For the drooling photophiles, it’s here – Canon’s New EOS-1Ds Mark II. Full 35mm frame, 16.7 megapixel. Dual digix processors. Dual CF cards. As one excited guy raves “What a honey”. But at $8k, is it worth selling your soul (or your car) for?
Maybe for the budding dermotologist. At 138 lines / mm, you not only see every pore in a facial shot – you can even determine if your subject has bacteria! Wow. Headshots have never been so exciting. And think of the intimate photography one could do as well…
Reminds me of the passage in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Chapter 5 (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) to wit “…very far from being a tempting sight…their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads.”
Uh, maybe best to use it for astrophotography – but the sizes of the pixels do matter. Are the pixels too small to integrate the light properly, so do you have to bin them together? Do you have to do serious cooling for Johnson noise? These are the mundane but serious issues.
If you’ve got the money, buy one for me and I’ll check it out for you. If you can’t afford it, the new Canon 20D just arrived too. 8.2 megapixel CMOS with state-of-the-art low noise sensor for $1,500. 1.6 crop factor. Out of stock just about everywhere, but only a 4 week waiting list. Just drop Lynne Jolitz a line at my website.