Tech Tips for September 29, 2008

Yeah yeah, I know I’m late again with the Tech Tips for this week. But better late than never, I always say! And that certainly applies to the 1D3 autofocus fix as well! Here are the questions for this week:

Hey Fake Chuck,
I’ve already had a bit of a whinge to you about being shafted with my 1d3 doorstop, was just wondering if Canon have any intention of offering all us 1d3 owners some sort of discount or trade-in incentive to upgrade to the 1d4 when it comes out ?

I sent this question right on over to Japan, and rather than PR spin their answer back to you, since I don’t have much time I’m just going to copy-paste their answer here. I hope your engrish is good:

Trade why? What smoking sex? You is use drugs? The Canon is a Santa Claus? Every year in our study, the cost of the camera billion to spend money! If you have 1D3 why the trade or not to ask for discounts to the Nikon? God Damn it all! I am not work on whiners autofocus. Even if it’s not good, why you not start your own camera companies to make better? JANPUOFU of a cliff! Very thank!

And there you have it. Now you know what I’m dealing with every day. And let me say that this is not even close to how bad it can get.

Fake Chuck you’ve said that the new 50D camera has a stop to a stop and a half better noise performance than the 40D. However, now that people are able to use the 50D and we’re seeing samples, the noise looks the same, if not slightly worse compared to the 40D. Granted the 50D also has a higher resolution, but what happened with the better noise performance you promised us?

I heard about this too and my email inbox is currently loaded with emails from people asking about this and it is driving me absolutely nuts. It’s almost as bad as the goddamn autofocus questions. Look, I got this information from the press release that Canon Inc. in Japan sent out to everyone. In this press release, THEY are making the claim of a stop to a stop and a half better noise performance compared to the 40D. I myself haven’t done any tests on this because quite frankly I could not give a rat’s ass about it. I’ve basically touched upon this issue in last week’s Tech Tips when I answered the question about the resolving power of our lenses. Here the answer is the same. In the film days, nobody cared about noise because they didn’t see it in the small prints, which is all they ever saw. Today we have high resolution computer screens, and everyone is viewing pictures at 100% like they’re some kind of lunatic. It’s almost like these people expect to hang a 100% crop of the corner of an image in their living room. I can already see it: “Yeah and over here you can see a 100% crop of the shadow portion of a picture of an elephant I took on Safari last year. As you can see the noise is barely visible.” – “That’s cool, Barney, but I can’t see the elephant in this crop. Shouldn’t you have printed the entire picture?”

Chuck, what EXACTLY is the 5D Mark II?? Is it a video camera or is it a photo camera? I thought it was a photo camera, but now I keep seeing irrelevant crap about video all the time, when I can’t seem to find any decent information about what pictures it will help me take.

I understand what you’re saying, and indeed it does seem like everyone is talking about the video capabilities of this camera and all the work we did on improving high ISO picture quality is lost on them. We just posted some ISO 1600 images taken with the 5D Mark II here. And yes, before you ask, they all seem to be in focus. That was a major relief for me as you can imagine. It’s almost like the feeling when you have to take a liquid shit that burns and you’re trying not to let everyone around you know what’s going on, slowly head for the restroom while you try to walk normal, and then when you’re finally sitting down just let it all come out with an incredible noise while you let a sigh of relief at the same time. This is roughly how I feel each time I see sample pictures of our latest cameras these days that are actually in focus. Anyway, I don’t understand what the fascination is with video either. Point and shoot cameras have had this feature for ages now, and now that we’ve added it to the 5D2, people are pretending like it’s the second coming of Christ. Like it’s some kind of revolution. Well it’s completely lost on me. So hey, I share your concerns.

Thanks for reading Tech Tips. That’s it for now. Remember to email your questions to fcwestfall@gmail.com or leave a comment in this post. See you next week!