Canon 50D announced—but where’s the 5D MkII?
26th August 2008
The rumors of the 50D have been popping up for the past few days and now they’re confirmed. The improvements are pretty impressive (although it looks like Mirror Lock Up is still hidden behind the Custom Function menu):
- 15 megapixel sensor with ISO boost up to 12800 (standard range is 100-3200 and they have the Auto ISO set to go from 100-1600).
- Canon says they have a new sensor manufacturing process and have redesigned the photodiodes and the micro lenses. Let’s hope this is the reason for the expanded ISO and not more aggressive noise reduction.
- A 3-inch LCD with 640×480 resolution (finally catching up with Nikon and Sony). And DPReview says that the anti-reflective coating makes this better than the one used on the Nikon and Sony cameras.
- Better weather sealing. It’s just described as better than the 40D so I’m not sure what that means: can I feel comfortable using it in a drizzle? In a downpour?
- DIGIC IV image processor. This is the first camera to get the new DIGIC IV (will we see a pair of these processors in the 5D replacement?). It provides the now-expected 14-bit analog-to-digital conversion and fast handling of big files. For some reason, though, they only talk about the burst speed with JPEG files and not RAW. I wonder how fast it is handling the RAW files?
- RAW, SRAW1, and SRAW2. The 40D introduced the SRAW1 format that used pixel binning (combining pixel sites) to generate a smaller RAW file with a bit less noise. The 50D has two levels of this: SRAW1 is 7.1MP and SRAW2 is 3.8MP. The rumor sites said that ISO6400 would only be available in SRAW1 and ISO12800 only in SRAW2 but the DPReview preview doesn’t mention anything about it.
- AF microadjustments. Now the 50D can store autofocus microadjustments for 20 different lenses. This should keep the folks who shoot rulers occupied for a while.
- Live View. It’s hard for me to get excited about Live View since I always hated shooting off the LCD with compact digicams but I can imagine Live View being interesting when shooting macros. I guess I will have to play with it to be convinced.
- And more. Phil Askey has the summary of new features in his preview.
There is already a hands-on test available but the text is in Swedish. They’re talking about it in a thread on the DPReview Forums.
Now, let’s hope we hear about that 5D replacement in the next week or two.