While I was in New York two weeks ago, I was privileged to receive two of the new cameras for testing. Bound by an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), I could not say boo. Till now.

The camera was announced yesterday. My impression is that Canon is back with a vengeance. The all-new AF system is fast and accurate without any of the inconsistency or jumpiness of the early MIII AF. Most of the sensors are cross-types. I am not big on the technical stuff but I do know that the camera focuses really well. It holds focus most of the time with backgrounds other than sky and holds focus nearly all of the time even when the sensor slips off the subect; I had many sharp images even when the central sensor was nowhere near the subject. I did set the custom function for AI Servo Tracking Sensitivity to Slow. Otherwise the CFs were set up the same as my MIII bodies.

The camera is very similar to the MIII so folks who have owned that body will not have much of a learning curve. Folks who never used a MIII will surely benefit from getting a copy of our MIII User's Guide. I will update and rename it soon after I get my hands on the camera.

Canon users will once again have the option to be able to manually select any one of the 45 points. That is a Godsend for me when working with static subjects.

I created RAW + Large JPEGs as I knew that I would not be able convert the RAW images; all of the images that I optimized were from the extracted JPEG.s (I was not positive until just now but as it turns out the extracted JPEGs were indeed the Large sized ones; after optimizing them I saved them as TIFFs.) Alfred noted that I should be able to convert them as DNG files but that is something that I would rather not do. The downloads for the MIV will be out some time....

With permission of my contact at Canon, I posted several MIV images here and was in the process of posting several more when when he called and asked me to take them all down. Canon was not keen on my posting images that were made with a pre-production body. I have written him and hope to have the images back up in a day or two if at all possible. Please do not ask me why because I do not know :)

Noise. Everyone wants to know about the noise. It looked great at ISO 1600 and I even had one that I liked at ISO 12,800. It did show some noise as expected but it looked more than useable to me. I did not have a chance to use much besides ISO 400, 800, 1600, and 12,800 as mentioned above. When I used the latter ISO in really dark pre-dawn conditions more noise was evident than when I used it on a cloudy afternoon.

You can find the manufacturer's info on the Mark IV here: http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/co...&modelid=19584

I have two on order; I have heard something about December deliveries. Bummer; I was hoping to have one for Bosque.... The camera does video and I hope to at least learn the basics of video capture when I get mine....

The 16.1 megapixel files looked pretty darned good for JPEGs; the color is great and the image files superb.


I am racking my brain trying to remember some more stuff on the camera but I am drawing a blank. Questions might stimulate my brain but remember I only had the camera for six days and one of them was spent on a plane...