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.

Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S: Lumenagerie

Canon 5D MkII / Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S

Wesley Willis had names for his demons. Heartbreaker, Meansucker. Nervewrecker. They made his life hell; but they gave him targets for his anger, something he could rail against without harming others. Without his demons he would probably never have become famous, but what kind of fame did he end up with? He was a novelty act, and twelve years after his death his legacy has faded.

He seemed destined for internet stardom, but sadly he died in the pre-Facebook period, the pre-Twitter period. He would have been Twitter's killer app. I would follow him on Twitter. Rock over London, rock on Chicago is 34 characters long, leaving 106 characters for him to spread his word. I loved the way he cussed the crowd. It meant he was telling them something.

"When faced with my demons / I clothe them and feed them". Pac-Man's demons were called Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. I have often wondered if they were objectively real within the abstract world of Pac-Man, or if they were actually manifestations of Pac-Man's neuroses. How come Pac-Man looked so jolly in the face of inevitable death, and why did the ghosts hide away in that little box?

A glimpse inside the game's source code reveals that the ghosts are driven by a compulsive mixture of phobic avoidance, unreasoning aggression, and mental confusion; a programming error means that Pinky and Inky are mentally ill, because one of their subroutines has an error. When Pac-Man heads up the screen they go haywire.

But what of Pac-Man himself? Very little has been written about the psychology of video game characters, presumably because they don't have an internal life; they are us, they are direct translations of our desires. Pac-Man himself has rudimentary characterisation - creator Toru Iwatani thought of him as a voracious, mischievous engine of pure will - but most people didn't care. Kids played Pac-Man because they liked the flashing lights and noises, women thought that Pac-Man was cute, grown men such as Billy Mitchell were driven by a compulsive desire to beat the game and achieve a perfect score.

Like most early arcade machines Pac-Man simply repeated the same level over and over again, but eventually a counter broke down and the game reached a "kill screen", where even the best player was stuck forever. Nonetheless it is possible to achieve an optimal score, whereby the player consumes every dot and power pellet and eats every vulnerable ghost, and all of the bonus fruit. It takes enormous concentration to achieve this feat. There was very little reward for being first - Mitchell broke the game in 1999, long after people had stopped caring about Pac-Man - and none at all for being second or third. Roughly half a dozen people, all men, have driven themselves to beat Pac-Man. They belong to an elite club which has no clubhouse, no perks, no drinks discount, no formal membership list, no dancing girls.

What does Pac-Man tell us about ourselves? When I play the game I tend to clear the board counter-clockwise, moving to the bottom-left and then proceeding along to the right and up and back across again. Does this make me a monster? Am I a bad man? Do women or normal people play Pac-Man in a fundamentally different way? Systems analysis is the study of systems, and at its heart is the idea that every process can be broken down into a set of fundamental subroutines, and in the other direction each system is part of a larger system.

The lens has an unusually close focus distance of 20cm (from the film plane) or 10cm (from the tip of the lens). This was shot with a Fuji S5, an APS-C camera, using a macro ring.

In the field of software development systems analysis is invaluable for understanding how, for example, an air traffic control centre is supposed to work - it has to integrate with weather radar and the national air traffic control system, and depending on the complexity of the brief perhaps also the local airport's baggage handling department and independent airline scheduling systems. I can imagine an air traffic control system growing until it runs everybody's lives 24/7 from cradle to grave. We will all either be flying, or awaiting flights, or planning flights.

Taken to its extreme the entirety of human society is an enormous super-system; the Earth's environment is another system, driven not by conscious desire but by feedback and inertia, and given that much of the Earth's energy comes from the Sun it is impossible to consider the Earth in isolation from the solar system. On a human level systems analysts have to differentiate between components of the network that need to be modelled in fine detail, and those that can be abstracted away. In the example of an air traffic control network, it is sufficient to model the workings of the sun; the storms on Jupiter do not have a measurable impact on flight times over the continental United States.

But what about that cliché, the stock market? The stock market is a gigantic analogue computer, fed with inputs that are processed by stock market traders, who are essentially nodes in an enormous network, themselves processing inputs from a multitude of diverse sources. Their collective output is stock market prices. Ultimately the stock market is a machine that exists to calculate stock market prices, and we are unable to predict future stock prices because that would require a hyper-machine, an uber-machine that can simulate a pocket universe.

And what of human society? Most computer programs are created for a definite, useful purpose, whether generating ballistic tables or designing rifle barrels or modelling nuclear explosions. Human society on the other hand is a computer program that simply exists, processing inputs and generating outputs for no ultimate purpose. I say "computer program", it would be more accurate to say that human society is a single-purpose analogue computer rather than software running on a general-purpose computing machine, which would imply that human society could be used to model something other than itself.

But perhaps it can. Perhaps the motion of human beings can be used to calculate ballistic tables or the loads passing through a suspension bridge on a windy day. If only the signs could be interpreted correctly.

Katy Perry wears daylo clothing, and people observe her and start to copy her, and the price of dayglo clothing increases, and from God's perspective Katy Perry is the nodal point of a psychedelic dayglo fungus that spreads across the planet. There are seven billion of us, processing nodes in our great computer, and we are also outputs, individual pixels in a seven-billion-pixel monitor that can only be viewed from afar. Imagine if Katy Perry was in fact the starter crank of a machine that uses human beings as its gears. Her music, overheard in shopping malls, subtly influences our behaviour. Eighteen months later a sufficiently perceptive observer strolls through his local high street; after studying us, he returns home with the encryption key of some secret files, or the nine millionth digit of Pi.

And perhaps there are rival programs jostling for our attention, trying to smother or pervert Katy Perry's message. The likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and Gabriella Cilmi failed to displace her, but the tide always recedes. Douglas Adams described a similar idea in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At the end of the book it is revealed that the Earth's ecosystem is a computer, and the living creatures on its surface are part of a distributed processing network; Arthur Dent was part of the final generation of human beings born before the program reached its conclusion, and he is eventually able to dredge up the answer to life, the universe, and everything from within his own mind.

Adams' sci-fi concepts tend to be lost amongst his wordplay, but the notion that society is actually a processing network has stuck with me. A processing network that consumes the present, regurgitates the past, and spits out the future, in real time.

A typical workplace is essentially an analogue processing unit that receives letters and telephone calls as its input, and generates spreadsheets and work schedules and bills as its output; the people who perform the work aren't really human beings when they are at work, they are office workers, subroutines in a computer program. A national government is an office workplace writ large. Information goes in one end, money is pumped in as fuel, and the output is a set of rules and regulations. Sometimes fuel is pumped over the output to boost performance.

Pac-Man was a machine designed to produce the ultimate Pac-Man player, as in The Last Starfighter, and it is fascinating to ponder its influence and that of other arcade machines. Before computer games, human beings were lumpy boring potato people who ate lard and played darts. Namco and Sega gave us crack reflexes and incredible concentration; Defender and Tempest had the effect of overclocking human society's mind. And, outside the world of computer games, the likes of Miles Davis and Einstein - and in his own small way, Wesley Willis - they tweaked our programming, added new hardware, eliminated useless subroutines.

On a more dramatic level Hitler and Stalin eliminated great chunks of the machine, in the most direct way. Their approach was unscientific, and I suspect that with a machine as complex and interdependent as human society, so prone to chaotic imponderables, any attempt to consciously pervert its progress is doomed to failure, at the mercy of unforeseen consequences.

Hitler cared only for the good of his tribe. But the great machine of humanity has its own course, and cares not for individual tribes; its ultimate destination is unknowable and perhaps not to our satisfaction. We may not recognise it when we arrive. Perhaps the program has already run its course, and we are simply swarf left to blow away in the wind, patients left forgotten in the waiting room of a dental practice that shut half an hour ago. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. It's one of Nikon's most legendary lenses. It was launched in 1981 as part of a general overhaul of Nikon's lens range. In another world it might have been just a cosmetic update of the earlier 28mm f/2.8, with support for AI-S.

But Nikon decided to fiddle with the design and throw in the close-range-correction technology from the posh 28mm f/2, and the result was a lens that was well-made, optically excellent, and reasonably priced. In theory Nikon's big star 28mm lens of the early 1980s was the 28mm f/2.0, but perhaps because of its higher price it didn't grab people as much; neither Google Books' archive of old magazines nor the modern internet has much to say about the 28mm f/2.0. My impression is that professional PJs of the early 1980s were wowed by the Nikon 25-50mm f/4 or the compact 20mm f/2.8 AI-S instead.

What was AI-S? Some kind of Nikon thing. Something to do with aperture control. Only half a dozen cameras supported it. Too late for the F3. Not even Nikon people remember it. It died a death when Nikon switched to electronic cameras with autofocus in the mid-80s. The 28mm f/2.8 AI-S remained in production, however, because it took a while for Nikon to release a really good autofocus 28mm; it was sold up until the late 2000s and apparently old-new stock still exists.

Press adverts from the mid-80s show a price of around $140-170, about twice that of equivalent lenses from Canon and Pentax, in step with Nikon's generally premium market position. At the time Nikon was trying to broaden its appeal, and the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S was sold alongside a much cheaper 28mm f/2.8 Series E lens. The Series E lenses were also compatible with AI-S, and modern eBay sellers often try to confuse the two, by listing the Series E as a 28mm f/2.8 Series E AI-S, or just outright lying. The 28mm Series E appears to be the Porsche Boxster of the Nikon 28mm lens range, in the sense that it's an admission you can't afford a 911.

To confuse matters still further the AI-S is cosmetically similar to the earlier 28mm f/2.8 AI, and there's nothing on the nameplate to indicate which is which; you have to know what they look like and check the serial numbers. The AI-S has its name ring inside the filter thread and has a flatter front end. What's it like performance-wise? Here's one of the local museums:

28mm is unfashionable nowadays - it's wide, but people are spoiled with 24mm and even wider. In the middle it's slightly soft at f/2.8 but not obviously so; it sharpens up at f/4 and then perhaps if I study real close it gets sharper at f/5.6 but no more beyond that, shown here at f/2.8, f/4 and f/5.6:

In the extreme full-frame corner it's decent at f/5.6 and becomes basically sharp across the entire frame at f/11, shown here at f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, and f/11, with the levels boosted:

Why did I pick a corner that was in shadow? The other corners either had nothing in them, or they had a wavy banner that waved and looked blurry. f/16 is the same as f/11 but slightly softer. On an APS-C camera it would be razor-sharp across the frame at f/8. Nikon fans with APS-C bodies might also consider the modern, autofocus 28mm f/1.8 AF-S, which is also a very good performer with the caveats that it retails for $700 and it's a lot bigger than the AI-S. 28mm is roughly 40mm in APS-C terms, in other words a kind of slightly wide normal.

The rest of Nikon's AI-S range was, apparently, uniformly good - the 105mm f/2.5 AI-S was the other famous AI-S lens - and I surmise that a 24mm f/2.8 or f/2 AI-S would be more versatile if you plan on using it with an APS-C camera. The problem is that everybody knew the AI-S lenses were good even in the early days of digital photography, and they were snapped up fifteen years ago. I believe that the latter-day popularity of other vintage lens mounts - Olympus OM, Contax/Yashica, Leica R - came about because the supply of cheap AI-S lenses on eBay dried up.

The AI-S is a pre-CPU lens, and it will only automate on the posher Nikon bodies; compact Nikon SLRs won't meter with it. It won't meter on my Nikon F50 film camera either. As an AI lens it's otherwise unproblematic, there's no risk of it breaking anything off the camera body. This is academic in my case because I used it mostly on a Canon 5D MkII with an adapter ring, although it works just fine on my Fuji S5. The S5 / D200 and I assume other high-end Nikon bodies won't recognise the lens automatically, and you have to use the aperture ring, but they can be programmed to understand that it's a 28mm f/2.8.

It focuses very closely, although this didn't wow me as much as it might because I've used a lot of Olympus OM lenses, and they focus very closely as well. Distortion is very mild:

The lens is very highly regarded but it doesn't seem to have much of a legend in the real world. I associate it with the Nikon F3, and I think of it as the quintessential early-mid-80s photojournalist wide prime, but if photojournalists used it they were too busy shooting to write about it. It did however appear in one of Nikon's most memorable print adverts (mounted on a battered F3, centre):

I have a vision of Nikon's ad agency flinging their prop F3 body around the car park in order to make it look used. In summary the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S is a lovely lens - I haven't mentioned the neutral colours, the decent bokeh, the very mild and easily correctable CA, the stellar build quality, the standard 52mm filter thread - although something of a pain on the used market. Used examples tend to have been bashed about, a few have been converted to modern cinema mounts, yet more have fungus, others are advertised in a way that borders on sharp practice. There are in theory six currently listed on eBay here in the UK, but one is actually an "AI-S fit" third party lens, one is a "Series E AI-S", three are broken, one is ambitiously priced.

Production continued until the 2000s but by the end of the line it was only available as a very expensive special order (perhaps assembled from Nikon's parts supply) and so the vast majority of examples are roughly a quarter of a century old. Nikon apparently made over two hundred thousand of them, so I guess that Nikon fans simply don't want to part with them. I don't blame them.

Rock over London. Rock on, Chigaco. Nikon: we get the world's worst assignments.