Canon EOS 1D Series

including the EOS 1Ds, 1D Mk. II, and 1Ds Mk. II
by Karen Nakamura

Overview and Personal Comments

The professional series of the Canon EOS system cameras has been graced with the EOS 1 moniker since the original EOS-1 film camera released in 1989. Since then, the groundbreaking tradition continued with the EOS-1N (1994) and EOS-1v (2000) film cameras. Canon EOS 1 series cameras have represented the best of the best: the best autofocus speed, the best weathersealing, the best ruggedness, and the best reliability.

The first digital '1' series camera was the EOS DCS 1 in 1995. This married an EOS-1N body with a Kodak 6 megapixel chip and cost around $30,000. Six years later in 2001, Canon came up with their own entirely homegrown design and released the EOS-1D which was 4 megapixels but only $7000.

Canon ramped up R&D and produced a quick succession of replacements. The EOS-1Ds came out in late 2002 and had a full-frame 11 megapixel sensor. Then the EOS-1D Mark II came out in mid-2004 with a 1.3x crop factor 8.2 megapixel sensor with very high frame rate (8.5fps) for photojournalists. And the EOS-1Ds Mark II came out in late-2004 with a full-frame 16.7 megapixel chip with slightly slower 4 fps shooting, designed mainly for studio photographers. Using the text or images on this website without permission on an ebay auction or any other site is a violation of federal law.

Canon EOS-1 series cameras all share a polycarbonate shell over a magnesium subframe and can take knocks and bumps very well. All of the camera's dial and controls are weathersealed -- even the lens mount has a gasket designed to seal with the latest 'L' series zoom lenses. These cameras are designed to be used in the worst weather conditions -- rain, hail, sleet, snow, volcanoes, deserts -- with impunity.

Digital SLRs such as the EOS-1D series aren't my favorite choice for general street photography. They are all much too large and heavy for me. I find I have trouble carrying it unobstrusively. The 1D series are gargantuan. You can't palm them easily for inobstrusive camera work. My Leica M7 just straps to my hand and the lenses fit easily in a pocket.

If you are covering an event, the sheer size of the 1D serves as your instant press pass. Police officers and stadium crew immediately assume that you are part of the media. Now, this can be be good and bad. Good if it gets you backstage, bad if they don't want the press seeing anything. And many sports stadiums in the USA restrict "professional cameras" which means large SLRs and lenses larger than 12" in length. So you might not want to bring your EOS 1D with 100-300mm lens if you're trying to pass as a civilian.

The 1Ds Mark II is single-handedly responsible for many wedding and studio photographers selling off their Hasselblad medium format equipment and going fully digital. The 16.7 megapixel images are that good. That being said, the full-frame sensor reveals every flaw of every lens you have. Expect to budget in upgrades for all of your old-generation L (e.g. 17-35; 28-70) lenses for the latest new-generation L's (e.g. 16-35; 24-70).

Accessories

The must-buy accessories for the 1D Series are:

• Additional Li-Ion batteries: you can buy either Canon's overpriced NP-E3 at $120 at B&H or you can buy third party batteries on ebay for about a quarter to half the price. Just do a search for NP-E3. Make sure you buy from a reputable vendor and check the shipping-handling fees, some of them are quite exhorbitant.
• Memory card: 1GB CF cards are the minimum reasonable size for the 1D models. They are now less than $100 each. In mid-2004, I bought a Creative Muvo2 MP3 player for $200 which has a 4 gigabyte Hitachi microdrive drive in it. I extracted it successfully, and then sold the shell for $30. JPEG performance is fine, it starts to be a bit sluggish with multiple RAWs at the same time. Rob Galbraith has a great listing of CF Card Performance on the 1Ds Mark II , definitely check it out. The fastest is almost twice as fast as the slowest. The microdrive eats up a bit more battery than the compact flash cards, but not that much more.
• Compact flash prices have dropped dramatically in the past year. Shop around. Especially with the 1D series, it pays to have a very fast CF card, so get one with the best speed rating (e.g., 40x) that you can afford. I tend to avoid the "no-brand" cards and buy Lexar, Sandisk, and other maker brands.
• SD Memory Cards are faster than CF memory cards on the 1D Mark II series cameras. But they are also more expensive and the maximum size is smaller. Everything in life is a trade-off.

Product Tiering

The Canon Digital EOS product tiering currently looks like this:

When is the Mark III coming out?

Canon is producing new editions of their professional EOS digital camera models each other year. They tend to release the photojournalist model before the studio model. Right now, they have no competition for either the 1D or 1Ds Mark IIs (the nearest is the Nikon D2X for photojournalists and the Mamiya ZD and Hasselblad H1D for studio photographers), so I imagine that they are not in a rush to get new models out the door.

Giving the pacing of their professional series every two years, my guess is that the next model in the series (the EOS-1D Mark III) will be released 2006.04:

	Canon D30: 2000.10
Canon 1D: 2001.4
	Canon D60: 2002.02 (14 mo)
Canon 1Ds: 2002.11
	Canon 10D: 2003.03 (13 mo)
Canon 1D Mk II: 2004.4 (3 years)		Canon 300D: 2003.09
	Canon 20D: 2004.09 (18 mo)
Canon 1Ds Mk II: 2004.11 (2 years)		Canon 350D: 2005.03 (18 mo)
Canon EOS-1D Mk III: 2006 ??	Canon xxD: ??????? (14-18 months?)

Technical Details

Canon EOS System Compatible Flashes (professional models)

About Canon

Canon started out its life as Seiki Kohgaku Kenkyuujo (Precision Optical Research Company). Its first goal was to produce domestic inexpensive Leica clones, and it released the Kwanon, its first camera in 1934. Interestingly, they used Nikon lenses since Nikon was already established as an optical lens manufacturer and was not making any of its own camera bodies at that time. Canon soon gained the ability to make their own lenses and never looked back. Nikon also went on to produce some reasonably popular cameras of its own as well.

The name 'Canon' comes from the Buddhist deity Kwanon and early Canon cameras were actually spelled 'Kwanon' and the lenses were named 'Kyasapa' after another deity.

Side note: Canon is my favorite Japanese company along with Honda. I actually interned for Canon Japan (ok, Canon Sales Japan, a part of the Canon keiretsu) during a summer in college and loved my coworkers to death. They keep coming out with innovations that take your breath away.

On the Net

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