USER REVI EW | CANON C300 MARK I I I
expansion arrangement that you can build on to with options like different I/Os and battery plates. The body for the C300 Mark III is the same as the C500 Mark II, which was introduced when that camera came along last year. From a form factor point of view it’s compact and sturdily built, everything is easily accessible and the button layout is consistent with all of Canon’s cinema EOS cameras. So, from a muscle memory point of view, there’s a very low learning curve. The only minor gripe, which for me isn’t a huge problem because we mainly work in corporates so we don’t have anywhere near the level of high-end audio, is that the audio controls on the right- hand side as you’re looking at the camera aren’t optimally placed. I’m just glad coming from the C200 to see timecode in the body. FANTASTIC SLOW MOTION Being in lockdown, my time with the camera was limited as was what I could shoot, so it was the children in the garden and so on. You’re getting 120 frames per second in 4K Raw Super 35 mode whatever your base frequency is and it’s great. This is quite unquantifiable but there’s something – a certain feel of lustre or smoothness – to the look of 120p. It doesn’t appear to be making many “CANON CLAIMS MORE THAN 16 STOPS OF RANGE”
ABOVE Ollie Kenchington, owner of award- winning Korro Films, loved the versatile C300 Mark III
is optimised for low light and noise areas. Both are tuned to do the best they can for those different areas, which is better than one process for the whole spectrum. The signal is then recombined, giving you the best of both worlds. The advantage of this is a cleaner and lower noise floor, giving you better low-light capabilities. In fact, it gives you back an extra stop of dynamic range. Canon claims more than 16 stops of range because of this. TESTING NEW DYNAMIC RANGE For me, the testing for this was basically to point the camera at high dynamic range scenes. For example, I went to a local wood where there’s a tall and dense canopy of trees with big gaps between them as they’re pine. So there’s enough opportunity for the sunlight to get through and
image quality compromises in order to hit those frame rates. This seems to be consistent with what Canon is telling us about the new processor and sensor, which are in this camera. They appear to be unlocking very nice quality high frame rates. Dual gain output isn’t the dual ISO feature that other cameras already have. Dual gain is slightly different. The keyword here is gain, which is basically an amplification of the signal. This amplification is an opportunity for the imaging system to introduce noise; it’s like raising the gain with microphones, which has similar noise-inducing problems or the potential for those. What Canon’s new dual gain output feature gives you, before the signal actually passes through the A/D conversion, is two different gain amplification processes: one that is optimised for highlight and high saturation areas and one that
BELOW The only minor gripe Kenchington had was that the audio controls weren’t optimally placed
24 DEF I N I T ION | JUNE 2020
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