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brainiac
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johnnydanger has started a thread about the absence of any equivalent to the 5D's C-mode: https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/573785
This got me thinking about why the 1D3 has been difficult to use in this regard. I shoot a lot of evening events in the dark. People are impatient, and I need to be able to switch to my standard flash setup very quickly. The genius of the 5D's C setting is that I can switch to it in the dark, by feel, without having to concentrate on submenu selections. It sets everything, but still allows me to go straight back to where I was before I invoked it, again, just by turning a physical click-dial. As soon as I turn the dial back to Av my previous colour balance, picture style, iso, shutter speed and aperture return. I can carry on where I left off.
The 1D3's 'Basic camera settings' does not include iso, as I have mentioned. It also requires fiddling about in the menus, and it loads surprisingly slowly. The settings are at least saved in camera, though, so if they included iso and most importantly had a physical switch on the camera to enable them by feel, then that would suffice.
The 'save settings to card' option is a non-starter as I shoot a lot of pictures, in a hurry, and every time I change cards the settings will be gone. I could save them on an SD card I suppose, but even then I still have to fiddle around in the menus to get them to load. But most annoyingly they overwrite current settings, so after keeping my victims waiting while I fiddle with my camera (loading saved settings), and using the new settings for a moment, I can not then return quickly to previous settings.
The 1D3's 3rd way of applying stored settings does allow you to return to previous settings, but requires holding down the * button, and does not include white balance, which is pretty crucial for flash, so that's a non-starter too.
Who will use this plethora of badly designed half-implemented features which don't fit well with how real photographers work? The 5D designers got it right. 1-series should have a C1, C2, and C3 mode, each exactly like the 5D's. Why was that software and interface not adopted in the 1-series?
This is analogical to the joystick focus point issue. With a joystick you can start moving the focus point to position before you have even brought the camera to your eye. You don't need to know where the FP is in order to put it where you want. The controls physically mimic the thing controlled, and that's intuitive. I accept that a better joystick would be an improvement, one which gave better force feedback, especially for the diagonal directions, but that, and legacy, are no reason to disable it.
I increasingly feel that this camera is crippled by a legacy of things done wrong which Canon hasn't got the guts to change for the better.
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| Sep 22, 2007 at 02:45 PM |
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