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5D III V 5Ds ?

TheRogue
Enthusiast

I'm assuming the 5Ds came out before the 5D III ?  What would be the reason to chose the more expensive 5Ds over the 3?

12 REPLIES 12


@TheRogue wrote:

I'm assuming the 5Ds came out before the 5D III ?  What would be the reason to chose the more expensive 5Ds over the 3?


No, several years later, actually. The 5D III is now being replaced by the 5D IV. Advantage of the 5Ds? Higher resolution (50 megapixels, vs 22 on the 5D III and 30 on the 5D IV). But the resolution comes at a price. The 5Ds figures to have poorer performance in low light (because its pixels are smaller), and the image files it produces are enormous. Also, resolution like that demands the best lenses money (quite a lot of it) can buy. Otherwise, what's the point?

 

The 5Ds is a specialized camera. My view is that if you need it, you'll know it. It's not the sort of camera you choose by comparing features and cost. If you have that kind of money and you're not sure you need the resolution, buy the 5D IV. Or buy the 5D III while it's still available, and put the $1000 you'll save towards your next lens.

Bob
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA

ScottyP
Authority

Agreed on all points. Unless you are going to be making enormous poster sized prints your need for 50 megapixels is doubtful. More likely you, like everyone else, will much much more often wish your camera could give you better image quality in dim light, which is not the forte of the high MP camera.

 

Other sacrifices you would make for getting the high MP camera are:

 

1.) Huge image files.  These take up a lot of storage space, fill up the memory cards faster, upload to the computer slower and take your post processing programs longer to run. 

2.) Slower frame rates (fps).  The big files take the camera longer to capture and write to the card so you will get slower frames per second and shorter bursts before the buffer fills and continuous shooting slows or pauses. 

3.) Price.  The extra money would do a lot more for your photography if invested in lenses rather than extra MP's. 

Scott

Canon 5d mk 4, Canon 6D, EF 70-200mm L f/2.8 IS mk2; EF 16-35 f/2.8 L mk. III; Sigma 35mm f/1.4 "Art" EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro; EF 85mm f/1.8; EF 1.4x extender mk. 3; EF 24-105 f/4 L; EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS; 3x Phottix Mitros+ speedlites

Why do so many people say "FER-tographer"? Do they take "fertographs"?

Mitsubishiman
Rising Star
I have the 5DsR, and several L series lenses, the replies are spot on, I have the fortune of large capacity cards, a 3.0 transfer system and a server of extremely large capacity, combined with higher end PCs to handle processing, if you are not geared up you will be a bit frustrated, although I will disagree with the comment regarding the need to print large resolution files, I think it is more to do with how much detail you are after, so it really comes down to what your choice of genre is and they are correct, it is and always will be about lenses, I have no regrets in the purchase, however it is not the best choice for a "walk about" camera, for that I still use the 7D, eventually I will probably get the 5D M IV, best of luck...

TCampbell
Elite
Elite

A 5K computer monitor is still just shy of 15 megapixels.  Other than the idea of allowing the ability to crop in aggressively, there's not much benefit to the extra resolution for sharing images that will be displayed on monitors.

 

The real benefit is for printing... and printing big.  But even that comes with some caution.

 

Any given lens has a limit to it's ability to resolve fine detail.   Even when the sensor has the ability to resolve the detail, the lens does not necessarily have that capability.  There's no point in using a 5Ds / 5Dsr with mediocre lenses.

 

But even the best lenses have limits to what they can do.... and it's not a problem of lens quality, it's a problem with the laws of physics.  Light doesn't actually travel in a perfectly straight beam, it travels as a wave.  The wave nature of light causes some interesting effects in physics when you really look closely.    This was first noticed in astronomy because stars (while big) are so incredibly far away that they are effectively true "point" sources of light.  They should not represent more than a single pixel... and yet they do.  This isn't necessarily due to "pixel blooming" (that's a different problem) but due to the wave nature of light itself.  The astronomer George Airy discovered that if you keep zooming in even with the best optical quality, what you get is a disk made of concentric rings (now called the "Airy Disk").  There's also the notion that whenever a "wave" hits any edge, it wants to "bend" around that edge (causing diffraction.)

 

This problem means that if you could have hypothetically "perfect" optics (if such a thing could exist) you would STILL be limited in the resolving power of the lens.  

 

There is something called "Dawes' Limit" and the related Rayleigh Criterion.  It turns out the resolving power of the lens (assuming perfect optics) is related to it's diameter.    Lenses with a physically large optical diameter have the ability to resolve finer detail than a smaller diameter lens (even if other properties such as focal length are similar).

 

When I do astronomy outreach, I sometimes am asked if I can see the landing sites on the moon with my telescope with detail well enough to see things such as the flags, the rover, the lunar module (only the "descent stage" is left behind), etc.   The answer is not only can my telescope not see it (and it's a big telescope)... you wouldn't be able to see it with any telescope on Earth.  Nothing is large enough.  By the physics of light, to see something as small as the lunar rover on the surface (just over 2 meters wide by about 3 meters long) you'd need a "lens" (telescope) with something slightly larger than a 25 meter diameter.  The largest telescopes in the world are only about 10 meters (and it's quite an engineering challenge to build those.)

 

If you were to use a 5Ds or 5Dsr and expected to get the full value out of the 50 megapixel sensor, you need to stick with focal ratios of around f/5.6 or lower (assuming high quality lenses).  At f/6.3 the camera will start to experience diffraction limits.  It's heavily set in by f/8 and at f/11 there's literally zero benefit to the 50MP sensor (you may as well be shooting with a 16 MP camera).

 

This is why you see the comment from Bob that "if you need it, you'll know it".  Most people don't need it.  

 

Here's an article on lens diffraction by Cambridge in Color that's pretty useful:  http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

 

 

Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da

It should be note that Canon's Digital Lighting optimizer does a convolution to correct for diffraction, it says so, anyway. 8^)

"The largest telescopes in the world are only about 10 meters (and it's quite an engineering challenge to build those.)"

 

Can you imagine the problem trying to keep that mirror flat?

EB
EOS 1DX and 1D Mk IV and less lenses then before!


@ebiggs1 wrote:

"The largest telescopes in the world are only about 10 meters (and it's quite an engineering challenge to build those.)"

 

Can you imagine the problem trying to keep that mirror flat?


Most of these use lots of hexagonal shaped mirror cells and these days they do adaptive optics.  When I was up in Science City (the observatories on top of the Haleakala volcano in Maui Hawaii) they were shooting the laster used to make "artificial stars" while a camera images the "artificial star" for analysis of distortion and this causes computer to shift each individual mirror cell on the telescope to "adapt" to the distortions created by the atmosphere.   This makes it possible to get photos shot from telescopes on the ground that rival what could be done in space with no atmosphere (e.g. the hubble).

 

Creating a "flat field" (the notion that an image sharply focused at the center may be fractionally out of focus at the corners) for some of the massive cameras they use is a bit of a problem.  So I'm told that the very large cameras actually use curved sensors to deal with that problem.

 

And then on a humorous note:  During my visit I needed to use the washroom...  So I go into the washroom and it turns out the mirror in front of the bathroom sink is an ACTUAL hexagonal mirror cell from a dicommissioned telescope.  The mirror cell would have been discarded but a couple of the astronomers thought I'd be a great idea to save a few cells and use them for the mirror. (So the bathroom mirror is the closest I ever got to one of the mirror cells.)  I got a bit of a chuckle out of that... I guess it's just one of those things you're definitely NOT expecting to see when you go to the washroom.

 

 

Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da

"And then on a humorous note:..."

 

Reminds of an experience I had with a Space Shuttle tile 30+ years ago.  Our research group was given a sample of material to test for how well, or how poorly, the material blocked range of radio frequencies.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."

Tim when we built the 30" a Powell Observatory the biggest feat was keeping that huge mirror flat.  It has many adjustment points under it, I can tell you!

I know the new technology lends itself to multi-mirror set ups.  But back then it wasn't available to us amateurs.

EB
EOS 1DX and 1D Mk IV and less lenses then before!
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