I've been using the 1D Mk3 for a few days now and there are some features that are obvious highlights. For starters the new battery technology is extraordinary. It took 2 hours to give the battery a full first charge on Wednesday afternoon, and since then the camera has shot a football match, an accident scene, a portrait for a news item, and an entire wedding. That's a total of 1,824 frames plus lots of time using the review screen, and still the battery meter is showing 26%.

(Update: Add another 686 frames from another football match, some news pics, and a couple of gala girls playing with the camera's crazy high-speed 10fps mode. The battery is still showing 7% charge.)

Secondly the ISO performance is going to make life a lot easier. Here's an ISO 800 frame from yesterday's wedding that was under-exposed by approximately one stop due to bouncing the flash off the high, dark-coloured ceiling. But I shot it in raw, pushed it one stop, and added a bit of fill light. With my previous cameras that would have produced an image that needed extra work to do selective noise reduction in the shadow areas, but with the Mk3 the noise isn't even noticeable.

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Incidentally the news profile pics that I mentioned, which were done for an item in Friday's Press & Journal, have since been licensed by two national newspapers. That nice income boost means that after only three days the Mk3 is already 1/4 of the way towards paying for itself.