The 1DII as a Landscape Camera? Is it good enough?

[Asher Kelman]

The 1DIII as a Landscape Camera? Is it good enough?

I'm surprised, but here it is the fast 10.1 MP Canon 1DIII being shown as a landscape camera.

The pictures look great! Study the pictures carefully. These are preprared by Canon, photographer not disclosed.

But what do you think of these two landscape shots?

Download the full size image below these two screen shots

and lets examine it as if you were going to buy your camera based on these two images! How sharp, what noise, the contrast, color, aberrations, fringing and anything ele important to you. How are the files to photoshop manipulation?


Now is this the Antarctic? It's a Glacier scape ! They should have at the GPS unit working (you can attach your GPS by USB!)


and Mountain or is it volcano with mile high cloud or smoke

Let's know what you think.

What is is about this camera that would be useful to you over the 5D* or 1DII for landscape.

Asher

 

[StuartRae]

How sharp, what noise, the contrast, color, aberrations, fringing

Asher,

I would have thought that most of these criteria depend more on the lens and raw converter used, than the camera body?

Sharpness - lens and converter.
Noise - camera.
Contrast & colour - lens, and to some extent the camera profile used in the converter.
Aberrations and fringing - lens. Some colour artifacts are introduced by the converter.

Regards,

Stusrt

 

[Ivan Garcia]

Initial thoughts

I had a little play with the 1DMKIII files.
Make no mistake this are very strong files, even at 8bits, it can stand an amazing amount of punishment.
Cropped, up sampled to 1920 X 1200 (lovely for a wallpaper on my apple 23hd) down sampled to
1120 X 700 @ q8 compression for web server.
Levels, curves, saturation, selective colour, and sharpening. Considering this is a extreme crop of the original file, I am very happy with the results, I might put my pre-order with my local dealer right now... very impressed, I can't wait to get hold of a Raw 14bit file...
I don't know the legalities of posting the picture below, any complaints and I shall remove it from the server.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Asher,

I would have thought that most of these criteria depend more on the lens and raw converter used, than the camera body?

Sharpness - lens and converter.
Noise - camera.
Contrast & colour - lens, and to some extent the camera profile used in the converter.
Aberrations and fringing - lens. Some colour artifacts are introduced by the converter.

Regards,

Stusrt

Hi Stuart,

The is a chain. The coating of the lens, reflections from the sensor are related. The angle of the light coming to the periphery of the sensor from the lens can test the fidelity of the color and shading.

This is a different world than film, Think of the wonderful EF 50mm 1.4 used in film shows the purple blue lines separating black and white on a 1DII. Chuck Westfall attributes this to the particular combination. Especially where IR filters are used and micro lenses used, the path of light through the glass can differ substantially at the outer part of the image field.

So one can no longer just assign attributes to one part of the chain exclusively.

So we can't take anything on faith. We need to examine everything.

Asher

 

[Jack_Flesher]

IMO the 1DII is a decent landscape camera. Here is a shot I took a few years ago with one and it prints well up to 16x24. There was a time I claimed it was nearly "as-good" as a 5D for landscape and while it is close, I would say with proper processing the 5D is better, giving about one more size up on a final print:

 

[Asher Kelman]

IMO the 1DII is a decent landscape camera. Here is a shot I took a few years ago with one and it prints well up to 16x24. There was a time I claimed it was nearly "as-good" as a 5D for landscape and while it is close, I would say with proper processing the 5D is better, giving about one more size up on a final print:

Stunning!

If this is what the can 1DII can do, then the 1DIII should be outstanding. Still, the 5D does take a lot of beating especially in wide angle work where the extra pixels and the lenses without any x 1.x factor is best.

This makes another thread in Photography as Art. Reflections in Water as metaphors!

Asher