A pair of white papers have been released by Canon exploring the new Canon 1DX Mark III DSLR. The two white papers cover its stills and video capabilities and come in at 59 and 21 pages long respectively. They go into a lot of detail about the overall performance, burst rates, autofocus, metering and flash, image quality, full-frame 4K, 5.5K RAW, the codecs used and more.
The stills white paper is particularly interesting because it covers some of Canon’s SLR highlights throughout the years going all the way back to the introduction 1971’s Canon F-1 system, which also debuted the Canon FD lens mount. It goes through the switch to EF in 1987 with the EOS-1 and the switch to digital with the EOS-1D in 2001, and right up to the current flagship 1DX Mark III.
They’re more of “explainer” documents, walking you through the specs, features and how things work rather than how to actually use them. Although they do touch on some hints. For example, why you might want to use a certain method of autofocus over another, etc. It also details when certain features aren’t available (like you don’t get Eye AF when using the optical viewfinder).
The documentation for the video side of things is also pretty interesting. I didn’t realise, for example, that when shooting 5.5K RAW video, you can simultaneously write out a 4K video stream to the second card slot for easier proxy editing or quick review of footage. It also presents some interesting video workflow techniques to help with your editing process.