The EOS-1DX Mark III is Canon’s newest professional camera. I received the camera from B&H on loan to make an in-depth review. Let’s start by seeing what’s in the box.
Russian nesting boxes
I opened the shipping box only to find another box inside. The fine print on the white box’s label revealed that it was from Canon. I found that this box held even more boxes. Inside was the EOS-1DX Mark III box, a SanDisk CFexpress 64GB card box and another one with a CFexpress card reader.
The camera itself is in a box inside the black EOS-1DX Mark III box. Whew! This unboxing reminded me of the Russian nesting dolls where each doll had another smaller doll inside it.
The simple brown box on the right held the 1DX Mark III body.
Inside the EOS-1DX Mark III’s box
The box has lots of goodies besides the camera body. It comes with a neck strap, a dual battery charger, an eyecup, a high-power battery and a really thick instruction book. The Mark III, like the Mark II, uses either the black body LP-EN4 battery or the later model LP-E19 battery that’s sheathed in gray. The former is a lower power version that will not drive either camera to its maximum frame rate.
Canon’s radical change
The extra boxes in the kit boxed by Canon that included a CFexpress card and reader made sense — a lot of sense, in fact — because Canon had radically switched things up in the Mark III. The original 1DX had two CF card slots. Its successor — the 1DX Mark II — had a CF and a CFast slot.
The latest pro camera, the 1DX Mark III has two slots that hold a pair of the ultra-fast CFexpress memory cards. The speed is needed for the camera that shoots up to 20 full-sized RAW files a second in a burst of up to 1000 frames. The Mark III also shoots 5.5K RAW video. These files are so large that 4 minutes of 30 frames-per-second 5.5K RAW video fills up a 64GB card.
After all of the gear was out of their box within a box within another box I felt like I had finally finished opening a Russian nesting doll set. New camera smell is kind of like new car smell, just fainter.
Now that all of the parts and pieces are together and the battery is charging, I’m going to settle down with the 1DX Mark III instruction manual, It’s a short read of 59 pages that covers the basics. There are also two white papers (a third one is on the way,) a guidebook exclusively for the autofocus features and an advanced manual (965 pages) in my reading future. They all downloadable on the Canon website. Canon sells the EOS-1DX Mark III with a CFExpress card and reader for $6499.
