This is a summary of my experience with the Canon 1DX for the first three months. Skip to the bottom of this review if you want my final impressions of the camera after the honeymoon period. My previous camera was the 5DII, mainly for weddings and portraits. I mostly look for low light performance.
1st Day 7/20/2012: I took several photos of my 13 year old daughter in dark incandescent light at 6400 and 25,600 ISO with an 85/1.2II lens at f/2.0. I ran both photos through LR4 with +10 noise reduction. I always shoot in RAW, so some post processing noise reduction is a must. Here's what I noticed. At 6400 ISO, I could see the downy blond baby hairs on her forehead and there wasn't much noise in the dark areas, just a bit of grain. At 25,600 ISO, the dark areas had grainy noise and those little downy hairs disappeared. But, the image was totally usable. My wife really liked it. I noticed that at these high ISO's any underexposure results in a significant increase in noise. So, overexposing a little minimizes noise at the higher ISO's. The autofocus is blazing fast in good light, and in dim light slows down. It takes about 1 to 3 seconds to focus in low light, and as long as there is an area of contrast, it will focus. Low light AF is about a third stop improvement over my 5DII, which was a pretty solid low light focuser (because I had sent it in to have AF tweaked). I was expecting more, but I'll take it because it's better than the 1DIV. I borrowed a 1DIV for 5 weddings and it hunted badly in low light, about a stop worse than my 5DII. Up to 12,800 ISO, I wouldn't hesitate to use the images from the 1DX. Images up to 25,600 ISO are usable depending on how much noise and detail are desired. There is one deficiency I noticed. In Manual mode, the exposure indicator does not show up on the top LCD, but only when looking into the viewfinder. It really should. I called Canon and it turns out this is unique to the 1D's. It is displayed for Av and Tv modes, where it is centered until exposure compensation is used. When posing a group I take a quick exposure reading on the top of 5DII without looking through the viewfinder because once I put the camera up to my face, people expect me to start snapping. Well, since weddings are my mainstay, I can usually guess to within 1/2 stop anyway, so I suppose I can live without this feature.
7/26/2012 Update: I wanted to see how long it took for the buffer to fill up with a UDMA card. It got to around 200 or 300 and error code 30 appeared. It didn't go away and Canon CPS said it was a locked shutter. I sent it in for a new unit and I'm waiting for it.
7/30/2012 Update: I received the replacement, took it out of the box and snapped photos for a half an hour. When I put the cap on the 85/1.2II I accidentally pressed the shutter button halfway and got an error code 80. It went away after taking the cap back off. Canon said it wasn't mechanical, likely software or electrical. That was good enough for me.
8/8/2012 Update: I went to the park and photographed my daughter swinging using the 85/1.2II lens. This is probably Canon's slowest focusing lens because of the way it moves the entire heavy internal glass. It's meant for portraits, not for sports. With my daughter coming toward me, the AF tracked her in AIServo. To give some perspective, this is something I have never been able to do with the 5DII and 40D. The glass takes over a second to move from one end to the other. Looking at them in LR4, I had a 50% keeper rate, which is excellent given that the 5DII would have had none. This camera pushes AF very hard. I'm liking this. What I'm not liking? The AF point doesn't light up when I press the shutter halfway down until it locks focus. That means in very dark conditions, I have to guess where the AF point is so I can focus it on the intended spot. This kind of defeats the super low light capability. I could press the AF selection button to light it up, but that's a delay which defeats the element of speed and it also lights up all the AF points like a Christmas tree. It took several calls to Canon CPS for me to realize that this feature, which was on the 5DII, is now gone. Some of Canon's CPS techs were convinced it was there and it just needed to be turned on. It's really gone.
8/13/2012 Update: I shot two weddings. One was very dark and went late into the night. I did some portraits of the couple walking around the gardens in the dark as I experimented with off camera flash. These images are usually my clients' favorites because of the dramatic light effects. But, it's usually the end of the day and clients are tired. I have to work fast. The AF not blinking with a half-press of the shutter button was a problem. It took nearly 10 to 20 seconds to lock focus versus 3 to 5 seconds with the 5DII. After a few of these, the couple wanted to head back. With the 5DII, I half press the shutter button and the AF point blinks to let me know where it is. Then, I move this AF point to focus on a high contrast area of the face or edge of the white dress, recompose, and take the shot. Then, it's off to the next pose or location for another shot or two. With the 1DX, I was unable to locate a high contrast area without knowing exactly where the center AF point was. It was grayed out. As a workaround, I tried using the AF point selection button on the back. It lit up all the AF points and blinded that eye to the dark. Using this camera in low light now requires a minimum of 2 to 3 seconds more to lock focus versus the 5DII. I'm baffled as to what Canon was thinking when they decided to eliminate this feature.
8/28/2012 Update: I shot another wedding with the 1DX in relatively good light. I did the formals at ISO 1600 as I generally do with the 5DII. I used a tripod and dragged the shutter, which results in images that are sharp, yet with the look of balanced lighting. What I noticed is that at 1600 ISO, the 1DX was maybe 1/2 stop ahead of the 5DII in terms of noise and detail rendition. I expected the images to be a full 2 stops cleaner at 1600 ISO, more like 400 ISO on the 5DII. I also noticed that 4000 ISO images weren't all that different from ones at 1600 ISO. Noise hardly changed. The lighting at this wedding was dim incandescent with backlighting from windows. At an outdoor wedding I did two weeks ago, 1600 and 4000 ISO were much cleaner in the dark areas throughout the entire wedding. So, now I'm wondering if mixed lighting affects noise.
I used auto white balance for the entire day and it was very accurate. It got confused on a few images with mixed light, but even then it wasn't far off. It was a small wedding and I shot just under 1200 images, with about 400 repeats in the mix. The battery was still at half charge at the end. One issue I ran into was that on three separate incidents, with the 85/1.2II and 16-35/2.8II lens, AF quit working. Nothing would happen when I pressed the shutter button, even when I depressed it all the way to take the photo. Focusing on something else worked for the first two instances, and for the third, I had to restart the camera. I remember having this issue when I first got my 5DII and I had to send it in twice before it was fixed completely. So, I'm hoping this was operator error and not the same issue.
8/29/2012 Update: I installed the new firmware. This had a fix for error code 80 from 7/30/2012.
9/4/2012 Update: I shot two more weddings. I wanted to better understand how mixed lighting affects noise in the dark areas at higher ISO's because I had noticed some high noise levels from 1600 to 4000 ISO in my 8/28/2012 update. At one wedding, skin tones were very dark and so were the suits, and lighting was mixed. The wedding party had many people, so for group shots I used f/11 to get enough depth of field with a 35mm/1.4 lens. I went to 8,000 ISO, then to 12,800 ISO. The 8,000 ISO images looked fine with +25 noise reduction in LR4. I would not hesitate to blow these up to 11x14 or even larger. ISO 12,800 came close to looking like the 8,000 ISO with more noise reduction applied. I'm conservative, and another photographer said he would use these up to much larger sizes. What I did differently at this wedding was to overexpose the entire image by 1/2 stop by exposing for the darker areas, then bringing exposure down in post processing. This minimized noise in the dark areas, even though I dodged some exposure back into them. What I had encountered in my 8/28/2012 update high noise levels from 1600 to 4000 ISO was the result of underexposing the dark areas of the image.
No issues with the AF freezing.
1DX colors are more accurate than the 5DII. If a scene is cloudy, the 1DX will produce an image that is cooler, not necessarily more blue, but more true to what it is. At first I thought these images had a more dead-looking skin tone and didn't like it. But, now I'm realizing it's just more accurate than what it was with the 5DII. Also, now that I've examined a couple thousand 1DX images next to 5DII images taken by my assistant, I'm noticing that 5DII images have a slightly purple tint that creeps in when I reduce color temperature of an image that was shot in strong yellow incandescent light. Not so much with the 1DX.
Conservatively here's how I see the noise levels on the 1DX compared to the 5DII (for example, noise at ISO 4000 on the 1DX looks roughly like noise at ISO 1600 on the 5DII). These comparisons are AFTER noise reduction was applied in LR4 on RAW files.
5DII 1DX
800 1600-2000
1600 4000
2000 6400
3200 12,800
1DX noise looks more like film grain and cleans up better than 5DII noise. So, at times I can get ISO 6400 on the 1DX to look like ISO 1600 on the 5DII by overexposing and bringing it back in post processing. The noise performance is very impressive.
9/24/2012 Update: I shot another wedding this past Saturday. AF froze twice, once with an 85/1.2II and the second time with the 35/1.4. On the second incident the bride threw her bouquet and I missed it completely. I had just put the 35/1.4 lens on, and this time, not only did AF freeze, but I couldn't change any settings. I jiggled the lens, made sure the power switch was set to full ON, pulled the 580EXII flash off and reinstalled it (since it comes loose throughout the day), removed and re-installed the lens, and finally I made sure the top LCD (that shows the settings) was on it was. Then, I turned the camera off and on (I think twice), which got it working again. Either way, I wanted to be methodical about my troubleshooting before turning the camera off to make absolutely sure it was not operator error. That cost me some crucial shots. I called Canon CPS and they recommended I send it in. Being an intermittent occurrence, I will wait and see if it becomes more repeatable so Canon has a better chance of catching it when I send it in. I'm hoping there's a firmware update that resolves this and that it's not really the camera. My 5DII had this issue when it was new, mostly with heavy lenses. The fix took two repair visits a tighter lens mounting pad.
10/3/2012 Update, two weddings: Off-center AF points are at least 1 stop less sensitive than the center AF point. In dim light, they tend to hunt, so I use the center AF and recompose.
10/13/2012 Update, three weddings later: AF froze twice, and I was able to get it going again so I didn't miss critical shots. It happens most reliabily with the 70-200/2.8 IS II, right about the time the bride is coming down the aisle. It's like it needs a much stronger contrast with that lens. It will simply not work on the groom or bride's outfits. I have to aim it dead center at the hairline on their faces. Then again, that's if I can find the darkened focus point in low light to put it there. It's gotten to the point where I almost never use the 70-200/2.8 IS II anymore because focus with it is now an issue on this camera. In reception low light? That lens stays in the bag. It can't focus.
There is an issue with AI Servo it does not work reliably in low light, say with people dancing in a reception. And, it gets much worse with non-center AF points. Pressing the shutter halfway, AI Servo lags the action by about 3 seconds, which would be fine if people were moving and stopping every few seconds to have their picture taken. The worst was when AI Servo was used with 61-point automatic selection AF, where the camera automatically selects focus. After about 20 minutes I got lucky with one shot out of about 300 hundred, only because there was a pause in the action. The only thing that works reliably in low light, then, is center focus/recompose in single shot mode. AI Servo is useless in low light.
Another issue I have been fighting, and I finally figured it is the camera and not me, is that the playback button works intermittently when a 580EXII flash is camera-mounted while a pocket wizard is plugged into the camera sync port. Those two bring this issue out reliably. The problem is that when I press the playback button it will only show the image for a fraction of a second. If I press it again, it will not play back the image, just go black. At first I thought surely I had my finger on the shutter button or I was resting the camera on something that caused the other shutter button to be pressed halfway. Tonight, I made sure nothing was touching the shutter buttons when I pressed the playback button and it happened on 7 separate occasions. It happens about 20% of the time and is especially annoying when the bride and groom want to see an image on the back of the camera. I will have to either turn the camera off or hammer the playback button about 10 times.
10/21/2012 Update: Canon released a firmware update v1.1.1 that addressed the grayed out AF point for AI Servo, but not for single shot mode, which is what wedding and portrait photographers need. I spoke with Canon CPS representatives and they explained that on the 5DII and 40D, the AF points are etched onto the glass that you look through. So, they can be lit up individually before focus confirmation with a half press of the shutter button. On the 1DX, 7D and 5DIII, AF points are not etched onto a glass, but displayed through an LCD and thus cannot be lit up until focus is achieved. The firmware fix for AI Servo doesn't really light up the AF point anyway it turns on a light at the edge of the screen that illuminates the entire screen. So, it's not really a fix, but better than nothing if you're a sports/wildlife photographer. I'm still not clear as to why Canon took this route in the 1DX's screen design. It's supposed to be the way all their new focusing screens work. The 7D, 5DIII, and 1DX all have grayed out AF points. It is a big step backward for me as a wedding photographer because over half my images are in low light. Even in the studio, having to spend an extra couple of seconds searching for the focus point is an impediment to getting natural-looking expressions from my clients. I'm seriously considering switching camera brands at some point because of this.
My enthusiasm has diminished a lot from when I purchased this camera. If you're a sports photographer in relatively good light, this camera is for you. I can't imagine a better sports camera on the market. But, if you're a wedding photographer, I would recommend looking at the 5DIII. The 1DX isn't worth the extra $3500, particularly since the 5DIII is lighter, has more megapixels, has the same 61 point AF system, has similar noise performance at high ISO's, and is reasonably weather sealed. The only advantages of the 1DX are its 12 fps, sturdy build, and additional weather sealing. That's not much for the extra money, if you ask me, particularly if you're a wedding photographer who doesn't need those features. But, keep in mind that the 5DIII also as the darkened AF point.
4/8/2013 This is one more update after setting the camera down for a few months and picking it up to do my first wedding of the season a couple of days ago. Watching the customers twitch while I spent an additional two to three seconds trying to locate the center AF point in low light more than confirmed my earlier discomfort about the issue. It is definitely a handicap for low light photography. This was a particularly stressful wedding due to delays. My assistant and I had to pick up the pace to make up for lost time. Thankfully, it was a very nice couple. But, because of the delays, their expectation was that I should be able to take my shots quickly after getting my settings worked out on the first group or two. Waving my camera side to side for an additional two to three seconds to find the darkened AF point, while my assistant had already taken the shot with her Nikon D700, was unacceptable. I was like molasses compared to her, and people's smiles would fade while I fiddled. If this is Canon's new direction with their AF design, I'm out for the longer term. In the short term, this is what I have to work with. I would never have made this purchase had I known Canon would disable a feature that I so heavily depended on. Other photographers I've spoken with have learned to put up with it because they're invested in the Canon system. Not sure I will stick around.
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