EOS 5D Mark III - quite amazing...

The tonal range in this image of the 13th Hole at Ipswich Golf Club shows one reason why I'm really impressed with the new EOS 5D Mark III.

ISO 400, 1/500 sec at f/11, -1/3 EV. Vignette added in Adobe Lightroom 4. 16:9 crop ratio. EOS 5D Mark III with EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM

Both the original EOS 5D and the EOS 5D Mark II had frame rates that were too slow for my photography needs which are heavily biased towards sports photography. The EOS 5D Mark III barely crawls across the acceptable line with 6FPS. Not great but usable. 8+FPS would be ideal but I used to shoot MotoGP and World Superbike with the EOS 3 and a PB-E2 vertical grip, which gave the EOS 3 7FPS...

But that's the only gripe I have with the new EOS 5D Mark III. In every other aspect this camera is quite amazing. It's image quality is superb and the new autofocus system is brilliant and very quickly adjusted to suit different types of subjects. It's also robust and recently handled a heavy workload on a very long job that involved several thousand frames being captured over 4 days, mostly in difficult lighting conditions.

Perhaps most amazing is it's low signal to noise ratio which produces clean images at very high ISO levels. The image below is from that job - ISO 10000, 1/500 sec at f/2.8, +1/3 EV. EOS 5D Mark III with EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM. Note the lack of noise and high levels of detail in the shadow areas.