What seems an age ago now I did a two-day workshop for Calumet at Drummond Street in London, and a chap turned up there armed with a Canon 1Dx PLUS a 200-400 f4.  The lens had only just been launched, and he’d been out and spent a truck-load of cash on both lens and body.

Yours truly was all over him like a severe rash, and I ripped it from his poor old fingers, stuck it in Case 2 and dived outside and started ripping through frames of vehicles passing the store!

I was smitten from that very moment – but it was weird all the same.  I was joyous at how the lens and camera performed; pissed off that I didn’t own it; and seething at Nikon AF and the poor distance performance of their own 200-400.

Not that Nikon is crap – far from it; it’s fantastic – but this was just SO much better, and child that I am, THIS was what I should be using and all else was just pants.

Begrudgingly I handed the old chap his camera back, satisfied my dour mood with a cursory “not bad….” and carried on with the workshop.

Later in the day I stuck the images I’d shot with the Canon 1Dx into Lightroom on the 27″ iMac I use for workshop presentations – and was immediately a little happier – they looked “iffy” to say the least!

The Nikon 200-400s’ distance resolution problem has always hacked me off – 10m or less it’s epic, but 75m and further I hate it, and in between well, sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t. And it’s bad with teleconverters, it really is…

Scanning through all the Canon 1Dx shots I was still amazed by the lens – it was delivering tack sharp high-resolution images at all focal lengths and distances, with and without  teleconverter; basically it was kicking the Nikon into the last century simply by NOT displaying ANY of the same faults.

But I was having to look past – in comparison to Nikon – a thin veil of sensor noise, and I was also aware of a reduction in sensor Dynamic Range when I looked at the shots and noted the popped highlights that experience told me my Nikon wouldn’t produce.

Since then I’ve had a few more occasional chances to use the lens and body, and my results have continued to generate the same response – great lens, shame about the sensor IQ; but I’ve always been using other folks cameras and you don’t like to mess about with them too much, so I have always assumed that things “could be made a bit better” with some fiddling about.

Last year, hand on heart, I can honestly say that I was responsible, in whole or part, for at least 6 sales of Canon 200-400’s to existing 1Dx owners, and the lens-envy has always been there when they’ve been and bought it.

Since the first day I handled the lens I’ve been of the mind that it would be the ultimate lens for my Eagle workshops in Norway.  I was thinking of trying to take one, plus the required 1Dx, over there in June last year; but seeing as the my clients were all Nikon I thought I’d best not!

But I have a “mixed bag” of clients booked for my Winter trip in a couple of weeks time, so seeing as I was of the mind that a few folk owed me a few favours…..

Upshot is that for the last two weeks, thanks to Reece Piper at Calumet, I’ve had a Canon 1Dx sat in my office; and many thanks to my favourite Geordie lass June Lown, a 200-400 f4 to go with it.

When I picked up the 1Dx from Calumet I swiped a 100mm f2.8 macro while I was at it, as I had been tasked with a high speed action shot featuring makeup brushes and I thought we’d go nuts and do the shot whilst exploring the 1Dx in a bit more depth.

Prior to picking up the Canon 1Dx I’d done a few test shots on my own Nikon gear just to get the lighting and flash timing sorted out, but I’d been using some different brushes:

Okay, so here is the base .CR2 raw file for the finished image:

Now, I’m going to get to the point of this post topic!

As a standard retouching procedure on this type of shot I always overlay a custom Curves Adjustment layer with a sine-wave curve – it helps show up all those little imperfections you can’t see when you view the image without it:

The main purpose in this particular case is to check for dark imperfections in that black background – yep, proper retouching is all about the minutia if you want perfection.

I’m trying to put together a video course on retouching that’ll be available in my store a little later this year – email me for details

Because the powder velocity is so damned high as it leaves the brush bristles I needed 1/32nd output power on the SB800s in order to freeze absolutely every grain of powder, so the shots(both Nikon and Canon) were at 400 iso just to give me a working aperture of f14.

When checking the test shots they looked like this with the customised Curve Layer:

Check out how clean the black background is.

So now all we do is swap the brushes, and change from Nikon D4 to the Canon 1Dx – I make no changes to either the lights or the background, and the exposure settings are exactly the same – 1/250th, 400 ISO, f14 – and I’m expecting gold…

But throw the CR2 file into Photoshop and stick the custom curve over it to see the comparrison:

Sweet Jesus………….!

Now don’t run away with the idea that it’s the “normal” noise you think of – luminance noise.  In fact from that point of view it’s no better or worse than the Nikon D4 sensor.

But what you can see here is PATTERN NOISE/READ NOISE – see my Sensor Noise post from a while ago HERE

Don’t get me wrong, you can barely see it at 100% magnification, and a lot of folk won’t notice it AT ALL:

But if you want BIG prints, or you sell your images for stock, then you need to check them a lot more thoroughly at higher magnifications:

At 400% the noise is just about visible – because it’s a dark error/fault on a basically slightly darker background.  But keep it at 100% and put the custom curve over it and:

…now you can see what you have got to take care off in retouching.

Got a 1Dx?  Then this pattern noise is in YOUR images – FACT.

But if the image has a more “normal” tonality to it then it certainly won’t be obvious to you – but it’s there nevertheless.  Just try looking in your shadow areas.

Why the 1Dx sensor should be so much noisier than the D4/D4S is beyond me to be honest. Yes I know it’s an older mark, but the then current Nikon D3 and D3S were far better than this; in fact they were, and still are, only marginally worse than today’s Nikons for pattern noise.

In reality the images are of course eminently usable – as the millions of 1Dx images used daily world-wide testifies; but they do need a teeny bit more effort when processing than files from a top-end Nikon camera, if the final images are to have the same degree of quality in terms of “clean-ness of file”.

There is also the question of a clipped Dynamic Range, but that’s an easy walk-around in most cases – neither Highlight Tone Priority or Safety Shift are the answer though IMO; the former just under-exposes the shot, and the latter drives me nuts, though it’s a damnably good idea in principle.

So this noise thing truly is my ONE AND ONLY gripe about this camera – up until this last week I had a few others based solely on my usage of other folks cameras, but those are now well and truly GONE.

On the “pros & cons” side of things, noise and clipped dynamic range are my only cons, and there are many pros that cancel them out – the real big one for my is the autofocus system which, at least when used with the new(ish) 200-400 and the latest firmware, is truly EPIC and seriously kicks Nikon into a cocked hat in terms of tractability, speed, accuracy and user control.

I’m working on a large pdf document all about autofocus with both Nikon D4/D4S and Canon 1Dx bodies that has wildlife photography and long lenses as the main bias, but it will give a lot of valuable information and knowledge to non-wildlife photographers and 5DMk3 owners as well. Again, email me for details – BUT IT WON’T BE FREE!

If I had the dough I’d buy a 1Dx and a 200-400 f4 tomorrow – perhaps I’d even dump Nikon all together for long lens action/wildlife photography.

But I haven’t, so unless a miracle happens and Canon suddenly feel like sponsoring someone who actually “knows about stuff” then there’ll be tears when this rig has to go back I can tell you…:(

Would I dump Nikon for all my photography where speed and autofocus are not required, like macro or landscape – not on your bloody life!

Many thanks to Reece Piper & Calumet UK, June Lown, and Chuck Westfall of Canon USA

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