Upside; The Canon is nicely built the viewfinder is much better with manual focus easier, the file is good and as Paul said holds the highlights well. The batteries last a billion frames. Skin tones are perfect.
Mr. Russell,
Yes, it's important to nail down which focusing screen is right for your style of shooting -- either the 4x5 blacked-out crop screen, or that EES (?) low-light screen, or even getting the Maxwell guy to whip you one up.
Batteries are nothing short of amazing; they last forever.
Skin tones are good, once you get your Preferences and PictureStyle set up, after testing.
Medium upside; The Canon software tethers ok, (all of today was tethered), the lcd lights up when you work tethered, you can name and rename in the Canon software and the preview initially comes up quick sending small jpeg and raw about 2 seconds before it's full screen.
Nice that the LCD of the 1ds3 stays lit up when tethering, versus the 1ds2 which went black when tethering.
Once you do the Rube Goldberg Non-Firewire Workaround (see below), the 1ds3 preview comes in in about a second or so, on a 17" Macbook Pro, on location. But you still have to manually download the RAWs, since you're only tethering a Small JPG.
1. Put a CF card in Slot 1.
2. Put an SD card in Slot 2.
3. Set the camera to "record separately".
4. Set the camera to "Playback only Slot 2".
5. Set the Slot 1, the CF slot, to record RAW.
6. Set the Slot 2, the SC card, to record JPG SMALL.
7. Open EOS Utility, and link it to DPP.
8. Hook up the USB cable to the Mac.
Downside; The Canon software tethered in this way gets bogged down and firing about 10 shoots semi quickly I hit the buffer and the previews load slow. Compared to tethering with my Phase backs and C-1, this is almost glacier like slow.
There is nothing like a Phase back and CaptureOne 3.78, for tethering. It is the Gold Standard. Everything else is a pale imitation. But you knew that already.
I shot a small job recently, though, where I didn't try to "link" DPP to EOS Utility. It was much simpler this way. You get a refreshed Preview Window each time you shoot a frame, although weirdly, that Preview window is always in vertical orientation, even if you're shoot a horizontal job. But the upside is, you're only dealing with EOS Utility, instead of trying to "link" to another application, and rub your head and pat your belly at the same time. (Canon should be shot for their sorry software approach to tethering).
The files are sharp but at first startle me because it's not medium format crisp sharp, it's Canon somewhat milky sharp. (They do sharpen in post, but not like the medium format files).
I set up my PictureStyle as Standard (or Neutral), with a 3 tag for Sharpness. DPP sees that tag upon import. I doubt any other software would see these tags, which is why I stick with DPP for everything. As for sharpness, you're dealing with CCD (Phase) versus CMOS (with aggressive AA filter to boot). But tag with 3 Sharpness, run it in DPP, and it's pretty nice.
The 4:3 crop works but it is somewhat disjointed. It shows in DPP and in the camera and on the lcd with those blue lines, but in any other program it becomes a 2:3 cameras.
Like I've said before in another thread, the StupidBlueLine that Canon uses is very irritating, compared to Nikon blacking out the extra frame area. When I bought the cropping screen, that was me saying "crop it"; it was not me saying "put a blue line around it, but show me the rest of the frame anyway, just to piss me off". And yes, I doubt that any other application would recognize the StupidBlueLine tag.
The ONE thing I need is higher, clean iso. The difference between a Canon at 640 iso, F 4.5 and 125th of a second and the Phase at 400 iso, F4.5 (or 5.6 if I want to hold the same depth of field) is about two stops in the Canons favor.
I shot a job last week at 800 and 1600 with the 1ds3. Very clean. Shockingly clean. You simply can't do that with a P30+.
At some point, you gotta choose. None are perfect. Would I love a P21+ back duct-taped onto the back of a 1ds3 body? Absolutely, but it's not gonna happen.