Canon and Nikon are like the Coke and Pepsi of the photography world. And if you have a Canon camera, the lenses for it won’t work with a Nikon camera, and vice versa, so you’re effectively locked into one or the other.  I’m a Canon guy, so I don’t really follow what Nikon’s doing much. But it turns out that Canon and Nikon have both just recently come out with amazing cameras.

Nikon just released the Nikon D3, which as some awesome features:

• It’s got an orientation sensor that shows you how ‘level’ the camera is.
• Dual CompactFlash cards, and you can use them several ways: double your storage, mirror them (I should note that CF card failures are probably far rarer than hard drive failures, so this is insane reliability), or store RAW images on one and JPGs on the other.
• HDMI output.
• ISO6400 as a standard feature.
  • ISO is how sensitive the camera is to light. A higher sensitivity lets you get pictures in darker settings, but raises the amount of noise (grain, essentially “static”) on the image. Most consumer cameras go ISO100-400. I can shoot up to ISO1600 without much noise, which lets me get a lot of shots I otherwise wouldn’t. I also have “ISO Expansion” unlocked, letting me bump up to ISO3200 when necessary, but at the expensive of pretty grainy images.
  • ISO6400 is the highest before you unlocked expanded ISO!
  • It goes up to ISO25600. Please excuse me while I drool. Unsurprisingly, ISO25600 is extremely noisy, but at the point, no other camera on the planet would even be able to take the picture, so some noise is an acceptable compromise. What interests me, though, is that, short of ISO25600, it’s really not that noisy. Look at the gallery of this site. Those first two pictures are ISO3200, which I find really hard to believe: they look flawless! ISO6400 is perfectly acceptable, and really, ISO12800 isn’t bad. I wouldn’t use ISO25600 if I could help it, but you’d probably only be using it when all the other photographers put their cameras away because it was too dark to get shots.

Of course, a camera like that is meant more at the sports market, where speed is essential. Canon just announced something for the other ultra-high-end market: studio photographers.

The Canon 1Ds Mark III was just recently announced. What’s remarkable here?

• It’s 21 megapixels, and it’s 21 megapixels on a full-frame sensor. Digital photography actually surpassed the ‘resolution’ of film long ago: if you were to take pictures on the best film and blow it up as much as possible, you’d get more detail if you used a high-end digital camera. But at 21 megapixels, Canon is closing in on medium-format cameras. Seriously, 21 megapixels.
• Two neat ways to manage sensor dust (the sensor builds up a charge that causes dust to stick to it, which ends up showing up on pictures):
  • “Dust mapping,” where you can use software on your computer to map out the dust.
  • A high-speed (ultrasonic?) vibration of the sensor, which keeps dust from sticking. A few other Canon cameras offer this, too, but it’s still very new.
• A fairly big image buffer, something I wouldn’t expect on a 21 megapixel camera… And 5 frames per second, which beats my 10D.
• An optional wireless add-on.
• As an aside, check out the photos page and check out how obscenely wide the 85mm f/1.2 lens is.
  • And now imagine… 85mm f/1.2 lens… On the Nikon camera… ISO25600… You could probably see in the dark?

In conclusion, I need to win the lottery. 😉