On February 21, 2007, Canon announced the new EOS-1D Mark III. So what, right? Wrong. Canon has packed quite a few upgrades into its predecessor the EOS-1D Mark II N. What you’re most likely to notice first is the upgrade from 8.2 to 10.1-million effective pixels. If you did your math, that’s an addition of nearly 2-million effective pixels. The next thing that will catch your attention is the move from the 2.5-inch lcd display on the Mark II N, to the 3-inch lcd on the new Mark III.

Although in today’s standards a 10.1-megapixel camera isn’t all that big of a deal, you need to put it into the perspective of this fact… CMOS sensors are where the magic happens. Unless you’re buying a camera from Canon’s (or Nikon’s) professional line, you’re getting a lower quality, smaller sized sensor. Generally, a larger sensor will produce a better quality image. So, if you were to compare two images of taken of the same subject, at same time, but one taken by Canon’s Mark III and the other taken by a 10-megapixel point-and-shoot, you’re going to get different quality pictures. You might not notice the differences at lower resolutions, but if you were to make 8×10’s of those images, you’ll most likely notice more noise in the one taken by the point-and-shoot.

Although I don’t have any experience with any of the cameras from the EOS-1D line, I have seen what they’re capable of. Jeremy Cowart is a Nashville-based photographer, who uses a cousin of the EOS-1D Mark II N, the EOS-1Ds Mark II. Granted, the EOS-1Ds Mark II is 16.7-megapixel camera, with a full-frame, 35mm, CMOS sensor, versus the 28.1mm x 18.7mm sensor of the Mark II N and the Mark III, but you can still expect some quality results. This opens up a lot of questions about what Canon’s has up their sleeve. One being, when will we see the EOS-1Ds Mark III? Second, can we expect another doubling in megapixels like we got between the 8.2-megapixel EOS-1D Mark II and the 16.7-megapixel EOS-1Ds Mark II? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the next few months have in store.