In the full-frame 2000-2005
With digital established as a serious format, it was time to give the professionals what they really craved – both with bodies and lenses
Canon’s first in-house EOS DSLR, the D30, certainly set some long-standing trends and many of the camera’s features are still present in the latest models. These include an APS-C format image sensor, which is smaller than a ‘full-frame’ sensor and has a 1.6x crop factor. Canon developed a CMOS image sensor for the camera right from the off, whereas many other digital camera manufacturers at the time used CCD sensors and switched to CMOS further down the line.
Back in 2000, the D30 had a 3.1Mp image sensor, a sensitivity range that topped out at ISO1600, and a paltry 1.9-inch LCD screen. Even so, it heralded the start of mainstream digital photography, and was originally supplied complete with a 16MB Compactflash memory card – which could store ten whole images.
Lens technology certainly hadn’t taken a back seat to camera development and, at the end of 2001, Canon launched the EF 400mm f/4 DO IS USM. A real smorgasbord of technology, the lens not only featured image stabilization and ultrasonic autofocus, but also employed ‘Diffractive Optics’. Fresnel elements, similar to those used for focusing stage lighting and lighthouse beams, were engineered to enable the manufacture of a fairly fast, powerful telephoto lens with a relatively small and lightweight build. Canon ‘DO’ lenses are still in production.
Face the full-frame future
Fast forward to the summer of 2002 and the EOS-1DS became Canon’s next landmark camera. The original 1D had hit the market at the end of the previous year, but had an APS-H format image sensor with a 1.3x crop factor. The 1Ds was Canon’s first digital EOS to feature a full-frame sensor, the same size as a frame of 35mm photographic film. It was hugely important development, because it enabled EF lenses to be used to their full potential, without any sacrifice in viewing angle.
Like other ‘1D’ series cameras, the 1Ds had the typical built-in vertical grip and duplicated shooting controls for natural landscape and portrait orientation shooting. However, it also had a relatively small pixel count of 11.4Mp. It was replaced in 2004 by the 1Ds Mk II which, with its 16.7Mp sensor, offered the greatest pixel count of any full-frame camera on the market, until itself being replaced by the 21.1Mp 1Ds Mk III three years later.
Backtracking to 2003, the release of the EOS 300D was the biggest gamechanger in photography’s digital age. It was the first DSLR costing hundreds instead of thousands, thereby making it affordable to enthusiast amateur photographers rather than just professionals and lottery winners. In the USA, it was badged the Digital Rebel.
Two years later, in 2005, the EOS 5D made a big splash by becoming the first ‘reasonably priced’ full-frame DSLR, beating the competing Nikon D700 to the market by three whole years.
The 1Ds was Canon’s first digital EOS camera to feature a full-frame sensor