to be. And when coupled with a Canon "silent wave" USM lens, it becomes almost undetectably quiet. The 1D has 45 AF points laid out in kind of a oval shape across the viewfinder. I'm not sure what the advantage is in having 45 points vs having 7-10 in the traditional cross format. You can choose to let the camera choose what group of AF points it thinks it should be focusing on, but I found this to be annoying because, in the situations I shoot in, it often ended up choosing something other than what I wanted it to. But if you are the kind of person who likes to use focus lock a lot, it might be just the ticket for you. The AF points light up in red, which makes it very easy to see which point you are using. Though if you don't like the red illumination, one of the many custom functions lets you turn it off. You can, of course, choose single AF, servo AF (continious), or MF. And the 1D will enable the AF assist light on Canon speedlights if you so desire. And as with all recent Canon SLR's, you get the option of moving the AF off of the shutter button and assigning it to a thumb button on the back of the top plate. Personally, I think moving the AF button is the greatest camera advance since sliced bread, but that's just me. The 1D's exposure system is just as full of options as the rest of it. No, there aren't any silly little "scene" modes here. But you do get the choice of 21 "zone" evaluative metering (linkable to any of the AF points), centerweighted metering, partial metering (using about 15% of the viewfinder), or true "spot" metering (using about 4% of the viewfinder). With the spot metering option you can choose to use the traditional center spot, or you can link the metering to any of the AF points, or you can do multi-spot metering (with up to 8 spot readings).

Metering works as well as you would expect it to. That is to say, the computer in the camera works very well, but it is no substitute for the computer between your ears. Just like every meter ever made, the 1D can still be fooled. I'm a big fan of the handheld meter and the review screen to make sure that I'm getting exactly the shot that I want. Like most pro cameras these days, the 1D lets you choose between auto, shutter priority, aperture priority, and manual. There as also a +/- 3 stop exposure compensation and a +/- 3 stop auto bracketing option. The auto bracketing can be set to shift either the shutter speed, aperture, or (interestingly) the ISO.

Speaking of ISO, the 1D has a healthy 200-1600 ISO range. I'm not really sure why we didn't get a ISO 50 or 100 option, but the 200 looks as good as most 100 speed shots, so I didn't worry about it much. With a top shutter speed of 1/16,000th I can't imagine having any problems with a scene being too bright at ISO 200. ISOs of 800 and 1600 start to get a bit of noise, but to me it's a nice noise. Not unlike a grainy B/W film. And in fact, that's usually what I do with my high ISO shots, turn them into B/W shots. Before you start to complain about the noise, just think back and remember how crappy high speed slide films look, grain like golf balls. (NOTE: Too late for me to test it out, I did notice that you can use one of the custom functions to expand the 1D's ISO range to 100-3200. I'm not sure what this means in terms of image quality. But it is possible.)

One knock on Canon vs. some of its competition is that, unlike when I used to use Nikon's D-flash TTL, I haven't ever been able to get satisfactory fill flash with Canon's ETTL system and my D30. But when they sent me the EOS 1D to review, Canon also sent me a 550EX flash unit. And I don't know what it is, but the 1D and the 550EX seemed to be made for each other. I got some great fill flash shots by just dialing down the flash exposure about one stop, just like I used to do with my Nikons. Maybe I just happened to be pointing the 1D at subjects that the ETTL could read perfectly, but I have to say that I was pleasantly suprised with the results. More important for me was the 1/500th flash synch which made daytime fill flash of action shots a breeze. I almost thought I was shooting with a leaf shutter lens.

White balence comes in a whopping NINE flavors: Auto, Daylight, Shade, Overcast, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Flash, Manually set, and manually set via Color Temp (2800K- 10,000K in 100K increments). Auto works pretty well for most situations, but I was glad to have the "shade" and "overcast" settings for cool situations that needed a little warming up. And the manual setting is a must-have for anyone who shoots in strange lighting conditions and wants a white wall to come out as white in the image. The manual setting via degrees Kelvin is an interesting option, but I have to admit that I didn't use it much. Mostly because I could never remember what number was daylight and what was tungsten. If you are blessed with a better memory than me, you might use this function more than I did.

Appearence and handling

The EOS 1D is a big, heavy camera. You aren't going to be taking any sneak candid shots with it. Your arm will quickly bulk up from carrying around its 3 lb. (without lens) weight. You'd think you could frame a house with this camera if you were short a hammer (I don't suggest doing that with any camera, except for maybe a Nikon F4). How does it look? It looks like a pro camera. Heavy duty everything, rubber seals on all the in/out plugs, a large verticle grip/battery holder, etc.

I loved the way that it handled. But I've always liked that F5/EOS1 camera size. To me, it just feels right. Even with my smaller hands, I had no trouble reaching all of the buttons and dials. Everything is laid out fairly obviously. Only a couple of things require some contortions to change (you have to hold down two buttons and roll the command dial to switch ISO speed). The vertical grip has another shutter button and a couple of the top plate thumb buttons.

Getting through menus or reviewing photos can be a bit tricky until you get the hang of it. For some reason, you have to keep switching which buttons you press (while you spin the control dial) to flip through menus, choose items, and review the photos. I guess this is as good of a time as any to bring up my one HUGE complaint with the EOS 1D . There is NO magnification function one the 1D . You can't zoom in and check for focus or blur when reviewing photos. There is no excuse for this. I am constantly using the zoom function on all of my other cameras. You don't want to realize 3 days and 3000 miles later that you messed up the shot. To not have a zoom function on the 1D made me feel like I was shooting film again (well it wasn't quite that bad). BOOOOO! Bad ommision, Canon. That having been said, I very rarely had any AF problems. The camera happily focused on what I told it to. But still..........

Unlike most point and shoot or "prosumer" digitals, the 1D has all of its settings and manual functions accessible with the press of a button (and usually the turn of the thumb wheel) and not hidden in some sub-menu. To me, this is of crucial importance. I feel if I can't control what the camera is doing, I can't control what photos I'm taking. The Canon G3/Nikon 5000/Olypus 5050 cameras are great for what they are. But when you are trying to make a white balence change in the middle of a fast moving situation, you can't be bogged down for 45 seconds scrolling through menus and trying to use the little direction pad to make the change. You'll have missed the shot. I can't stress enough how much the EOS 1D made me feel like I was using a honest-to-god pro photojournalist camera.

Some Other Features

The EOS 1D has 21 different custom functions. Some of these I likely will never care about. But some, such as reassigning buttons to perform other functions, I find essential to my shooting style. In addition, by uploading them from the EOS 1D software, you can gain access to another 25 "personal functions". Some as useful as enabling/disabling sppelight AF assist light, some as obscure as "disable focus-search drive by lens". But I'm sure that someone will have a use for each of them.

Another interesting feature of the 1D is that you have a choice of 5 different color spaces in which to shoot. For some, like photographers who are going do be dealing with pre-press issues for magazine reproduction, this gives a choice of sRGB (Matrix 5) or Adobe expanded RGB 1998 (Matrix 4) color spaces. But for the rest of us, it gives us a choice of three different "films" from which to shoot. Color Matrix 1 gives a very neutral color rendition overall. Color Matrix 2 is supposed to have saturation and contrast similar to a portrait film, with pleasing skin tones. And color Matrix 3 is Canon Digital's version of Velvia or E100vs saturated slide film. True, you could do all of that is post processing. But there are some who would rather have it done in the camera, so that the images is how they envisioned it when it shows up on their computer.

A larger CCD means a small 1.3X image multiplier Which is great news for guys like me who love to use wide lenses, but it might not be very exciting for the long lens nature photographers out there. As lots of photojournalism in recent years has evolved towards the "wide and close" school, I think Canon knows their market pretty well. I do slightly miss the tonality that I see from the CMOS sensor in my D30, but it's really not enough to make a fuss about. Canon said that they couldn't get the speed that they wanted for the 1D with a CMOS sensor, so they went to a CCD. I believe them, and I would rather have the speed that the 1D gives.

A neat feature that I kept forgetting to use is the ability to associate a sound file (up to 30 seconds in length) to a particular image file. You could use this to record a location or subject name to remember later. Or you could do what one photographer I know does and just use it to record 30 seconds of ambient noise, say in a Bankok market, just to give an idea of what the place sounded like when he shows people his photos.

Competition

The Nikon D1h is really the only competition that the EOS 1D has in the speed department, and at 4.5fps and 2.7 mpix, it lags far behind. However, I don't doubt that Nikon will be updating the D1 line in the near future to better match up with Canon's dSLR line.

Gallery

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Conclusion

Things I liked:

• Speed
• Large shot buffer
• Fash flash synch
• Build quality
• Good iso range
• Feels just a film camera (handels well)
• Low 1.3x image multiplier makes wide angle shots easier
• 550EX flash seems very well suited making fill flash easier
• Different "film" choices available by selectable color matrixes

Things I didn't like:

• No image magnification in playback, unexcusable
• High price (not so bad in comparison to the 1D s though)
• Learning controls for scrolling through images in playback takes some getting used to
• No TIFF option

Overall:

I think that it's pretty obvious that I like this camera a lot. Much of that is because it is a camera that is buillt for my style of action sports shooting. If I were a landscape photographer, I think it would be harder for me to be quite as excited about the 1D . But as it is, for someone who is looking for a digital camera that looks, feels, and performs like its film counterpart (EOS 1v), this is it. As with every camera I've ever seen, nothing is perfect, but I was pretty happy with Canon's effort on the 1D . And as further proof of its abilities, I sold a whole interview's worth of images to a national extreme sports magazine that I shot while this camera was on loan to me. Any camera that lets me get the shots I'm trying for, has got to be better than adverage in my book.

My background

I'm the digital editor here on photo.net. Home is the Northwest corner of the USA (Washington state currently). I'm 26 and make my living as a photographer/filmer for the BMX industry. I have been shooting photos for close to 15 years now and have been shooting 98% digitally for the past 18 months. I currently shoot with Various Canon digital cameras, a Leica IIIf, and an Arca Swiss 4x5. The farthest I have ever thrown a baseball is 6.34 miles. But it was against the wind, so keep that in mind.