This is not a detailed camera review—there are countless photographers and writers with far more talent and experience in this regard than I will ever have. Nor do I have the time or inclination to take thousands of photos of test charts and running men in order to tear apart every custom function and analyse the last drop of performance. If you want a long list of specs, download and read the manual, or check out one of the many websites that repeat all that info. What follows is simply my thoughts to date on the EOS 1D Mark IV, the latest top shelf offering from Canon.
This camera is currently still quite scarce (in this part of the world at least), and after the fiasco that was the EOS 1D Mark III there are a lot of people understandably cautious about the latest incarnation of Canon’s flagship 1 series. When first announced (October 2009), Canon indicated the EOS 1D Mark IV would be available by mid December. I got on a waiting list the very next day but it wasn’t until my birthday in late January 2010 that I got the call from Photo and Video to say my body was in. Rumor has it there was something called the Winter Olympics about to start somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere and Canon thought photographers there should get all the early units. I don’t know, but delays like that, given the recent 1-series history, and not a word of official explanation can start people thinking. Anyway, I felt like buying myself a present, and just hoped it wasn’t too much of a gamble.
I find it interesting that Canon frequently refers to the Mark III’s inconsistent auto focus in Mark IV documentation. Clearly an attempt to separate the new-and-improved from the old lemon. I passed on getting a Mark III, and am very pleased I did. The 50D is the body with which I am most interested in comparing the 1D Mk IV. This is not really a fair fight, considering the price difference and age, but they have virtually the same pixel count (16.0 megapixels for the 1D Mk IV compared to 15.1 for the 50D), and the 50D has been my primary wildlife camera of late. Although the 50D is a very capable camera, there are a few things I was never very satisfied with. I’ve now had over a month with the 1D Mk IV. This is what I think so far.
In the hand
One of the most important aspects of a camera is the handling; how it fits in your hand, how easy it is to reach controls, how logical the increasingly complex menu options are to navigate.
The 1 series Canons are built tough, and the 1D Mark IV is no different. It feels solid and durable. Enough said.
The menu is easy to navigate and anyone familiar with a prosumer Canon body will find their way around without too much difficulty.
The histogram is standard Canon style. One look at the back of a Nikon D3x will show Canon shooters how much they are being short changed. Dear Canon, the histogram is the most important thing displayed on the LCD screen. Please give us a full screen overlay and obvious ends to the x-axis.
I have the optional battery pack on my 50D, primarily for the vertical shutter release and to give it a bit more bulk which I find easier to hold, but it has some flex and I prefer the integral grip of the 1D Mk IV by far. The 1D Mark IV is far from perfect though. I like to use the multi-controller to change focus points, but you can’t reach it in the vertical position on either camera unless you have an unusually long thumb. The finger indent on the 1D Mark IV grip seems strangely narrow to me, but it is not something that bother me much in use. I guess the designers at Canon have a hand shape quite different to anyone I’ve ever met. Modern manufacturing processes and freedom from the restrictions imposed by rolls of film must surely allow great flexibility for ergonomic excellence, but we seem to be stuck with old ideas.
I probably don’t even need to point out that there is still no dedicated mirror lock-up button. Photographers have been complaining about this for years. It seems the designers think they know better than the people actually using the gear, and it is hard to interpret this as anything but plain old arrogance.
Image quality
I’m pleased Canon didn’t try to squeeze more than 16 megapixels onto the APS-H (1.3x if you like) sensor. The important thing is that they are very good pixels. The images typically have detail that the 50D struggles to attain. This is no doubt at least partly due to the larger, 5.7 μm pixels of the 1d Mark IV (compared to 4.7 μm for the 50D) being less taxing on technique, optics and subject movement, but perhaps also suggests a less aggressive anti-aliasing filter on the new body.
By my eye, the 1d Mark IV has the best part of 2 stops improvement in colour noise, and the luminance noise has a much nicer, smoother appearance compared to the 50D. With the 50D I was always reluctant to go beyond ISO 400, but with the 1d Mark IV I’ll dial in ISO 1250 without hesitation if needed. It is not just about noise (although people love to focus on that)—the 1d Mark IV also does a nice job of maintaining detail and colour. You can turn the ISO up to ridiculous 6 figure numbers if you want, and use it to make hideous looking photos. The top half of the ISO scale is about marketing, nothing more useful.
I’ve done no tests to back it up, but the improvement in dynamic range of this new body is also readily apparent when reviewing images.
Auto focus
This is what most prospective Mark IV owners will be interested in—how well it tracks moving subjects. It is, after all, designed explicitly for action photography. In short it seems to be very capable. I found the 50D to be too slow to keep up with fast approaching subjects—the point of focus often shifting further back with each frame in a series. More bothersome to me was the tendency of the 50D to jump to the background far too enthusiastically if the focus point is not kept precisely on the subject. The 1D Mark IV performs noticeably better in both regards.
Before starting any serious shooting, I used the moiré interference method to check autofocus accuracy with all my lenses. The only ones that could be improved with micro adjustment were the 16-35/2.8 which I gave +3, and +2 for the 300/2.8 and 2xII teleconverter combination, everything else was spot on (unlike my 50D). A reassuring indication of a little bit of quality control at the factory, maybe.
Although I had hoped for friendlier weather, an Albatross Encounter trip off Kaikoura to shoot pelagic birds proved to be a nice test for the ID Mark IV. It was raining, the light was dull, and the sea was ‘moderate’. Cameras like this laugh in the face of a bit of rain, so the only challenge with that was keeping it off the lens’ front element. Crank the ISO up to 1250 to maintain high shutter speeds in the dull light, and lets see how well the auto focus tracks fast flying birds as we bob up and down in a small boat. As soon as I shot the royal albatross sequence below I had a good feeling about the autofocus. Initial acquisition was very snappy, and it stayed with it. I wasn’t flat out at 10 frames per second for the whole 4 seconds this sequence took to capture—I was pausing for compositional variety—but when I realised half way through that it was still tracking I grinned and kept going, ending up with these 17 frames.
Gosh, didn’t I do well to keep the thing in the frame while just about everyone else on the boat was feeding their breakfast to the birds! I had the surrounding AF points on for this sequence. Four are easy to mark for the trash, 2 are not sharp on the eye but these can’t really be blamed on the camera (and are not far off anyway), and the rest are correctly focused. The numbers don’t mean much, as there are too many variables here to try to quantify performance, but I have no doubt that the 50D would have grabbed the background at about frame 8 (and certainly by 9) and not let go, and it would have really struggled to drive the focus fast enough to track the bird as it got closer. The 1D Mark IV on the other hand not only used its predictive tracking algorithms and surrounding focus points properly to stay on target when I wandered, it recovered very smartly when it did miss a bit, and it kept up with the rapidly approaching bird. The end result is probably twice the number of usable frames to choose from.
I have tried different autofocus custom functions and find using manually selected AF points with surrounding point expansion (C.Fn III-8-2) to work best for me with birds in flight.
The “all 45 points area” custom function (C.Fn III-8-3) sounds great, and is amusing to play with for a short while, but I have found it to be otherwise useless. It is too easily confused to produce consistently tack-sharp images.
Summary
The similarities between the 50D and 1D Mk IV pretty much begin and end with the pixel count. This shouldn’t be a surprise since the latter costs nearly four times as much as the former.
This is a highly customisable camera, with more functions and features than you can shake a stick at. I haven’t even played with the video feature yet. Oh yes, it does full HD video.
It offers great image quality with low noise. The buffer is deep enough that I haven’t yet hit the wall, even though I’m only using lowly old 30 MB/s Extreme III compact flash cards. 16 GB cards fill up pretty fast at 10 frames per second though, with raw files around 20 to 25 MB each. Autofocus performance seems excellent to me. Initial acquisition is fast, it is stable on static subjects, and focus-tracking works very well. The most irritating thing is that a few very simple changes could improve the functionality a great deal, and I struggle to understand why they are so overlooked.
Double thumbs up from me.
