Canon EOS-1Ds: Mother is the Breadmaker, Father the Yeast

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.

The 1Ds wasn't the first full-frame digital SLR, or even the second. Or the third. Or the fourth, although it was the first unequivocal success. The first generation of full-frame cameras were all based around a six megapixel sensor made by Philips, the FTF3020, which was introduced in late 1998. It was built from a matrix of 12x12mm one-megapixel sensors ganged together. Apparently Philips had terrible trouble mass-producing the FTF3020 to a sufficiently high quality.

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.

Why Firewire? In 2002 USB 2.0 was relatively new and photographers all had PowerBook G3s. That's my theory. The Firewire port is awkward nowadays. If you just want to transfer images from the 1Ds it's quicker to take out the card and use a card reader, but the 1Ds has a number of personalisation options that can only be set by plugging the camera into a computer and running Canon's EOS Utility software.

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.

What happened? To the 1Ds? What happened to the 1Ds? It was replaced in late 2004 by the 1Ds MkII, which had a sixteen megapixel sensor but was otherwise very similar. A year later Canon launched the relatively compact twelve-megapixel 5D, which had a full-frame sensor in a much smaller body than the 1Ds. It sold for less than half the price of the MkII, £2,500 vs £6,000, and stole away some of the 1Ds' market share. For a lot of photographers weather sealing and high-sensitivity multi-point autofocus were superfluous and the 5D was good enough.

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 pose as a professional generate an air of professionalism you can claim you bought it in 2002 and still use it for sentimental reasons.

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.

Canon EOS 300D: In the Past, People Used to Dream About the Future

Let's have a look at the Canon EOS 300D, a digital SLR from 2003. If the 300D was a human being it would now be fifteen years old. That's just over two dog years, or seven dogs stretched in a line. Honey badgers can in theory live for over twenty years in captivity.

The 300D was the first digital SLR aimed at the consumer market.* It was technically sound and a big success, but for reasons I will explain later on it left something of a sour taste in the mouth and is nowadays if not exactly damned then at least celebrated only begrudgingly. It's a bit of a plastic antique and has no real used value, and like all those Ford Escorts from the 1980s it will eventually be very rare because no-one cared enough to preserve it, but at the moment used 300Ds are still widely available on eBay. I briefly owned one ages ago as a backup but never really used it or even liked it, but I was recently seized by nostalgia and decided to pick one up and try it out again.

* The Kodak DCS 315 (1998) was sold at a lower price point than Kodak's other cameras but was still $5,000+; the Fuji S1 Pro (2000) was also cheaper than the competition but still sold for $3,500 or so.

A Mercedes 300D. Oh yes. Ordinarily I blur out the numberplates but this car has had an interesting history - it seems to have been a wedding car and was, until recently, in Scotland! I wonder how it got to London?

Back in 2003 it was notable for its combination of excellent image quality and keen price, hovering around $1,000 at a time when high-end amateur gear such as the Canon 10D and Nikon D100 sold for about $1,400, vs $5,000 for a Nikon D1x and $8,000 for a Canon 1Ds. Only a couple of years earlier Kodak's DCS models had sold for $15,000+; the digital SLR market was still very new and exciting in 2003. The 300D sparked off a boom in digital SLR sales that lasted until the smartphone revolution of the late 2000s - from 2003 until 2008 the digital SLR market tripled in size, then peaked, then entered a rapid decline. Fewer digital cameras are sold nowadays than in 2003, although the SLR market has managed to stabilise.

A 300D, front

But oh, while it lasted! To own a digital SLR in the 2000s! It was like owning a film SLR in the 1960s. If you were a woman, you were a woman of style; you were Audrey Hepburn taking behind-the-scenes snapshots of Gregory Peck on the set of Roman Holiday, even though you were only on a weekend break to Rome via EasyJet. If you were a man you were David Bailey and David Hamilton rolled into one, a high-rolling debonair grown-up with a big watch and a big camera that made girls take off their clothes. I imagine that some people even used the 300D as an image-making tool, rather than as a lifestyle accessory. I wonder what happened to them.

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The 300D retailed for around $1,000 with a kit lens, a hundred dollars less without. Objectively it wasn't cheap (the 300V film SLR, launched concurrently, was half the price). However this was 2003 and everybody had six credit cards. If you were already £12,000 in debt an extra few hundred pounds wasn't going to make much difference. Besides which your house would be worth £1,000 more in about fourteen days, so what did it matter? NB I apologise for switching into sterling there. I'm British, but most of the reference materials I can find quote prices in dollars, and as always a straight dollar-pound exchange rate swap doesn't tell the whole story.

Versus the slightly larger but much heavier 10D. My 10D has seen better days. Note the rear command wheel, top-mounted LCD, and PC sync socket (the 300D doesn't have one). I've put masking tape over the 10D's irritatingly bright self-timer light.

For a few months the 300D had the field to itself. Nikon responded a year later with the D70, which was slightly more expensive but slightly classier. By the end of the decade you could pick up a pretty capable digital SLR in Argos for £250 or so whereas ten years earlier you would have had to visit a camera store in a major city. By the 2010s the digital SLR market resembled the film SLR market of the 1990s; flooded with different models at different price points that were more or less equally capable. One thing they couldn't do was upload photographs instantly to Facebook or Instagram, which is where the smartphone came in handy, and even the smallest digital SLR didn't fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans.

I popped along to Goop, a new pop-up shop in Notting Hill. It's the physical version of Gwyneth Paltrow's website. It hasn't officially opened yet - they were still fitting it out.

I was tempted to go in and ask if I they had something that would make me smell like Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina, but the exclusion order is still in force and there was a small but slight risk she might have been in the store, so I stayed more than twenty feet away at all times.

Nowadays people wonder if the digital SLR has a future. Do you have any idea? I don't. If you do, there's a game you can play. Write your ideas down on a sheet of paper, then wait ten years, then read them back. If you were correct, congratulate yourself. I have played this game myself. Sitting next to my keyboard I have a piece of paper from 2008. It has just one thing written on it. "Aspect of locust". I was not correct. "Aspect of locust".

What does Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina smell like? In the village of Ano Vouves, on the island of Crete, there is an olive tree that is at least two thousand years old. It is the spitting image of Buzz Osborne from The Melvins.

When I think of Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina I imagine that I am standing next to this tree. It is indescribably ancient, with a subtle scent of... I can't describe smells with words. It smells of the dry wind, of men and women who challenged the Gods. They live on in my imagination. 

Like this tree, Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina fills me with a sweet sadness; I am reminded of my own mortality, but a voice tells me that it's okay, we will all go together.

There's something else I want to say. I'm going to digress here. Let me finish. Way back in the past I remember viddying some pop music on the television. A man with orange hair and wild eyes was shouting about how he could be wrong, he could be right / he could be black, he could be white / he could be right, he could be wrong / he could be white, he could be black. I was struck by the way he deliberately got the rhyme wrong, as if he wanted to provoke us.

It was of course John Lydon of Public Image Limited and the song was "Rise" and he did indeed want to provoke us, but I was a kid back then and I didn't know any of that because the internet didn't exist and there was no other way to find out. It was entirely possible to live through the whole of the 1980s without meeting a single person who owned a Public Image Limited record. I shudder to think how it must have been in the 1800s, when peasants couldn't read. The upper classes must have seemed like supergods to the working man.

"Rise" haunted me for years, but when I finally got on the internet in the mid-1990s I worked it out in no time, and for a brief moment it felt as if a little hazy area of my brain had been fixed. Ditto Red Box's "For America", which burned itself into my brain back in 1986 and left me mystified until the mid-1990s. Two mysteries from the distant past solved by the internet.

But the internet doesn't know everything, and there was one mystery that haunted me for ages until quite recently, when by chance I stumbled on the answer. See, there used to be a band from Scotland called Finitribe. They might still exist; the band was a kind of ad-hoc arrangement. Their career paralleled that of The Shamen, but whereas The Shamen were briefly a major chart act Finitribe were in the same commercial league as Cud and The Pale. Less popular than Cud; more popular than The Pale; objectively not popular. You remember The Pale. "Butterfly", that was their song. You must remember.

Finitribe began as an angry indie band with a political bent, then they discovered Ecstasy and became a rave band; they were for a short time even on the same record label as The Shamen, who presumably ate up the label's promotional budget. Their commercial high water mark was An Unexpected Groovy Treat (1992) which failed to chart but people seem to remember it fondly. Lead single "Forevergreen" spent a week in the chart at number 51.

The band followed Treat with the excellent, mostly instrumental, utterly underrated europop album Sheigra (1994), which had a promotional budget of nothing but sounded as if it cost a fortune to record. The album's two singles managed to chart in the top hundred but the album itself flopped. Imagine Jam and Spoon or Grace but with a bloke singing with a slight Scottish accent. On a musical level there was absolutely no reason why Finitribe should have sold fewer records than Dr Alban or Undercover. They weren't fat or ugly. Perhaps the problem was that they came from Scotland, which is far away. I don't know.

"Brand New", from Sheigra.

The band's final album, Sleazy Listening (1998), was a kind of dark trip-hop thing that I didn't like at the time but eventually warmed to. It didn't chart anywhere and that was that for Finitribe.

In my opinion Sheigra was their masterpiece, but the song I remember most fondly is Groovy Treat's "Forevergreen". There were a bunch of remixes but I prefer the album version. The "Forevermost Excellent" mix is pretty good but feels like a different song. The record company made a video but spent no money on it and used a curiously understated remix that doesn't capture the flavour of the original.

Groovy Treat hasn't aged well. The sampled speech fragments and boomy drums were fashionable at the time - Ministry and Front Line Assembly mined the same musical seam - but the idea of peppering a song with clips of speech from cartoons and films has yet to come back into fashion. The lyrics are for the most part ecstacy-fuelled stream-of-consciousness nonsense, but "Forevergreen" is an exception. It has a theme. It's about something. Like all the best dance songs it has a sad undercurrent lurking beneath the surface, because if life was perfect there would be no dancing, no nightclubs; people would just sit around peaking at home.

Kraftwerk's music had an undercurrent. Their flat descriptions of motorways, neon lights, computerised dating and pocket calculators left their songs open to interpretation. Were they in favour of automation, or against it? Were they sincere, or ironic? Why did it all sound so lonely? "Forevergreen" has some of Kraftwerk's ambiguity. The minimalist lyrics paint a rosy picture of a clean bright future filled with maglev trains and underwater cities while simultaneously implying that the inhabitants would end up living in what amounts to a giant gated community while the rest of us look on. "Forevergreen" doesn't achieve the same level of wistful sadness as Donald Fagen's "IGY" or Opus III's "It's a Fine Day" but for a dance track from 1992 it's surprisingly thoughtful.

What really makes the song, however, is the choice of samples. It's the only song on the album where the samples fit the theme and don't sound silly, and this is where the internet came to my rescue yet again. I always wondered where the samples came from, but the song is so obscure - the samples are so obscure - that no-one on the internet knew. Until now! It seems that the Internet Archive has recently uploaded the back catalogue of British sci-fi magazine Interzone.

Issue 52 of Interzone, dated October 1991, has a review of Central TV's "Viewpoint 91: Japan Dreaming" by Wendy Bradley. I learn that the programme "took as its theme the idea that the only country which still believes in the bright future of golden age science fiction is Japan". I also learn that this is where most of the samples used in "Forevergreen" come from, including the opening narration by Lindsay Duncan ("in the past people used to dream about the future") and some puffery by a chap called Sheridan Tatsuno, who talked about "Teletopia, Technopolis, Marianopolis, Aquatopia, Seatopia, Aeropolis, Alice City, Motopia, Geofront, Lunar Space, [and] Lunar Hotels", all of which were ambitious Japanese construction projects that had been mooted in the late 1980s.

The first digital SLR I owned was a Canon D30, the three-megapixel model before the model before the 300D. I was drawn to the Canon EOS system by its flexibility - it's easy to adapt other lenses to work with EOS cameras.

All of the images of London in this post were taken with an 300D using an Olympus OM 24mm f/2 as above. The 300D has a 1.6x crop factor so a 24mm lens becomes a kind of 38mm, making the entire system akin to an old 1970s rangefinder compact a la the Konica C35, Ricoh 500G, Vivitar 35EE etc.

In fact most of the lyrics of the song - about linear expresses and fuzzy logic - were directly inspired by the programme. Sadly it's not available on Youtube and Central TV no longer exists. The BFI claims to have a copy on VHS but I imagine that it's unplayable by now. It's one of countless little documentaries that was broadcast once, archived, and will probably never see the light of day again. The programme appears to have been inspired by Sheridan Tatsuno's Created in Japan, a book about Japanese innovation that was published in 1990. Just for fun I bought a copy.

The long tail in action. The next date was September 2018. There will probably never be another date after that. There comes a point when the signal becomes indistinguishable from the cosmic background radiation. At that point the signal dies; it dies forever.

Mine was originally owned by the Royal Military College of Science, which no longer exists! The book is very dry. I can't laugh at its predictions of the future because they're all reasonable in the context of the late 1980s. People assumed back then that the internet would be a much more limited thing, and that it would be corporate-run just like television; there was a peculiar obsession with videophones; the timeline was about a decade too optimistic; the thought of a single device that could electronically translate and read books and make mobile phone calls - rather than lots of individual devices - eluded them but then again it wasn't until the late 2000s that smartphones could do everything so I can't blame them.

There's a chapter about HDTV, the Japanese high-def television standard that predated modern high-def TV. Look, I haven't read the book yet, I've only skimmed through it. If I ever break my legs and need to spend ages lying down recuperating I'll go through it and let you know. Until then, my legs are fine. Seven years in dog years. I'm actually reading Roadside Picnic for a reason that will hopefully become apparent in the near future.

The samples are the reason "Forevergreen" sticks with me. Firstly because Finitribe actually bothered to make them fit the song. Secondly because the sequencing fits the music - Tatsuno's list of construction projects at first sounds like a triumphant roll-call, but his voice is bathed in reverb, as if we were listening to an old radio in an empty warehouse. The lady narrator has the same treatment, as if we were standing in the dead Dubai of Spec Ops: The Line while a robot PA delivers pre-recorded announcements to an audience of corpses.

"Now being built / Millennium Tower out at sea in Tokyo bay / soon to be followed by Aeropolis, another tower city six thousand feet tall / whose inhabitants will commute vertically by elevator / through the clouds"

Above it all is the historical irony. Japan's economy did very well in the 1980s. The country's excellent performance meant that the Japanese Yen rose in value against the dollar, which hurt exports but gave Japanese firms greater purchasing power abroad. This made it attractive for Japanese businesses to buy up real estate in the United States, which they did - much to the alarm of commentators in the US, who felt that Japan was taking over the world. It was a buying spree on a par with China's modern-day investments in Canada and Australia. Ultimately a combination of higher domestic interest rates and a general worldwide recession in the early 1990s put the kibosh on Japan's speculative foreign investments, but it wasn't immediately apparent that Japan's recession would drag on as long as it did.

At home the price of land in Tokyo skyrocketed, which is why there were so many plans for gigantic tower blocks. They made economic sense because the cost of constructing the building was a pittance compared to the value of the land. Why not make them huge? A few of the projects mentioned in "Forevergreen" were even going to be built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, among them Millennium Tower, which was proposed in 1989. Teletopia was an ambitious plan to turn Japan into a digital hub, perhaps to compensate for Japan's weakness in the IT sector. Teletopia involved transforming the artificial island of Odaiba, in Tokyo Bay, into a silicon village - a Technopolis - but it fell through and the island ended up mostly deserted. Geofront and the Alice City project were attempts to bypass real estate prices by building giant cities underground. Judging by the lack of internet coverage I have to assume that they went nowhere.

When Sheridan Tatsuno wrote his book Japan was doing well, but by the time "Forevergreen" was released the economy had entered a recession that would drag on for years. Teletopia, Seatopia, Geofront and so forth were cancelled, as was a 1996 Tokyo Expo designed to show them off. Tokyo's waterfront underwent extensive redevelopment in the 1980s, but following a major earthquake in 1995 that killed over six thousand people Japan's appetite for building huge skyscrapers on reclaimed land diminished and remains at a low ebb. Japan had suffered small recessions in the 1980s and perhaps the markets assumed that things would get back to normal in short order, but in the end Japan's economy never regained the air of invincibility it once had.

Nowadays when people think of giant skyscrapers they probably think of China and the Middle East. The ten tallest buildings in the world, as of 2018, are in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, and China; but mostly China, because the list is dominated by China. Does this mean that China's economy is sound? Does possession of the majority of the world's tallest buildings mean that China is doing well? Are the people of China happy, and if not, what's the point of all those skyscrapers? I imagine it makes China's politicians feel good. Most of them are men. I'm a man, and I like the thought of owning the most toys, the biggest toys. But women enjoy owning handbags, so they're just as bad. We're all bad.

A Volvo 700. Perhaps the Mercedes was carried from Scotland to London inside the Volvo.

Japan's economy is still the third-largest in the world, but it's dwarfed by China. They didn't see that coming in the late 1980s. The alien space bats flapped their wings.

"The lead the way in computers, robotics, superconductors, and new materials"

But yes imma talking about the Canon 300D. It sparked off a boom in digital SLR sales. It was objectively a pretty good camera albeit with a slight air of naffness that it retains fifteen years later. The first problem is the body. The 300D was sold alongside the 10D, which was made of black-painted metal. I have one! It feels like a metal brick. Very tough. The 10D is a man's camera. In contrast the 300D is made of unpainted silver plastic with huge panel gaps and visible screw heads.

Why silver? The 300D was the digital cousin of the now-forgotten 300V film SLR, which had a silver body. The 300V in turn was a visual echo of the EOS 50 of the mid-1990s, which had a black-and-silver colour scheme that was supposed to look like a classic film camera of the AE-1 era. The 50 was made of silvery metal; by the time of the 300V the metal had been cost-reduced into plastic. Limited numbers of the late-run 300D were made of black plastic, which looked much better, and black seems to have been the default choice for the 350D, with silver as the option. Canon continued to use silver bodies for its cheaper digital SLRs for several years, stopping with the 450D of 2010 and then starting again last year with the 200D. I don't know why they bother.

Sitting next to a mid-1990s EOS 50e, which introduced Canon's the silver-and-black colour scheme. It sparked off a trend; Nikon followed with the silver-bodied F-60 a year or so later.

It has to be said that although the 300D looks grotty, it feels solid. My camera is presumably fourteen or fifteen years old, but is well-built and doesn't creak; the unpainted plastic has actually aged better than the painted 10D. The buttons feel cheap and are too small, and it's a shame Canon left out the command dial, but on the whole the physical interface makes sense and everything still works.

The camera has an arrangement of mirrors instead of a prism, but comparing the viewfinder with the 10D I can't see much difference. It has the same seven autofocus points as the 10D, illuminated with little dots. You select them by pressing the AF point selector button and winding the forefinger command wheel back and forth, which is one of the awkward consequences of not having a command dial on the back of the camera or a little joystick. The front command wheel feels sharp.

That brings us to the 300D's other problem. Some of its cost-saving measures were reasonable enough. The pentamirror, lack of a command dial, cheap-feeling buttons etc were understandable. The problem is that underneath the body the 300D had essentially the same imaging engine as the 10D. The same six-megapixel sensor allied to the same electronics. They both used the same generation of DIGIC processors, although at the time it wasn't called DIGIC. Canon was worried that photographers would stop buying the 10D, so they altered the 300D's firmware to remove a number of features.

An eleven-second exposure at ISO 100. It's clean and noise-free as you would expect, with no obvious stuck pixels. In the early days of digital SLRs Canon's sensors were generally better at long-duration exposures - multi-minutes rather than just eleven seconds - but the competition soon caught up.

A quarter of a second at ISO 3200, although at least with the 300D's custom firmware ISO 3200 appears to be a software creation, e.g. it's ISO 1600 underexposed by a stop, then boosted by a stop digitally. This might be why the 10D calls it "H" instead of "ISO 3200".

Under daylight the image is obviously grainy, with luminance noise, but it's not awful. I suspect that under artificial light it would be horrible.

The most obvious omission was ISO 3200, which was available on the 10D but not the 300D. Camera control of flash compensation was also removed, as was the ability to record RAW and JPEG files simultaneously, plus the custom functions menu, mirror lock up, and direct control of autofocus mode. In its stock form the 300D only activated AF servo tracking in the creative modes; the photographer couldn't turn it on otherwise. There was no technical justification for these changes. There were enough buttons on the camera to support the extra features.

I imagine that most people who bought a 300D didn't notice or care about the firmware changes, but for everybody else it came across as a cynical piece of enforced market segmentation. It cast a pall over the 300D's reputation. To the company's credit, Canon didn't repeat the same trick with the next camera in the line, the 350D. In fact Canon has even added features to some cameras with firmware patches, instead of taking them away - notably the 5D MkII, which shipped with a simple automatic-exposure-only movie mode but was quickly patched into a decent video SLR. Good for Canon. Companies can change.

Luckily within a year a chap called Wasia - probably not his real name, and he might be a woman, I don't know - managed to port the essence of the 10D's firmware over to the 300D, and nowadays it's a simple matter to give the 300D an unofficial firmware hack that increases its functionality. I used a slightly more advanced hack by a bunch of chaps, or women, or a mixed bunch of men and women called The Undutchables, who might not be Dutch, might even be non-gendered. In theory this voids the warranty and also in theory the camera might bug out, but at this late stage in the game I don't think it matters.

As mentioned above the 10D and 300D have essentially the same imaging pathway, which is a good thing because Canon's sensor was excellent for the time and is still fine in good light. The 300D can do essentially noise-free long-duration exposures and isn't bad at ISO 1600, although not a patch on modern-day digital SLRs.

The other thing that dates the 300D is relatively narrow dynamic range, exacerbated by an exposure system that pushes to the right slightly. It tends to blow out highlights while the shadows are relatively noisy. Scroll up to the shot of Goop, near the beginning of this article, all those hours ago. Notice how the balcony along the top of the image looks weirdly flat. That's because it blew out. It's just a solid block of white, with no texture. On top of that shadow noise has a vague banding pattern, which is distracting. If you account for this and shoot in good light, or on a tripod, the 300D's image quality is no worse than any modern digital camera, it's just that the images are smaller.

The camera takes Compact Flash cards. It apparently has issues with larger capacities, but I've tried 2gb and 4gb cards with no problems. Perhaps larger cards will flake out. I don't know. The 300D uses BP-511 batteries, which were shared with the D30, D60, 10D, and a couple of the G-series PowerShots. Replacements are still widely available although the supply will eventually dry up. In the UK you will have trouble getting them through the post.

The 300D has a large recess inside the mount for EF-S lenses; the 10D predated EF-S and can't mount EF-S lenses.

One thing I haven't mentioned. The 300D introduced the EF-S lens mount. EF-S lenses protrude slightly further back in the camera body and only cover an APS-C area. Canon still makes EF-S lenses, generally aimed at the lower end of the market. There are only a few wide-angle EF-S lenses, no fast EF-S primes, and Canon's only fast standard EF-S zoom hasn't been upgraded since it was launched way back in 2006. Other manufacturers have done more with the idea.

How many 300Ds did Canon sell? I can work it out with science. The serial number of Digital Photography Review's evaluation model, presumably from early in the run, was 0370023053. I have no idea of the history of mine, but the serial number is 1270441285. This means that Canon made just over nine hundred million 300Ds, which assuming an average sale price of $1,000 dollars must have netted the company almost a trillion dollars. If all those cameras were gathered together in one place they would weigh almost six hundred million kilograms - about the same as two entire carrier battle groups, including the personnel.

Unless of course the first few digits of the serial number mean something else, in which case, I dunno, a million? A couple of million? One and a half million? If mine is around the half-million mark, that sounds reasonable.

On the used market the 300D's price dropped quite quickly. It was replaced eighteen months later by the eight megapixel 350D, which was in general a better camera. The 350D had a smaller, cuter body and sold for slightly less. The 300D's depreciation curve on the used market was further depressed by the rapidly lowering prices of brand-new digital SLRs. Budget around £30 for a good one with a charger and battery. There was a vertical grip, which only worked with the 300D. If you want a good cheap dirt-cheap digital SLR I recommend the 350D instead, if only because it's smaller and lighter.

And that's the 300D. On my deathbed it will be said that I did not challenge the Gods; my reply will be that the ancient Greeks challenged the Gods not for fun, but so that they might live a peaceful life. Which I did, the end.