Let's have a look at the Canon EOS 1Ds. The original 1Ds, from 2002. Back then it was a heck of a thing. It was built to deliver blunt force trauma; hurting bombs. Heavy-duty, cast-iron piledriving punches. It had an eleven megapixel sensor at a time when people were still impressed with six. A full-frame sensor at a time when people were still amazed by the smooth tonality and narrow depth of field of APS-C, and it was all wrapped up in the best camera body Canon could make.
In 2020 age has withered it, and custom staled its infinite variety, but on the whole it hasn't dated all that badly. The autofocus and metering are still impressive, and on a physical level - as an object - the body looks fantastic. It falls apart under artificial light, and its performance is surprisingly mediocre at higher ISOs, but in daylight it produces noise-free images with subtle colours. Operationally the body is instantly responsive but the I/O bus is very slow. Let's not talk about the LCD monitor.
In the early 2000s Canon seemed to be much less enthusiastic about the digital SLR market than Nikon. The Nikon D1 was a big success with photojournalists, and on the whole Nikon's range of digital products - its swivel-bodied CoolPix cameras, the Coolscan film scanners, the early digital-friendly 17-35mm f/2.8 - felt like part of a thought-out system. Canon had a strong presence in the consumer market but its professional digital portfolio felt haphazard. In that context the 1Ds was a powerful statement of intent; its combination of resolution and large sensor were a generation ahead of the competition.
Judging by its factory code my 1Ds was built in December 2002, in Canon's factory in Oita, Japan. The shutter is rated for around 150,000 shots; mine has taken 27,000; the lubricants will probably gum up long before the shutter breaks. The capacitors will rupture. The rubber will perish, the LCD backlight will burn out. By that time no-one will service it - as far as I can tell no-one services it in 2020 - and humanity will have mutated into a form that no longer uses visible light to detect predators. It will have a second life as a boat anchor.
Canon's in-house competition was the Canon 10D, which had a six megapixel, APS-C sensor. It was launched slightly before the mid-2000s digital SLR boom, and for a few months in 2003 Canon only sold three digital SLRs - the 1D, the 1Ds, and the 10D. To confuse buyers they all had different sensor formats (APS-H, APS-C, and 35mm).
By the year 2002 several manufacturers had experimented with full-frame sensors, but none of the first generation of full-frame digital SLRs had been unequivocally successful. The 1Ds bucked the trend; it was mostly quirk-free, and despite a price of around £7,000 / $8,000 it apparently sold well.
I don't have access to Canon's sales figures, but the unit reviewed by Imaging Resource in 2002 was serial number 101003. Mine is 117893, so assuming an unbroken run of serial numbers Canon must have sold at least 16,890. It's unlikely that mine was the last ever made, so I guess there were 30,000 or so, a lot for something aimed at such a small market. Very few people on the internet have photographed the bottom of their original 1Ds, so I can't make a more accurate guess as to how many were made.
The 1Ds' body and autofocus system were shared with the EOS 1D, which had an APS-H sensor, and were apparently derived from the EOS 1V, which was the last of Canon's professional 35mm film cameras, so presumably the most expensive part of the 1Ds' development process was the sensor, which was a CMOS unit of Canon's own devising.
A 1Gb IBM Microdrive - $400 or so in 2002 - stores 87 RAW images.
Writing about the original 1Ds is difficult. As far as I can tell the camera sold almost exclusively to press agencies and moderately well-heeled wedding, portrait, and advertising photographers, who were for the most part focused on their business than writing about cameras on the internet. Their work was not intended to last beyond the moment. The leading fashion and editorial photographers of the day used whatever the heck they wanted, ranging from autofocus point-and-shoots to large format view cameras, and medium format photographers were not impressed with eleven megapixels.
Furthermore an awful lot of photographers still shot film in 2002 - not because it was fashionably retro, but because it was normal - and so my hunch is that the 1Ds was embraced by a mixture of forward-thinking people who were not sentimental about the past and middle-class computer nerds. Hard-nosed hard-charging pioneers, who at this moment in time have probably switched to drone photography, or have abandoned traditional cameras in favour of high-resolution mobile phones.
Bear in mind that in order to use the 1Ds effectively in 2002 a photographer needed a bunch of memory cards, which were not cheap, plus a decent computer - also not cheap - and a bag full of batteries and lenses, plus some flash units or studio strobes. The toppermost of the poppermost would have had a second 1Ds body plus an Apple laptop so that they could transmit images in the field, again not cheap. The 1Ds was less expensive than a digital medium format back and a lot more flexible, but still very expensive as a system.
By the time the 1Ds entered the second-hand market Canon sold the smaller, more competent 5D, which drew attention away from it. Most of the leading photo websites existed in 2002, but beyond first-look reviews there isn't much on the internet about the original 1Ds. I have the impression that most of the surviving bodies are now objects d'art.
Lidice
~
Off to Lidice, a village in the Czech Republic.
One of many villages obliterated by German forces during the Second World War.
They destroyed it in June 1942 in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Germans appear to have selected Lidice on a whim; the evidence that it harboured members of the resistance was flimsy.
They shot all the men and sent the women to die in the concentration camps. The children vanished into the night and fog.
Lidice was bulldozed. After the war it was rebuilt a few hundred yards from the original location. A handful of the original residents returned. Heydrich was buried in Berlin, in a grave marked with an elaborate SS tombstone, but the Allied forces removed almost all trace of it at the end of the war. Lidice lives on.
A glimpse of the 1Ds' big sensor. In common with most digital SLRs from before 2005 or so the sensor cleaning mode simply flips up the mirror - you have to remove dust from the sensor yourself.
The Philips sensor appeared in the Contax N Digital of 2002, which was released in limited quantities and has left very little trace on the internet - this review is probably fantastic if you read Thai - and the Pentax MZ-D, which was developed into a functional prototype but cancelled before release. The N Digital had a base ISO of 25 but had shadow noise even at that low level.
The sensor also appeared in a number of 6x7 and 645-format medium format digital backs from Leaf, Sinar, Phase One among others, where it would have had a crop factor. It would be fascinating to try one of these cameras out in 2020, but getting the right combination of sensor back, camera body, tethering cables, batteries, and period-correct software would be extremely difficult.
By the time the 1Ds came out the first generation of full-frame cameras had died off. In 2002 Philips sold its CCD business to DALSA, who concentrated on the scientific market. In 2002 the 1Ds' most direct competitor was the fourteen megapixel, full-frame Kodak DCS Pro 14n, which was built on a Nikon F80 film body. I have one! Here's what it looks like, on the left:
This picture doesn't really get across how fat it is from front to back. It's an ugly fat lump. A big ugly fat lump. A camera that, if you saw it while eating, you would be unable to finish your meal. A camera that, if you saw it in the street, you would point it out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking it. A camera that dedicated its life to making money by lying with every breath it could muster in order to keep murderers and rapists on the streets. It tried to play husband. It tried to taste the life of a simple man. It didn't work out.
It has just dawned on me that Se7en is twenty-five years old. A quarter of a century. Yikes. I've always had a soft spot for the Kodak DCS cameras. In the 1990s Kodak had to work everything out for themselves, and they mostly got it right, but the 14n is hard to love. In its favour it has fourteen megapixels versus the 1Ds' eleven, and it doesn't have an antialiasing filter, so the images look crisp at 100%. It has two memory card slots - Compact Flash and SD - and it will write any combination of RAW and JPG images to either card, whereas the 1Ds has a single CF card slot and only writes RAW or RAW+JPG. There's no option to just output JPGs.
Against the 14n anything higher than ISO 160 has unpleasant shadow noise, the F80 camera chassis is unimpressive and feels flimsy, the sensor can't cope with long exposures beyond two seconds, images tend to have a peculiar green/purple colour cast, and overall the colours feel flat and purple, which is odd for a camera engineered by Kodak. At launch the SD card slot was disabled because Kodak hadn't finished writing the camera's firmware. The slow card write times, low base ISO, and low flash sync speed (only 1/125th) made it awkward for wedding photography.
At around £4,000 the 14n was much cheaper than the 1Ds, and if you had a bunch of Nikon lenses it was the only full-frame Nikon-mount camera until the D3 in 2007. Kodak tried to fix some of the camera's problems with the Pro SLR/n and SLR/c a year later, but it wasn't enough, and the company left the professional digital photography market in 2005. As of 2020 it's difficult to use the 14n extensively because the batteries are long out of production. The 1Ds has a similar problem but third-party batteries are still available, so it will continue working for a few years yet.
The 1Ds used the same batteries as the 1D. They're Nickel-Metal-Hydride (NiMH), an older technology than modern Lithium batteries, in turn more advanced than the Nickel-Cadium (NiCad) batteries used by the earlier Kodak DCS cameras. They weigh a lot and last for hundreds of shots. The charger is a big block that connects to a pair of batteries with tendrils.
I have the impression that back in 2002 most reviewers assumed that full-frame was an inevitability, and that the 1Ds would be followed by a flood of similar cameras, but in practice Canon had the field to itself for several years. The next full-frame digital SLRs were Canon's own sixteen megapixel 1Ds MkII (2004) and the compact, twelve megapixel 5D (2005). In the meantime Nikon stuck with APS-C, and for a few years the company seemed to lag behind, but they had a strong comeback with the full-frame D3 (2007), which prioritised low noise over high resolution.
I mention all this because the 1Ds wasn't just a camera. It was also a potent expression of Canon's technical dominance, and also a great status symbol for Canon and the photographers who had enough coin to own one or use one for their job. Nowadays digital SLRs that don't shoot video are old-fashioned, but seventeen years ago the 1Ds would have opened doors. It would have won arguments and one-upped the competition.
Does the original 1Ds make any sense in 2020? Not really, but it's more obsolescent than obsolete. The clicky-clicky camera side of things is still very good. The 45-point autofocus system is fast and precise. It has a bunch of autofocus points that become super-accurate at f/2.8 and wider and I feel slightly ashamed that I will probably never tax the 1Ds autofocus system. For most of the images in this post I used a Canon 100mm f/2, and I didn't have any problems focusing on things:
The red channel seems to blow out green.
Focus tracking? I have no idea. I didn't encounter any race cars. The autofocus hardware was used in all of Canon's professional-level cameras from the late-1990s up until the 1Ds MkIII of 2007, so I have to assume it was good enough for the world's sports photographers. Flash sync speed is 1/250th, which is good but not exceptional, but the camera is compatible with E-TTL Mk1, which supports a strobed high-speed-sync mode on certain flash units.
The first two things that struck me about the 1Ds were the hairtrigger shutter button and the lighting-fast mirror blackout, which at 87ms is literally faster than a blink. The mirror seems to go FLICK rather than KER-CHUNK. In fact it doesn't go FLICK, it goes FLK. Got that?
Furthermore the body has a bunch of weather seals. Sadly the I/O port cover on my example has been pulled off, a popular modification at the time; I suppose I could cover it with gaffer tape. The body itself feels like a single block of metal with textured plastic on the handgrips. The only weak point is the battery, which - as with the Nikon D1 - forms the bottom-left part of the case. You have to twist a knob and press a button to remove it. The batteries have rubber seals to maintain the camera's weather proofing, but the outside cap is plastic. I have seen some used 1Dses with bashed-in prism housings, so it's not indestructible, but I imagine it would survive a drop to a concrete floor without smashing apart.
You have to move your hands an awful lot to operate the camera. The menu system is reminiscent of the Kodak DCS cameras, in that you hold MENU while turning the rear dial to move left and right between menu pages, and then SELECT and the dial to move up and down through the menu options. The top plate has three weatherproof buttons that operate in combination with the rear and (mostly) forefinger dial:
From top to bottom you can change the shooting mode (AV, TV, etc), the autofocus mode (tracking or one-shot), the metering mode and flash exposure compensation, and then by holding two buttons you can change the bracketing interval (up to three stops), the ISO, and whether the camera fires in single-shot or burst mode. I changed ISO most of all, because the camera doesn't have an auto-ISO mode.
The ISO ranges from 100 to 1250, an odd top figure that was shared with the APS-C EOS D60. I'm not sure why it didn't go up to 1600. There's also a menu option to enable ISO 50, but I think it's a software creation that simply overexposes the image by a stop and then de-exposes it during development. The metering tends to err towards underexposure, or at least when confronted with an outdoors scene it tries to retain highlight detail in the clouds, which is fair enough. My hunch is that the exposure system was modelled on slide film, where you have to expose for the highlights. Images from the 1Ds benefit from having the shadows boosted, which increases grain, but at lower ISOs it's not all that noticeable.
This is ISO 1250, with the shadows boosted by about a stop. The noise isn't quite random, but sized down like this it's not offensive. The 1Ds doesn't cope well with fluorescent light - if you correct for the orange cast the image turns purple instead.
I took this quickly, while crossing the road, but left to its own devices the 1Ds did a good job of keeping detail in the clouds. I've boosted the shadows with Photoshop.
The big selling point of the 1Ds was its huge file size, almost twice that of the contemporary Canon D60, 10D, and Nikon D100. By modern standards eleven megapixels is small for a stills camera - it's only slightly larger than 4K - but the 1Ds produces sharp, detailed, smooth images that are still pleasing to the eye. It has a relatively weak antialising filter that nonetheless doesn't generate very much moire. Here are a couple of examples of the detail it can produce:
Again, the metering system retained detail in the clouds, and I had to brighten the lower part of the image with Photoshop. I left my grad filters at home. This was shot on the observation deck of Prague's TV tower, looking towards the castle.
As a consequence there's a bit of grain at 100%, but it's not objectionable. There's a tiny, almost unnoticeable touch of false colour moire in some of the fine details - the windows on top of the tower - but you have to look very closely to see it.
This is a reverse-angle shot taken from the vicinity of Prague's castle. You can see the TV tower on the horizon, on the left.
At the bottom of the image, to the left, you can see the yellow building in the photograph above - the two towers are just poking over all the other buildings. Again, I've brightened the image in Photoshop to bring out detail in the shadows, so there's more grain than there would be if I used manual metering and a grad filter.
The 1Ds shoots at three frames a second and has a ten-frame buffer. It does however take a while to write images to the card - that's one thing that separates it from the modern age. It wasn't aimed at sports photographers but I imagine that in its day professional photojournalists could work around the slow buffer. On a physical level the 1Ds is heavy, about 1.6kg, but it balances well with long lenses.
As mentioned earlier the camera side of the 1Ds - autofocus, exposure, handling etc - is still very good today, although I miss auto ISO. The sensor however has noticeable shadow noise and only retains about a stop of highlight information, so even with graduated filters and careful exposure there will inevitably be instances where you have to bracket.
In its favour it copes well with long-duration exposures. The 1Ds' contemporaries from Nikon and Kodak weren't very good in that respect - my 14n spits out black frames if the exposure is longer than two seconds, and from my experience of using a Nikon D1x the images were usable but plagued with hot pixels if the exposure was longer than ten seconds or so.
The 1Ds uses a dark frame system, whereby e.g. a thirty-second exposure is followed by a second thirty-second exposure with the shutter closed, which is then subtracted from the original. The following image is a thirty-second exposure taken with the lens cap on:
If I boost the contrast there's some low-level banding, which would be invisible ordinarily, unless perhaps you were taking pictures of distant stars:
My 5D MkII is no longer state of the art, but it has a more advanced sensor than the 1Ds. If I try the above trick - a thirty-second exposure with the lens cap on, boosted with Photoshop's "auto contrast" - I get the following result:
It looks more purple because the 5D MkII has twice as many pixels. It's not completely random, but random enough that in real images it would be unnoticeable. I was just curious to see what the result looked like.
The 1Ds has a large, 100% viewfinder. In the following image I arranged the four pipes along the bottom of the viewfinder frame when I took the picture, and that is where they were when I opened the image in Photoshop.
Prague's main train station has a little vintage station on top of it. Until recently there was a cafe and shops, but as of early 2020 it's deserted.
The 1Ds was launched on the cusp of The Modern Age, so for the most part it doesn't have the odd quirks that make so many early digital cameras charming. It has a conventional Bayer-pattern colour sensor, with non-removable antialiasing and infrared blocking filters. It appears to have no problem with large memory cards, at least up to 32gb. A 32gb card will store 2570 RAW files.
It does however have some oddities. In common with the first generation of professional digital SLRs it doesn't have USB, it has Firewire:
It only has three ports. Firewire, Canon's proprietary remote socket, and PC flash sync.
The interface is reminiscent of the Kodak DCS models, but with a splash of colour. It was completely overhauled for the 1Ds MkII.
The camera has the standard array of custom functions for autofocus and button assignments etc, but it also has a range of personal functions that go into more detail. With the personal functions you can turn off most of the exposure modes, so that the camera only shoots in program autoexposure (for example), or you can lock it to only fire at certain shutter speeds and apertures.
I'm not sure why; perhaps it was aimed at photo news agencies who wanted to make the cameras idiot-proof, or studio photographers who expected to mount the 1Ds on a sturdy tripod and shoot thousands of images at f/11, 1/250th with studio flash, and they were worried that an assistant might change some of the settings. Who knows.
Very few PCs ever had Firewire, and Apple dropped it in 2012, but luckily I have a vintage Power Macintosh G5 and an old Canon EOS Utility disc, so I connected my 1Ds to it:
Firewire 400 was apparently on a par with USB 2.0, speed-wise - as a PC person it passed me by - but as mentioned in the text it's quicker to grab images from the card than directly from the 1Ds.
Some of the options are very useful. In this case you can set the camera to continuously churn through HDR bracketing. Of note you still have to turn the functions on with the camera's interface - EOS Utility merely makes them selectable. They're greyed out otherwise.
Quiet operation is disappointing. It makes the quality of the shutter noise slightly different, more spread out, but not really any quieter.
There's also a personal function that enables image zoom. I'm not sure why that isn't turned on by default. Anything else? EOS Utility can embed your name in the camera. Mine was blank, so I have no idea who used to own it.
On the front of the camera, just above the EOS-1 logo, there's a translucent white oval. This has an external white balance sensor behind it. The Kodak DCS models also had external white balance, as did a couple of the early Olympus Four Thirds cameras. I can't say that the 1Ds' white balance is noticeably better than any other camera I have used. It was dropped from the 1Ds MkII and hasn't reappeared, so I assume it was more trouble than it was worth.
The 1Ds saves its RAW files with a .TIF extension. They're around 9-10mb each. Kodak also used .TIF extensions so I wonder if Canon simply assumed it was the standard. In practice they're just standard Canon RAW files - Photoshop processes them just fine - but I imagine that the extension might confuse some operating systems. Thankfully, and unlike the D30 and other cameras, the 1Ds doesn't generate tiny little thumbnail files and it doesn't split its files into 100-file folders.
In common with other professional-level cameras the 1Ds has a physical shutter that closes off the viewfinder. You have to pull down a little lever just to the right of the viewfinder. It's intended to stop light entering the camera during long exposures, especially during daytime.
Anything else? The 1Ds takes a fraction of a second to boot up. It supports a range of different focusing screens, with the Ec-C III Original Laser Matte as the standard. It doesn't have Live View and it can't shoot movies. Those things were several years away in 2002. As mentioned earlier you have to clean the sensor manually.
In-camera HDR? Electronic spirit level? Wi-fi? No, no, and no. You can upload different tone curves to the camera but there are no JPG processing options otherwise. Some of the focusing screens are matted for 5x4 and square format but you still have to crop the images manually. As far as I can tell the only unusual accessory was Canon's Data Verification Kit, which could be used in conjunction with one of the custom functions to add a digital watermark to the camera's JPG images; the watermark was supposed to prove that the image hadn't been altered.
The 1Ds also has a voice recording function, which was something else that appeared on the Kodak DCS cameras. You can associate one or more thirty-second .WAV snippets with each image. This makes sense if you're a photojournalist in the field, and you need to take notes; it's not very useful otherwise.
The camera shipped with the DCK-E1 battery coupler, which had a dummy battery that could run the camera from mains power. As far as I can tell Quantum et al didn't sell an external battery pack for the 1Ds; the batteries are however "dumb", so there would have been no obvious technical obstacle to doing so.
The 1Ds MkII was in turn replaced by the twenty-one megapixel 1Ds MkIII in 2007, which introduced live view and automatic sensor cleaning, and had a 5fps burst mode. Contemporary reviews were positive although I have a sense that the market wanted something more than just an extra five megapixels.
Ultimately the MkIII was the last of the 1Ds cameras. The market changed abruptly at the end of the decade, for a number of reasons. Digital videography took off, and in that context having a high resolution sensor wasn't very important; at the same time computing power increased to a point where Canon could merge the high-speed 1D press cameras and high-resolution 1Ds studio cameras into a single machine, and as a consequence the line continued with the 1D X in 2011, which had an eighteen megapixel full-frame sensor that could shoot at fourteen frames a second. Furthermore the success of the Nikon D3 demonstrated that a lot of photographers were perfectly comfortable with a lower resolution if it meant they could shoot at ISO 6400.
A year after the 1D X Canon released the similar, video-optimised 1D C, by which time the stills-only 1Ds felt very quaint. Its modern conceptual equivalent is the fifty megapixel 5Ds - crushing resolution superiority with a full-frame sensor - although on a detail level they're very different cameras.
To an extent the high-end digital SLR market has also been struck by the rise of smartphones; what is the point of high-resolution portrait photography in a world where fame and fortune can be made from low-resolution, crudely-filtered Instagram pictures?
This was shot with my mobile phone. The highlights are blown out, but the image is otherwise bright and vivid. I wasn't stopped by security guards and after taking the shot I could immediately upload it to Instagram.
I'm digressing here. Does the original 1Ds make any sense in 2020? Not really. It's not bad, it's just far too big and heavy for what it does. Back in 2002 photographers were prepared to put up with the size and weight because they wanted eleven megapixels, but in 2020 that doesn't apply any more. In its favour it's still very robust, and would make a decent events or possibly even sporting camera if you picked the moment carefully.
On a pragmatic level the body still looks impressive, so if you're trying to
If you're too young for that, pretend you bought it from the man who did all the on-set publicity photographs for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Say that he went to Scotland and took loads of photos of Alfonso Cuarón with it. Make something up. No-one will know otherwise. Remember that Derek Trotter was a moron whose ill-thought-out schemes continually failed, but he was the hero and people liked him. Boycie was much better off and did no-one any harm, but he didn't have charisma so he was the villain. Charisma will get you places.
On the negative side, for concert photography the 1Ds' shadow noise and poor performance under fluorescent light are awkward. For hiking and landscape photography it's weather-sealed but very heavy. The batteries are also very heavy, and NiMH cells perform poorly in cold weather. The charger is also very large. You could alternatively use a much smaller camera with an underwater housing, or a plastic bag, or some kind of rubber weather shield. Bear in mind that top mountaineers of yore carried Olympus OM 35mm SLRs and just wiped off the snow.
Alternatives? If you want to shoot action sports on a budget the APS-C Canon 7D MkI sells for a similar price on the used market, and has a comparable autofocus system, more resolution, movie mode, and weather seals. If you want high resolution a used 5D MkII sells for slightly more, but has twenty-one megapixels and movie mode albeit that the autofocus system is nothing special. If you want to experiment with full-frame an original Canon 5D is a lot easier to carry around.
In the mid-2000s there was a debate as to whether a used 1Ds was a better buy than a new 5D, and in the late 2000s there was another debate as to whether a well-used 1Ds was better than a lightly-used 5D. Resolution-wise the 1Ds apparently has a lighter anti-aliasing filter, but in my experience the 5D's sensor was noticeable newer, better under poor lighting, decent at ISO 1600, so I would opt for that instead.
That's almost all I have to say about the 1Ds. If you want one nowadays be sure to get the NC-E2 charger as well, because there aren't any third-party alternatives. Canon's website still has the manual, but irritatingly it doesn't host Digital Photo Professional or EOS Utility, only updates; you need to either dig out an old CD or download a copy unofficially. The 1Ds should be fully compatible with modern EOS flash units and lenses, although it will only run flash units in E-TTL I mode (E-TTL II, the current system, was a minor upgrade).
Postscript
At least in the UK Canon's professional servicing network assigns points to different pieces of Canon gear, depending on a formula known only unto Canon; the more points you have, the better service you receive. In 2002 the 1Ds was probably worth a million points, and would have been enough to have Canon send either Gillian Anderson or David Duchovny or both to your doorstep with replacement equipment on a plush golden pillow plus some handcuffs and champagne.
In 2020 however the original 1Ds is worth 80 points. All three of the 1Ds models are worth 80 points. In comparison the 5Ds is worth 290 points and the 200mm f/2 IS is worth 500. The 1Ds still has a little bit of glory, a bit of faded glory, but only a little bit.
