How does the Canon EOS 5D measure up? Mostly ramblings on ergonomics.

A couple of columns back I mentioned how bulky the Canon EOS 5D felt, compared with that svelte street fighter, the Leica M. Why, even compared to a medium format Mamiya 6 rangefinder, it still feels bulky. This bulk is a mixture of the Large Amorphous Blob school of body styling, compounded by the sheer bigness of the 24-105 mm ‘L’ lens. Not much one can do about that, but I did get rid of the worthless lens hood which made a dramatic difference, not to mention that you can now take the lens off and stand it on end without fear of expensive crashing sounds.

So how does it feel from a quality perspective? First, it’s clearly well put together. No, not Leica engineered, bespoke, hand fitted, quality. More Lexus mass produced but with great quality control sort of thing. Seams are as parallel as on any Toyota. Wonder what I mean? Next time you are following a Detroit product in traffic, just glance at the seam between trunk lid and body. See? The eye is very sensitive about parallelism, which is why we notice the products of Detroit’s union labor as quickly as we spot a crooked horizon.

Most importantly, Canon got the texture of the body covering right. Now the Rollei 6000 series of medium format cameras use a wonderful, high tech diamond textured body covering. It looks great but makes no difference as no part of your hand ever comes in contact with it. You use a pistol grip in the right hand and the left cradles and focuses the lens. So body covering has no tactile bearing on the equation. The Mamiya 6, by contrast, like any rangefinder camera, is made to be solidly grasped with the right hand, with the left optionally on the body or under the lens. So quite why Mamiya felt obliged to cover their very well thought out camera with a covering which feels like nothing so much as wet kelp, beats me.

After 30 years of the miserably designed screw thread bodes which will forever remind us of the world’s worst rangefinder and viewfinder, Leica finally got ergonomics right with the M3 in the early fifties. Needless to say, some accountant took over engineering, so they managed to make a meal of things when the M4-2 and later versions came out. You see, they replaced that wonderful, textured rubber body covering with something akin to used greaseproof paper. By then the quality of the M rangefinder had been well and truly compromised so one might argue that this move was perfectly in context. The feel was gone.

The texture of the EOS 5D body covering is just right. Grippy enough to create confidence but not so rough as to intrude. I hope it stays grippy with use. The lens controls on the 24-105mm are not quite as good. The zoom ring is too rough and the texturing on both zoom and focus rings could stand improvement. At least they avoided a ‘one touch’ zoom where one ring does for both focus and zoom. Lesson One in ergonomics. Controls sharing multiple functions cause planes to fall out of the sky. And similar disasters. They should take a look at the early 50mm Leitz Wetzlar Summicron for guidance when they redesign those ring coverings. Heck, the patents have expired.

Then there are four other oversights, mercifully all easily fixed. First is the world’s worst camera strap. Not only does it scream CANON EOS DIGITAL, it cannot be shortened enough and the ends splay out all over the place. Adding insult to injury, it always manages to end up with the rubberized side out, so an over-the-shoulder perch is precarious indeed. Still, I suppose the screaming advertisement is less visible that way. Thank goodness for Al Stegmeyer at Upstrap.com.

Second is the placement of the film plane mark on the left rear of the prism housing. Now quite why an auto-everything camera needs a film plane mark I will leave for you to decide. The answer probably features right up there with the intent of the more arcane sections of the Internal Revenue Code. Unfortunately, this film plane mark is easily mistaken for the indicator mark which shows the setting of the exposure dial. And, because of parallax, you always think you are one click out on that dial, until you turn the camera around and …. oh!, so that’s the right mark! Why not just make this dial show its setting though a cut out in an overlapping window? Cost, I suppose. There goes that accountant again.

The last two? These are straight out of the play book of the nouveau riche. Now I understand that the Japanese are label obsessed, whether it’s Levis, Chanel or Mercedes. Go to stores carrying any of these and there they are, long lines of them, buying branded sweat shirts and baseball caps. In other words things you really do not want to be seen in when unmarked, even less so when emblazoned with the maker’s name in huge type. So whether that’s nouve Japponais or nouveau riche, I took a few seconds with the ancienne regime, AKA black electrical tape, and fixed the problem. My 5D is now incognito, and a third piece of tape (I was in a spending mood, I admit it) covers that useless film plane mark.

The design and placement of the shutter release button works well for me, though I do have rather long fingers. In the vertical position it’s just as easy to use, provided you turn the camera counter-clockwise viewed from behind, shutter release pointing to the sky. The other way round it’s a bit tricky to use.

The balance of the camera in the hand with the 24-105mm mounted is just fine. On a tripod it is, of course, a tad front heavy lacking frontal support otherwise conferred by one’s left hand, but not enough that you worry about stressing out the camera’s baseplate. Just make sure you tighten that ball and socket head on the tripod fully!

The rear screen, which allows setting of some seventeen million parameters – I use it only to erase a full card once downloaded to the iMac – is completely useless in sunlight. You need shade or an indoor setting to read the thing. It also constantly reminds me just how greasy one’s nose gets. Still, it probably serves well as a makeshift make-up mirror for women users.

Out of the box the camera body smells quite foul; all sorts of chemicals which something tells me are not ideal for the old blood stream. I left the camera out to air for a couple of days and that, plus a couple of well intentioned licks from Bert the Border Terrier, seem to have fixed the problem.

Then there’s the ‘what were they thinking of?’ feature which seems to exist in most machines.

Let’s see. With the Leica M it’s the world’s worst possible film loading system. This was redesigned with the M4 and became a Quick Jam system, updating the Slow Jam original. Rangefinder Leicas, to this day, have a tripod socket on the M so far to the right that it might as well be on another camera. Smart, that. Then of course there were the soft brass camera strap rings which made many a repair man happy. I had mine replaced with stainless steel ones. However, one can forgive all these peccadilloes in light of the fact that the Leica M is simply the greatest street photography machine ever made. They add a sort of charm, like Cindy Crawford’s mole.

On the Leicaflex SL it’s the world’s worst film advance lever, unless you have fingers as long as ET. Mine just sold to, yes you guessed it, a Japanese collector, so he won’t care. I can excuse that also, in exchange for the best viewfinder ever fitted to a 35mm SLR.

On the Nikon F it was a pentaprism so hard to remove that you had to use industrial tooling to depress the release button on the back.

On the 6000 series Rolleiflex it’s the focusing screen holder, made by a bunch of West Hollywood fairies. You really do not want to be changing that one too often. Or the miserably dim standard focusing screen which allows Rollei to extort another $200 from you for one that works. Beyond cynical.

In the Rolleiflex 3.5F twin lens medium format camera with the built in meter, it’s a protruding meter needle cover which breaks as soon as you look at it. The needle follows soon after. Same lousy standard focusing screen, too.

In the Mamiya 6MF it’s a cluttered viewfinder with all those silly ‘multiple format’ frames no one ever uses as well as a film wind mechanism made of the purest cheddar. Plus a meter switch that is Off at the red dot instead of On. Go figure.

No, with the 5D it’s not the ‘print’ button on the back which allows direct printing to a Canon printer. Everyone seems to trash that. What’s the big deal? Sounds like a neat feature for quick and dirty results – the rich man’s Polaroid, if you like. No, it’s the two hinged rubber covers on the left of the camera, hiding the flash socket and computer connections. Now the latter will be seldom used – probably for the occasional upgrade of firmware – but the flash socket is another thing. I like to use a Novatron studio flash outfit for portraiture and this wretched little flap is not only hard to prise up, it is also not so much hinged as it is bendy, owing to a crease in the rubber. It would have been better to just make a little slide over flap like the one on the other side. Excellently designed, that one hides the Compact Flash digital ‘film’ card.

All in all, for a camera of this complexity then, there are few ergonomic boo-boos. Those that cannot be readily cured – the invisible rear screen when viewed in sunlight, the rubber left side flap – are, for the most part, no big deal.

Finally, thank goodness for the short lens-flange-to-‘film’-plane distance in the EOS body. That allows me to use my old Leica Telyt lenses, with an inexpensive adapter while preserving the ability to focus to infinity.

And some economics.

I dropped the three best snaps from yesterday’s foray with the Canon EOS 5D into Photoshop, added some unsharp masking (I use settings of 125/1/1 or thereabouts), bypassed the dust spotting step as there’s no film involved (hope that sensor stays clean!) and printed them on my Epson 1270 ink jet printer on Epson Premium Lustre Photo Paper. This has a nice mixture of sheen, for definition, and matt stippling to avoid looking too garish. Well, I have to say the results rival 4″x5″ film originals for creamy smoothness in large areas devoid of detail and equal or exceed medium format for sharpness and resolution. That creamy smoothness is simply not available in 35mm film originals at these enlargement ratios. The dynamic range, meaning the extremes from black to white, is clearly superior to either 35mm or medium format, reflected in the ability to capture lots of detail in poorly lit or low contrast areas. And I’m not even trying. These are auto-everything prints with the camera set as the factory shipped it, with definition set to JPG fine.

Mission accomplished. One quarter of the bulk of medium format and better quality than available on rapidly dying film. The EOS 5D is a stake in the heart of the Big Yellow God in Rochester. Goodbye Rolleiflex and Mamiya. We had a nice time together.

Take this image as an example. Extreme contrast range, white whites, cavernous blacks. In other words, a traditional printer’s nightmare. However, one click and the Epson puts out a perfect 13″ x 19″ print a few minutes later.

Looking at the EXIF data for the picture in Photoshop (˜File Info”) I learn it was taken at the lens’s shortest focal length of 24mm at 1/30th at f/6.3. Handheld of course, with lack of motion blur attributable more to Canon’s IS technology than the photographer’s (not so) steady hand.

You can clearly see the barrel distortion introduced by the optics reflected in the bowing of the cross beam in the ceiling, though I understand a RAW file will allow easy correction of this. If there is color fringing at the corners from this fairly wide angle setting, I cannot see it, though once again Photoshop CS2 provides for correction of such aberrations.

OK, so now I’m feeling better about blowing $4,500, even if the gear was free after all those medium format sales. But how expensive is it, as a 2006 state-of-the-art piece of equipment? 1969 is a significant year for me. It was when I started saving for my Leica M3, finally purchased, used, in 1971. At that time, there were but two camera stores in London – Wallace Heaton and the Rest. Wallace Heaton, you see, provided cameras to Her Majesty QEII, the wonderful Queen Mother and the not so wonderful Duke of Edinburgh. Indeed, you can see the Queen on a UK postage stamp, headscarf and all, her Leica M3 held with the hands of an expert. Luckily for her, Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar gave her that one free, so she didn’t even have to sully her hands with commerce at the Wallace Heaton store. Still, I suppose she still had to buy film.

Before those days of internet pop-up ads, Wallace Heaton published a small paperback annually, known to one and all as the Blue Book, named after the color of its cover. No prizes for originality, true, but an icon of the times. So I checked the price of the current Leica, the M4, in the Blue Book for 1969 and this is what I saw:

That £169.8.8, equal to $474.41 in real money back then or $5,799.05 inflated at 7% annually through today. And lest you think the Leica was premium priced back then, the best SLR then made, the Nikon F, sold for almost exactly the same amount.

So now I’m not feeling too badly about the $3,000 I paid B&H for the EOS 5D body.

And as for the long line of Japanese waiting to buy my Leica M3 at 40 cents on the dollar, let me repeat: “It’s not for sale”. Yet. Heck, when the Nikkei hits 30,000 you can prise it from my clutches for $5,000. Maybe.

One of the reasons advanced for digital photography is that it is cheap. After all, no film or chemical processing is involved. Now I have to say this strikes me as sheer rot for those seeking to make big prints for wall hanging. I average three pictures a roll of film that I want to print big. With 4″ x 5″ film more like 75%. That large, slow-working format encourages economy of effort and cuts waste dramatically. So if it costs $10 for a roll of processed 35mm film of 24 exposures, that figures to some $3 per processed success. Printing on an ink jet adds maybe $2 for the large sheet of paper and $2 for the inks, so we have $7 so far, all told. Now buy a matte, a mounting board, glass, the frame and hanging hardware and your all in cost for a beautiful 22″ x 28″ framed, matted print skyrockets to $70. How, pray, is the $3 saved on film material to this equation? So if you are buying digital to save on film costs, you need to rethink the economics.

Unless, like most photographers, you never display your work properly mounted and framed.

First impressions – the Canon EOS 5D in use

Living in central coastal California brings with it many benefits. No big city problems, space to breathe, no pollution and beautiful countryside all around in what is rapidly becoming the Napa Valley of the south.

So it did not take much effort to take the EOS 5D for a short field trip along twisty Santa Rosa Creek Road from Highway 46 all the way down to Cambria.

First, I have to keep reminding myself that this camera was purchased to replace my wonderful medium format gear which, in turn reflected my split thinking about equipment. I love rangefinders, hence the Mamiya 6 three lens outfit (small, fast, quiet). I also like control over variables, thus the Rollei 6003 (big, heavy and noisy). So it’s a tad silly to compare the size and weight of the EOS 5D with the Leica M3, but instructive nonetheless, as both are ‘35mm’ cameras.

With the 24-105mm IS ‘L’ lens the 5D weighs in at just under four pounds, replete with garish strap announcing ‘CANON EOS DIGITAL’ in large woven letters. That will have to go. Not only is it an exercise in poor taste, it cannot be shortened enough to keep the camera at chest height, where it belongs. I have a proper strap on order from Upstrap.com.

The lens hood will be the second thing to go – the worst possible way of advertising ‘photographer’. I’ll check for flare and just let the UV filter take care of protection if flare is not an issue.

Finally, I wish the body was chrome, not black, but that is not an option. The last thing on earth I want to be mistaken for is a professional photographer and black cameras seem to scream ‘pro’. Imagine the three worst things you can say when asked what you do at a party: 1. I work for the IRS. 2. I am a proctologist. 3. I am a professional photographer. Ugh! All guaranteed to clear the room.

A rational 35mm comparison is with the Leica M3, 21mm, 35mm, 50mm and 90mm lenses. That gives a similar focal length range. I don’t have my 35mm as it’s out on loan, so I threw in the Bessa T body where my 21mm usually resides, and the weight comes out to a pound more. Swap the Bessa body for the 35mm and there’s nothing to choose. You trade the convenience of a zoom on the Canon for some of the fastest compact optics made – the 21mm is f/2.8, the others all f/2, compared with the f/4 of the 24-105mm. Now the Canon zoom lens very cleverly gains three stops through the use of the Image Stabilizer technology, but that’s another story.

Here’s the film gear on the scale.

Finally, overall bulk and looks. Ugh! As you can see the Canon is positively gargantuan next to the Leica – like the cuckoo placed parasitically in the poor warbler’s nest by its mother. Even without that ridiculous, poorly designed lens hood, it’s large. As for looks, the body is indistinguishable from any number of competing digital SLRs, meaning it’s largely an amorphous blob which screams ‘designed by computer’. It certainly will not feature in your dreams.

This is not a camera for people with small hands. The controls on the lens are large in diameter and take some getting used to. The zoom ring is not as smooth as one might like, though the manual focus ring is very sweet. The dim viewfinder, compared with the Leica, is remarkably uncluttered, with data readouts below the picture. They are not at all distracting. Indeed, I rather struggled to see these in daylight. What is startling is the speed with which the autofocus works and, at least with my first snaps today, the automatic focusing seems spot on. There is no shutter lag. None. You can take a first pressure on the shutter release to lock focus and exposure and the feel of the release is so well engineered that it could not be improved on. While much softer than the Leica’s, which is surely the gold standard, I would venture to suggest it’s better, as there is less likelihood of camera shake.

I‘m not a serial or bulk shooter so the three frames a second capability is of no use to me, other than it startled me this morning when I didn’t realize I had it on and took three pictures where only one was intended! 3 fps is fast. With no film to wind on, the camera is surprisingly quiet, not as quiet as the Leica, but the noise is largely devoid of metallic overtones, maybe owing to the plastic casing and well damped mirror. That makes it seem quiet. Clever. Well done Canon.

Ask me what the best engineered lenses I have used are and I would unhesitatingly reply Leica and Rollei 6×6, though early all metal Nikon lenses were also excellent when it comes to build quality. No compromises were made in the designs of these lenses as their cost and weight attest. Now this Canon pro-grade lens is a different kettle of fish. It seems very light for its massive bulk when you first pick it up. The general feel of quality is for all to see and, notably, there is absolutely no wobble in the moving parts or barrels, which I have never experienced with a zoom lens before. It doesn’t feel as if it could survive the next nuclear blast, unlike its German counterparts, but time will tell. It focuses to about one quarter life size fully extended. Good to have. The switches for auto/manual focus and for IS on/off on the side of the barrel cannot be moved by accident. At $1,250 it’s a bargain. Have you priced Leica glass recently?

To push things a bit I exposed a couple of shots at one stop down and ISO 200, depending on the noise-free nature of the large sensor to avoid ‘grain’. The 1/250th second exposure computes to 1/2,000 with IS, so camera motion is not an issue. That bears thinking about. Consider how much sharpness is gained from the miracle of reduced image blur which IS confers. 16x enlargements (meaning 16” x 24” from the full frame) were noise free and very sharp in the center. As good as medium format? Too early to say but my first reaction is very positive. I need to take some snaps with lots of fine filigree detail to answer that. If you are one of those photographers who likes resolution charts as purportedly objective measures well, you had better stop reading, because those will never be seen here. My interests in the functioning of camera tools is strictly empirical. Sharpness or resolution are like obscenity. I cannot define them but I know them when I see them.

The peacock’s head, from the center of the frame, is equivalent to a 30x enlargement. Here’s the original:

No image sharpening was used other than that provided by the 5D on the Standard setting. Clearly, this lens has potential. You can just see digital artifacts, bearing in mind this is an enormous enlargement. This was at 105mm, ISO 200, one stop down – f/5.6. Autofocus was used. Out of focus highlights are unobtrusive.

Click here and you can see a dozen pictures from this morning’s ramble, including the peacock original. None of these had any post-processing applied and, of course, file sizes were reduced to make loading speed acceptable. Some involve challenging lighting, confirming the exposure meter works well. I used the default Evaluative Metering, making no adjustments to the camera’s choices. These were all taken at the highest quality JPG setting which means files are some 6 megabytes in size, which compares favorably with some 150 megabytes for high quality scans from 120 medium format film. Stated differently, an older G4 Mac will have no problem loading these files in a few seconds. My commiserations is you use Windows.

I have yet to experiment with RAW which evidently yields a file twice the size of highest quality JPG. RAW should allow easy correction of lens barrel distortion and vignetting, so I suppose that’s the way to go.

I made a few 13” x 19” prints on my Epson ink jet after completing the above. Of these, more anon.

The Canon EOS 5D arrives

With so much in excess equipment sales proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I splashed out wildly and paid the nice people at B&H in New York $20 more for Second Day shipping to the Templeton estate. This wild act of rash spending saw the Canon EOS 5D and the 24-105mm Canon lens arrive yesterday evening, where Bertie the Border Terrier and I dutifully placed it on the south patio so that we might contemplate what wonders this Pandora’s Box might disclose. Further, it was the Cocktail Hour, and nothing short of a second Japanese attack interrupts that.

This was a mixture of fun, as we enjoyed the delicious anticipation of what was inside, yet no less a period of deep apprehension. Setting aside my recent use of an Olympus Digital POS (in case you are wondering, that stands for Point Or Shoot, because with that camera’s shutter lag you cannot have both), for the last 40 plus years I have been loading cameras with film and adjusting but three variables – shutter speed, aperture and focus, and most of the time these adjustments have been manual. Often, it should be added, with incantations to the exposure God, praying that I would be within four or five stops of the right settings.

Lest the reader wonders at my sense of apprehension, then it has to be pointed out that the camera in my hands for most of those forty plus years was a Leica M2 or M3. And because I know a good thing when I see my negatives, the lenses on those Leicas always said ‘Leitz, Wetzlar’ on the front. For all of Leica’s problems, they remain the standard against which to judge to this day. And what lenses. The distortion free 21mm Asph Elmarit. The ’standard’ 35mm Asph Summicron. Any number of 50mm Summicrons. The ne plus ultra 90mm Apo Asph Summicron, perhaps the most perfect optic ever made. And finally, one of the very sharpest, the 135mm Apo Telyt, now winging its way back after a one year loan to a friend on the east coast. Throw in a couple of Telyts used on the idiotic Visoflex housing and you can see where my heart lies, optically speaking.

Before the great day arrived I had done a spot of studying and had procured a nice little Firewire card reader for the iMac; all this talk of plugging the camera into your computer strikes me as so much nonsense. Just remove the card and place it in the reader. Further, I had also learned that the swines in marketing at Macromedia/Adobe had ensured that Photoshop CS would not read RAW files from the 5D, so I had grudgingly upgraded to Photoshop CS2 which does. Unfortunately, the latest Adobe Camera RAW software is not backwards compatible with the earlier version of the application. I had also spent some time on Canon’s web site studying the interactive tutorials on the 5D and digital photography in general and found them useful and entertaining. Most importantly, they took out some of the apprehension I was suffering from the oncoming blizzard of knobs, dials and menu options.

Now Bertie’s take on this was, as usual, philosophical. “What have you got to lose?” he asked rhetorically. “Heck, the gear in that box was free, after all, and you can always sell it for little loss if it’s not for you.” By now the sun had almost set and the Martini glass, sadly drained, was now home to a lonely cocktail onion. So I gave the onion to Bert (we are dealing with a pretty sophisticated animal here) and set about the box, hoping to snap at least one picture before sunset. You know the sort of thing – “My first picture with my new toy on the day I received it”.

So we opened the boxes up, stuck the lens on the body, popped in the battery (nice that they ship it partly charged), inserted a memory card and stuck our head out the front door. Notice the strict adherence to American Attention Span with regard to the instructions.

And this is what we saw:

Canon EOS 5D. Picture 0001.

And that, dear reader, is why I live in California.

Anyway, suitably drained after this emotional experience, Bertram and I headed for the home theater to watch Hitchcock’s Frenzy, to learn better how real pictures are taken.

The EOS 5D is here, it looks like it works and there’s more to come….