Official specs: Canon EOS-1D X Mark II

At least they have 14/16fps to "spec" against the 10 of the 7D2. Definately puts it on the improvement mark.

The 5D4 can now be bumped to 8-9fps and that'll be plenty for my needs and it still won't hurt the 1dx

Talley wrote in post #17891010
At least they have 14/16fps to "spec" against the 10 of the 7D2. Definately puts it on the improvement mark.

The 5D4 can now be bumped to 8-9fps and that'll be plenty for my needs and it still won't hurt the 1dx

Pretty soon, every 8k-capable video camera will be shooting 32MP at 25fps or higher. They're not far off now. 4k is common and production companies are starting to use 8k - the technology is there and just needs to trickle down.

You can do that sort of thing with an electronic shutter. No chance of that happening with a flapping mirror.

The action SLR's days are numbered.

umphotography wrote in post #17886987
Im seeing all the remarks about touch screen and I think im like the majority. Makes no difference to me. I can see this being ready cool for the video guys but not sure how it can help me as a stills shooter unless Im capturing images through Live View and it works in conjunction with live view.

Am I missing anything ??

missing loads. ever used iphone vs a old nokia device with a keypad.

which offrs better UI interaction?

Touch screen is not a gimmick

Far quicker then a D-PAD

wallstreetoneil wrote in post #17887127
this touch screen issue is pretty easy

Canon is a big company - they do big company things

they allocated a budget and assigned resources based on the specs

there was no budget for the development time necessary to give the 1Dx a feature which were not necessary for sales

when all the guys shooting NFL games and soccer games world wide tell their Canon rep they want a touch screen to review pictures, it will appear on the next model


therefore, you can likely figure out what the feedback was

1) i like the ergonomics, don't change it too much
2) give me more shadow detail and 1 more stop of clean ISO
3) i'll take a few more FPS if you can do it, but I don't want any more oiling issues
4) it isn't a 100% necessary, but if you can allow me to do high quality frame grabs from video, I might use that at some point (thus 8meg, 4k, 60p video)
5) a guy i know is going to south america somewhere deep in the jungle and would like to code some gps data in the pictures for the editor - can you do that?
6) i can't see the f'ing focus point in the dark - make it red
7) i got kicked by the bride's grandmother while taking pictures at a friend's wedding - I need a quiet shutter mode if it's possible
8) a highspeed wifi connector that can reach 500 feet would allow me to send pictures in near realtime to my editor - can you up the speed of the connector
9) i would love to record every frame of the men's 100 meter final at the Olympics - so i need about 11 seconds or raw buffer

if you do all that I will buy 2 - thanks

you dont just release a product based on peoples needs. you also throw in some surprises too.

if companies just releasd what only people wanted, we wont see no new featurs/innovation/sur​prised at all.

Canon could learn a thing or two from appple

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891190
missing loads. ever used iphone vs a old nokia device with a keypad.

which offrs better UI interaction?

Touch screen is not a gimmick

Far quicker then a D-PAD

That really depends on what you are trying to do. Reviewing images and zooming and panning around? The touch screen is much faster. Changing AF points while looking through the viewfinder? The joystick lets me change points without taking my eyes off the viewfinder, so that is definitely faster than any touchscreen.

frankchn wrote in post #17891194
That really depends on what you are trying to do. Reviewing images and zooming and panning around? The touch screen is much faster. Changing AF points while looking through the viewfinder? The joystick lets me change points without taking my eyes off the viewfinder, so that is definitely faster than any touchscreen.

have both.

touch screen doesnt mean get rid of the joystick.

An app developer and a engineer could rap up a touch screen UI in 6months flat

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891193
you dont just release a product based on peoples needs. you also throw in some surprises too.

if companies just releasd what only people wanted, we wont see no new featurs/innovation/sur​prised at all.

Canon could learn a thing or two from appple

You are mistaken if you think Apple revolutionizes the industry with every release of a new Mac or a new iPhone. In fact, Apple has not substantially changed the core UI elements of iOS or Mac OS for a while. The original iPhone came with some apps and a grid of icons for the home screen and that remains the case for iOS 9. Same thing with Mac OS X -- in Mac OS X 10.0, you have a toolbar on top and a dock at the bottom for your apps and that remains true in El Capitan today. Things get upgraded and new features get added (Touch ID, 3D Touch in iPhones; Spotlight, App Store, etc... in Mac OS), but the core has remained the same.

The same philosophy has to hold even more true with Canon, especially on their flagship cameras. Canon can put bells and whistles and "interesting" features that will catch the eye of a consumer shopping for cameras at Best Buy, but the professionals who are actually going to buy the $6000 cameras are not interested in surprises or features that are irrelevant to what they do. They want absolute reliability and improvements in core functionality, which is what Canon delivers with the 1DX Mark II.

The priority for Canon on flagships has to be (1) make sure that their cameras are completely reliable (no repeat of the 1D3 AF fiasco which basically conceded a lot of high end market to Nikon's D3) and (2) improving core functionality (fps, DR, high ISO, AF) and finally (3) add some features that some of their core demographic of photojournalists and sports photographers want (GPS, 4K video, etc...).

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891196
have both.

touch screen doesnt mean get rid of the joystick.

An app developer and a engineer could rap up a touch screen UI in 6months flat

And they are doing that, though again they have to make sure that the touch screen does not interfere with how most of their target market use the camera (no unwanted touches because of your cheek pressing up against the screen, etc...).

Shadowblade wrote in post #17891020
Pretty soon, every 8k-capable video camera will be shooting 32MP at 25fps or higher. They're not far off now. 4k is common and production companies are starting to use 8k - the technology is there and just needs to trickle down.

You can do that sort of thing with an electronic shutter. No chance of that happening with a flapping mirror.

The action SLR's days are numbered.

A common catch cry of the last few years yet I believe the numbers you are referring to are a lot bigger than you think

frankchn wrote in post #17891201
You are mistaken if you think Apple revolutionizes the industry with every release of a new Mac or a new iPhone. In fact, Apple has not substantially changed the core UI elements of iOS or Mac OS for a while. The original iPhone came with some apps and a grid of icons for the home screen and that remains the case for iOS 9. Same thing with Mac OS X -- in Mac OS X 10.0, you have a toolbar on top and a dock at the bottom for your apps and that remains true in El Capitan today. Things get upgraded and new features get added (Touch ID, 3D Touch in iPhones; Spotlight, App Store, etc... in Mac OS), but the core has remained the same.

The same philosophy has to hold even more true with Canon, especially on their flagship cameras. Canon can put bells and whistles and "interesting" features that will catch the eye of a consumer shopping for cameras at Best Buy, but the professionals who are actually going to buy the $6000 cameras are not interested in surprises or features that are irrelevant to what they do. They want absolute reliability and improvements in core functionality, which is what Canon delivers with the 1DX Mark II.

The priority for Canon on flagships has to be (1) make sure that their cameras are completely reliable (no repeat of the 1D3 AF fiasco which basically conceded a lot of high end market to Nikon's D3) and (2) improving core functionality (fps, DR, high ISO, AF) and finally (3) add some features that some of their core demographic of photojournalists and sports photographers want (GPS, 4K video, etc...).

And they are doing that, though again they have to make sure that the touch screen does not interfere with how most of their target market use the camera (no unwanted touches because of your cheek pressing up against the screen, etc...).

You could disable touch mode for that or screen wakes up only when you press one of the physical buttons like the menu button.

there is other flaws in this camera that will effect core user requirements such as the false advertisement of 14fps.

You can only achieve that when u shoot only one single CFAST card in the slot as the CF slot with a card inside will slow down the FPS(what is your take on this?)

Also USB C should have been implemented and there are plenty who have requested for this to be part of the camera.

John Sheehy wrote in post #17890717
It depends on how many assumptions you want to make. You can somewhat safely assume that clipping will be about 14000 levels above black, and assume that the metered gray point is the same as usual (about 1500), then all you need to see is a patch of the black-masked borders on the side of the RAW image, and get its statistics. In 14-bit RAWs, the base ISO black noise is usually in the 4.8 to 6.0 range for existing Canons. If there is a major improvement in base-ISO DR, and they are still using linear 14-bit files, we might see lower numbers around 2.0, or even 1.0 (but 1.0 would mean that 14 bits isn't quite enough). If there is clipping in the RAW image, then you know the exact clipping point.

If Canon chose to change how much highlight headroom there is, then you will get the correct DR for that RAW, but you don't know its actual ISO, to correct as DxOMark does (their plot points are not at exactly 800, 1600, etc, so that the figures represent read noise levels at real ISOs and not just the DRs of files).

I get the exact RAW values by using IRIS (www.astrosurf.com/buil - old but still loads fairly new RAWs), or libRAW's (www.libraw.org) included binary named something like "unprocessed RAW" to create TIFs. Both yield literal RAW values, in a gray mosaic.

Many thanks John. Interesting and useful.

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891196
An app developer and a engineer could rap up a touch screen UI in 6months flat

That's entirely likely - but then it's got to be sufficiently tested and supported, and they'll probably be under pressure to get working on the next product or feature (now that they've delivered the bare minimum features the business decided were critical for the product... and they're still a little late because it was overambitious on the time-scale front).

That's the reality of commercial engineering. The beauty with guys like the Magic Lantern team is that you can have a bunch of talented people tinkering away in their own time, under no time-scale pressures, with no requirement to justify that a feature they're adding will deliver a return on the investment.

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891243
You can only achieve that when u shoot only one single CFAST card in the slot as the CF slot with a card inside will slow down the FPS(what is your take on this?)

Are you meaning if you're writing raws to both cards (in which case, likely yes), or something like the 5D3 problem where use of the SD card slows down the CF card interface?

Remember that cameras have a RAM buffer, into which they can dump data at crazy rates. As far as I recall, Canon are claiming a buffer with a capacity for 170 raw shots - meaning you could shoot for ~12 seconds with full size raws at 14 fps before you need to hit the card. Even a 50MB/s CF card should have enough time to write out 50MB/s * 12s = 600MB; so maybe ~20 shots in that time. Thus you may actually get something closer to 190 shots (at 14 fps) before it chokes up.

sploo wrote in post #17891246
Many thanks John. Interesting and useful.

That's entirely likely - but then it's got to be sufficiently tested and supported, and they'll probably be under pressure to get working on the next product or feature (now that they've delivered the bare minimum features the business decided were critical for the product... and they're still a little late because it was overambitious on the time-scale front).

That's the reality of commercial engineering. The beauty with guys like the Magic Lantern team is that you can have a bunch of talented people tinkering away in their own time, under no time-scale pressures, with no requirement to justify that a feature they're adding will deliver a return on the investment.

the 6months timeline includes testing mate.

to be blunt, the work has been done already on other touch screen dslr with canon cameras .

sploo wrote in post #17891249
Are you meaning if you're writing raws to both cards (in which case, likely yes), or something like the 5D3 problem where use of the SD card slows down the CF card interface?

Remember that cameras have a RAM buffer, into which they can dump data at crazy rates. As far as I recall, Canon are claiming a buffer with a capacity for 170 raw shots - meaning you could shoot for ~12 seconds with full size raws at 14 fps before you need to hit the card. Even a 50MB/s CF card should have enough time to write out 50MB/s * 12s = 600MB; so maybe ~20 shots in that time. Thus you may actually get something closer to 190 shots (at 14 fps) before it chokes up.

yes just like the 5d3

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891258
the 6months timeline includes testing mate.

to be blunt, the work has been done already on other touch screen dslr with canon cameras .

The groundwork maybe, but probably not implementing and testing all the specific menus for this new camera. I do also wonder just how much shared firmware there is: probably lots between cameras (just good sense) but perhaps less so between an SL1 and 1Dx (rather different sides of the coin).

Most likely, they just ran out of time for non-critical features and it got pushed. Whether or not it appears in a future firmware may well be down to what competitors do.

jonneymendoza wrote in post #17891260
yes just like the 5d3

Is there any evidence for that though? AFAIU CFast is based on the Serial ATA interface, CF is the old Parallel ATA. Probably then they will require different interface circuitry. It would also be a rather significant fail in a high-end sports camera if using the CF card cripples the CFast slot.

smythie wrote in post #17891223
A common catch cry of the last few years yet I believe the numbers you are referring to are a lot bigger than you think

We've got 8k video cameras already.

We also have lag-free EVFs (a combination of OLED and dedicated image processing hardware)

We also have on-sensor phase detection, as well as electronic shutters.

All the ingredients are there. They just need a bit of refinement and miniaturisation. Even without the EVF and on-sensor phase detection, you can achieve the same thing with a translucent mirror.

If you have an 8k video camera with fast AF, there's no reason to have a separate stills action camera.