The Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III from 2007, then arguably the best professional DSLR ever made; is it able to hold its own against the iPhone 16 Pro Max today, or has the smart phone camera made it and similar DSLRs obsolete?
It is hard to believe that it has been almost 20 years since Steve Jobs shook the world with the announcement of the original iPhone. Its launch has been a clear point of demarcation in human civilization.
There were no smart phones before the iPhone and its first early integration of a camera into a mobile handset led almost to the entire erasure of the market for point and shoot cameras. According to one market study, the market for point and shoots was set to reach $6.8 billion the year before the iPhone's launch.
By 2012, the point and shoot camera market was crumbling. "The market for compact digital cameras shrank at a faster speed and scale than we had imagined as smartphones with camera functions spread around the world," Olympus president Hiroyuki Sasa told a news briefing this month the AFP news agency reported.
Shipments of small cameras had dropped by a devastating 42 percent, the report from AFP noted. The reason: "...smartphones have proved a mighty rival to point-and-shoot cameras, analysts say, offering an all-in-one phone, computer and camera with comparatively high quality pictures and Internet photo downloading."
When DSLRs Ruled The Photography World
The camera market was almost completely disrupted by the devices that catered to convenience in a way single purpose devices couldn't. But dedicated cameras, especially professional DSLRs, were insulated from disruption by at least one major factor where smartphone cameras just couldn't compete: image quality.
There was no question in the early days of smart phone cameras that professional DSLRs were orders of magnitude better. Professional photographers were not about to start shooting weddings, sports, and wildlife with smartphones. These applications and others demanded image quality above all, and pro DSLRs delivered -- as they and their mirrorless descendents still do today.
In the early days of the iPhone, it would have been crazy to compare a class leading professional camera like the EOS 1Ds Mark III to the iPhone camera. But how about now? After nearly two decades of development, how does the new iPhone stack up?
On paper, it looks like a win for the iPhone. The current iPhone 16 Pro Max sports 48 megapixels, and on that count, at least, it looks dominant when compared with the 1Ds Mark III's mere 21 megapixels.
But, megapixels aren't everything. A used 1Ds Mark III is much less than half the price of the iPhone Pro Max, offers a full-frame sensor, an ergonomic body designed specifically for photography, and an endless supply of focal lengths through the huge range of EF-compatible lenses that are on the market.
The Question of Image Quality
The only thing left is image quality and here is where it gets interesting. As our recent samples show, the iPhone has come a long way, capturing great detail with good dynamic range. Here, on these categories, it competes well with the older pro DSLR.
But, the DSLR still has a vast edge when it comes to rendering color. The images from the 1Ds Mark III is accurate and pleasing to the eye. The colors are true to life, and it renders the light in the scene very accurately, with pleasing shadows blending accurately into the scene.
The iPhone, by contrast, seems to artificially elevate the color of a scene, making it appear almost fluorescent. The light in the scene is not captured in a true-to-life fashion, either. Simply put, used in basic default mode, the iPhone camera is overcooking the photos.
Despite this, the iPhone has evolved into a great creative tool and the new 16 Pro Max offers photographers and filmmakers new capabilities that, dare we say, make it an almost indespensable tool for professional creators.
As for the EOS 1Ds Mark III -- we still use it for professional jobs on occasion, but it too has been supplanted in our daily work. Our more modern DSLRs, the Canon 5D Mark IV and 1DX Mark II, produce both outstanding photographic quality and video quality and are our go-to tools for most work. In our opinion they simply offer the best price to image quality ratio currently available.
Equipment Used & Affiliate Links
We used the iPhone 16 Pro Max which is available in "renewed" condition from Amazon. To support us and get your own copy, you can use our affiliate link for Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Y3AAWe (Note that we can't verify the condition of something sold as "renewed" on Amazon. You get something of a discount, perhaps, with the tradeoff being that may or may not be "like new.")
We mounted the iPhone in the SmallRig x Brandon Li Mobile Video Kit for iPhone 16 Pro Max. This kit gives you a case and a cage for your iPhone along with side handles and a variable neutral density filter. Primarily a kit for videographers, as you see in our video, it is useful for iPhone photography as well. It is available from Amazon: https://amzn.to/44Oxl9l
We also used the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III camera with the Canon EF 16-35 f/4 L lens.
The 1Ds Mark III was Canon's professional "high resolution" studio camera dating to 2007 and was the "flagship" in the lineup for that purpose until it was replaced with the EOS 5DS and 5DSR as a higher-resolution option. The Mark III is a great camera that is highly weather sealed and has the best sensor of its time. For most photographic purposes it still works well today, but it is especially good for landscape and portrait photography, just as it has always been.
The Canon 16-35 f/4 L lens is one of the more useful additions to any lens collection. It is reasonably sharp at all focal lengths, has great image stabilization and covers the most widely used "slight wide to normal" focal lengths of 24mm and 35mm, while combining that with the ability to get really wide at 16mm, where it captures pleasing shots with great versatility in composition. It is one of our most used lenses.
If you'd like to get your own copy of this camera and lens combo, and support us a bit at the same time (which we appreciate), we recommend shopping at MPB.com.
