Canon 1Ds3

Canon has put example images on their website from the new 1Ds3. There's lots of criticism on the web on the quality of the images but out of curiosity I downloaded the hillside town landscape image and loaded it into Photoshop. It was interesting. The image seems quite soft, yet has a tremendous amount of detail. When it came to sharpening though - my usual 300 .5 in smart sharpen for my 1Ds2 was way over the top for this image and in fact the best result was 300 .1, an amount smaller than I have ever used.

Not only that, while my normal routine is to use Photokit Output Sharpening for the appropriate DPI setting, in fact the best print made was when I didn't do a final output sharpening. I'm using a Canon 5000 printer which can sharpen output within the printer driver but this was set to zero.

We'll need to wait to see side by side comparisons between the II and the III cameras but there is at least the suggestion that while the pixel count isn't all that much more (21 vs. 16 MP), perhaps the AA filter has been weakened a bit and perhaps there will be a significant difference.

The times, they are interesting.