An interesting rumor came across my desk this morning regarding Canon, and their plans for the next EOS-1 D flagship camera. If the latest is true, does 30FPS and a Global Shutter sound good to you?
According to the rumor report coming out of Canon Rumors, Canon is working hard to develop a new global shutter for their next EOS-1 D flagship camera. For those of you who do not know, a global shutter (sometimes referred to as an electronic shutter) does not have any moving parts, and is a sensor based technology.
Basically instead of having a physical shutter expose the sensor by opening and shutting, a global shutter works by exposing or obstructing all the photosites at once, or some do a more gradual fade on/off. But the effect is the same, the entire sensor is exposed at the same time, rather than a little at a time as with a standard physical shutter.
The rumor goes on to say that the company is hoping to achieve continuous shooting speeds of up to 30FPS for still images. This would obviously require quite a lot of new technologies, not just a global shutter, to achieve. But, it would virtually cement the Canon EOS-1 D as the top choice for sports and action shooters.
Now, the rumor is rated a CR1, meaning its from a new/untrusted source. So don’t go buying stock in Canon or selling all your gear in anticipation, as there’s little validating these claims. But still, the idea that Canon is working on something like this is rather exciting.
My X-T1 just got an electronic shutter via the latest firmware update, and it is awesome. When it is on, the camera is completely silent, its perfect for street photography or wedding ceremonies, or other events where you need to be able to capture the moment silently. An EOS-1 D with this technology would be pretty cool.
What are your thoughts on this news of Canon working on a global shutter for their next flagship camera? Share your thoughts in a comment below and let us know what you think!
[via Canon Rumors]
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Well, heck, at that point, you might as well just shoot 4k at 30fps… sure, it’s only 8mp and probably not raw… but… your buffer/memory probably wouldn’t be destroyed as badly.
Wow! That’s blazing fast and one less mechanical item, but what about the mirror? I can’t imagine the mirror flapping up and down 30 times a second. Will Canon go to an electronic viewfinder?
Also advances have to be made in memory technology to dump those images to storage, plus it probably has to have a helluva big buffer for writing to memory.
Interesting thought that was just passed my way – about high frame rates and DSLRs we own…
But let’s talk about the Nikon 1 v3 for a moment first, prefacing my point. Though the Nikon 1 v3 is mirrorless, and more so gimmicky and “less than” when compared to a flagship Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fuji etc, yet notably it has a small enough sensor (2.7 crop) and semi-beefy Expeed 4 which probably provides a nice enough conduit to allow for a 30 to 60 fps throughput, ok. I’m really pointing out the sensor being so small here…
Because my friend and I were discussing the Canon 30fps tonight and he says, uh sounds like a video camera to me with the ability to pull individual images off of it – more or less. Then he asks me a couple of questions about my D810. He asked, does your D810 take excellent video? I said yes. Then he asked what the frame rate was on my video – which I said 30 or 60 fps. He says good, why not try an experiment. Take some movies with it, and pull frames out of it and review the image quality. If they pass muster, are as accurate as taking a still, then, there ya go – you now have a Nikon D810 which will effectively do the same thing as a Nikon 1 (or mirror less camera), yes?
He stated the reason my Nikon can do the 30 to 60fps is because the sensor area used (similar to the Nikon 1) is way smaller – 1920 x 1080 – is that not equivalent to a mirror less system?
Now, in that thinking, if I can accept a smaller picture and grab quality photos from the produced movies does that suffice as a poor man’s mirror less?
Thoughts?
1920 x 1080 frame grabs from video are equivalent to only 2MB files. May pass for web work but not for serious print enlargements. This is significantly different than 30fps at full resolution on a digital camera.
The promise looks interesting but wonder if the focus could keep up with each frame at 30fps. I suspect not.
@ GREG SILVER – Thumbs up, was just a thought! I would imagine “it” could not be that easy, right? or everyone would be doing the poor man’s (or shall I say “poor photographer’s”) mirrorless thing…
It seems that the general sentiment in this thread is that a high frame rate is not that important over other aspects of “capture”, correct?
not to distract from the thread / article, yet when there are no moving parts in play I think of stability. the “global” term above sounds like mirrorless (a.k.a. electronic shutter) and while it does hand us a high fps, which is good, I would say it plays more to the “stability” i.e. less camera shake which I think is a much more desirable attribute…
and, I have to ask about mirrorless and cameras of that nature when used on a tripod (maybe this is a general rule…) but I had been advised to turn off vibration reduction as that in and of itself can cause shake, is this true?
I’d agree Robert that the capture rate isn’t always the most import as some of the other aspects. Myself – I tend to put AF near (or at) the top. If I can’t get a good focus on my subject then it doesn’t matter how fast the fps is or how fast the shutter is or how low the aperture is or if it has dynamic range. A blurry picture (for the most part) is a throw away. But when you have a good AF system – that usually benefits all other aspects of the camera.
When I use my mirrorless on a tripod – I tend to disable the SteadyShot feature as I too have heard it could cause issues on the final output of the picture. I can’t verify that but my pictures without SteadyShot on a Tripod come out crisp.
Burst mode it will be :)
I will get a lot more excited about it when I hear something official from Canon, because I believe that just as much as I believe that Canon is going to stop making cameras
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I’m less excited about 30fps than the possibility to finally raise the flash sync above 1/250th. Being able to sync at speeds faster than 1/500th is more useful for me than 30fps.
You can do that now with Canon Speedlites in HHS mode (with some disadvantages) – of course it would be nice to be able to do that with some big boy studio strobes as well.
HSS is a bad gimmick. I need fast T.1 flash durations to stop action, not a series of pulses that eat through batteries.
My thoughts exactly — there are any number of ways to get high frame rates and high *effective* shutter speeds (things that sports shooters care about), including scanning/rolling electronic shutters, but there’s only one way to get real high-speed flash (without blacking out the environment/ambient), and that’s to make a shutter that is completely “open” all at once, but with a short-enough duration to balance or eliminate the ambient and/or prevent obvious ghosting. So if this rumour is true and we are actually talking about a global stills shutter, it shouldn’t be the sports/birding crowd who are most excited about it, it should be everybody who wishes their small flashes were about 4 or more times as powerful, since HSS and ND filtration both “solve” the problem by killing the flash’s light.
By the way, if your output demands aren’t too high, the 6MP Nikons from the early-to-mid noughties (D100 and D70, along with the D50 and the original D40 if you rig them right) are crap cameras by today’s standards, but they’ll happily do full sync to 1/8000 wired, about 1/2500 optically slaved (SU4-style “dumb” optical) due to slave delays, and about 1/1000 radio wireless (depending on your trigger set). Low pixel count, DX sensor size, a useful “ISO range” consisting of 200 and 400 before CCD noise becomes intrusive (it doesn’t clean up well like CMOS noise), and there’s some shutter lag to deal with (the focal plane part of the hybrid shutter is bulletproof because it’s a little slow to open) if you’re working with short-duration events of limited predictability, but if you can tolerate the trade-offs you can get pictures you can’t get with another DSLR at the moment. The output is good enough for the web and trade mags (NatGeo will take it), but little rough for fine printing larger than page size. Still, the bodies are cheap on the used market, so until we catch up to 2004 again, it’s a solution.
Wow, very nice. No, won’t be giving up my Nikon D810 (no yet involved either), even if the rumor is true –
t’would be very hard for me to give up a great camera, which, if I ever could become the photographer I want to be, I could put what I have to some good use. I like Nikon sensors and I like Nikon color representations and the D810’s dynamic range, which are way more important to me than FPS.
Dont’ get me wrong, I’d love a high FPS capability, but it just does not outrank the aforementioned desired attributes…
And, if I really wanted high FPS, right now, I could throw down for a Nikon 1 V3 with adapter, accept the quality loss, and toss it in my bag – and yes, I would be spending the rest of my money on sports tickets… it would be so cool to capture the ball hitting the sweet spot of a bat, maybe capture 5 – 6 frames of the split second before impact, impact, a few split seconds after impact, and if I’m good (good lens – 300mm phase fresnel maybe, and a 3rd or 4th row seat just off the 1st or 3rd base lines) I could capture / freeze the threads and or particulates of the ball or bat flying / spraying away… ok, now I’m rethinking… Hmmm.. NOT!!!
Maybe Nikon’s D5s would have these very same attributes, again, I like Nikon’s color representations and sensors… Trust me, a lot cheaper to walk into a Camera alone than trade up the whole kit n kaboodle (is that how you spell kit n kaboodle?) for another brand –
I’ll wait… but first, I have to mature as a photographer…
I suspect that Canon isn’t alone in this quest, but I would probably be surprised if they managed to get all of the pieces of the puzzle to pull of 30 fps on a FF sensor for the next release. If they did, I agree with you that there would be a rapid migration to this amongst sports/action shooters in no time flat.
30fps ??? holy crap ! really good news for sports photographer if its true. With 30fps you’re gonna need a crap tone of memory cards because your gonna blast through them in a matter of seconds hahah