Canon 1D Mark III Modes & Menus

Canon EOS-1D Mark III Modes & Menus

Capture Modes

As you'd expect, Canon EOS-1D Mark III offers full manual exposure control, as well as a complement of partial manual and automatic exposure modes. For example, you can choose between Program AE, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Manual, and Bulb modes. (The Depth of Field AE mode is absent, however.) The majority of these are fairly self-explanatory, as Program AE, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual modes provide varying degrees of manual and automatic exposure control. While available apertures vary with the lens used, shutter speeds range from 1/8,000 to 30 seconds in all modes except Bulb, which keeps the shutter open as long as the Shutter button is depressed. (Interestingly, Bulb mode has no time limit, other than the available charge in the battery.) Canon's optional RS-80N3 remote switch and TC-80N3 Timer Remote Controller allow you to take long time exposures without having to hold your finger on the Shutter button. In Program AE mode, turning the Main dial on top of the camera cycles through a range of equivalent exposure settings, allowing you to pick the best exposure with an emphasis on either aperture or shutter speed, while letting the camera determine the exposure. (This is commonly referred to as a "program shift" or "vari-program" option.) Being a professional camera, the EOS-1D Mark III offers no scene modes.

Playback Mode

Activated by pressing the Play button on the back panel. Playback mode lets you view images, erase them, protect them, or set them up for printing on DPOF and PictBridge-compatible devices. You can also view images in an index display, enlarge images to 10x, view a slide show of all captured images, or rotate an image. The DISP button activates an information display, which reports the exposure settings for the image; a second press graphs the exposure values and a small luminance histogram, and another press displays both the luminance and separate Red, Green, and Blue histograms.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III Menus

Even more different from the 1D Mark II N is the new tabbed menu interface that uses a combination of either the Quick Command Dial and Main Dial, or the joystick-like Multi-Controller to navigate between tabs or up and down the options on each tab. We found both methods to be much easier and more efficient than the previous approach that relied on the Quick Command Dial and buttons on the left side of the camera body to accomplish the same functions.

If you click on each of the screen shots below, they'll open up a separate window showing all the options for that screen in a tabular matrix.