The viewfinder is optical - you cannot get the image in the viewfinder "zooming" to 1.3x or 1.6x.
Theoretically you could do it if you moved all the exposure information to the LCD overlay (rather than along the outside edges) and then put a zooming viewfinder on the camera that could alter it's magnification of the image reflected off the prism. Would have a couple drawbacks though
Canon made a reasonable engineering choice, it seems to me. Lightroom recognizes the crop in the raw file, so the photo shows up already cropped in Lightroom, but the data is not lost if you screw up framing and want some of the original file. The crop is completed in-camera with jpegs. Seems to me that is the most flexible arrangement, and is consistent with many other features that only apply to jpegs. Having just spent an afternoon shooting hummingbird moths, which do not sit still for anything, I appreciate being able to go back and reframe. And yes, the 1.3 and 1.6X framing is an artificial construct if you're shooting raw, but there must be lots of folks whose workflow requirements demand that they output jpegs, or else there wouldn't be all of the framing tools, highlight recovery tools, in-camera processing tools that were developed to enhance jpeg output.
There is nothing "engineering" about that. It is purely marketing gimmick with no purpose rather than to mark the "Camera can shoot in APS-C mode" checkbox.
Sure you can. Putting in an optical lens that magnifies to 1.0, 1.3 and 1.6 is trivial.
There are lots of photographers, with many different needs. A feature that is critical to one photographer may be useless to another.
I'll respectfully disagree with you. Obviously you can do whatever you want with the Raw file and you can shoot at whatever imaginary crop factor you want. The crop factors are not carved in stone unless you output jpeg, just like other image processing functions within the camera. Canon chose the most conservative path, and that is an engineering choice in software / firmware. Seems to me that people bitching about this would rather have the data outside of the crop box thrown away, thinking that there might be an option for faster frame rate, or larger burst capacity as a tradeoff. Canon's engineers obviously made other choices. I dunno about others, but I bought this camera knowing it was a 5 FPS body and that my mk3 was 6 FPS. Yeah, I'd like more frame rate, but I ain't bitchin much. Image quality is pretty astonishing.
I would find myself agreeing with you more if shooting with them in JPEG gave you some advantage beyond not needing to crop after the fact - a nominal FPS boost for each crop factor would have been nice for Canon to provide tbh.
Faster crop frame rates would have been nice. We don't know if data throughput is the only limiting factor in this camera. Faster frame rates might require beefing up other components as well. This would increase the price of the camera.
Good point - it also takes a lot of mirror box engineering, although it looks like they used the same tech from the 7D2 here as far as the mechanism (at least according to the marketing folks), but who really knows.
But you lose the benefit of "Crop Mode" we see on other cameras (especially shooting RAW). In this case, it seems, you do not get the increase in frames per second shooting rate and smaller file size that Crop Mode usually gives.
Some find it beneficial to crop in camera (capture less so smaller file) than doing it out of camera in post. In this case, if the 5Ds(r) doesn't actually crop at capture, there may indeed be little/no benefit.
The 5Ds crops in camera when you are shooting JPEG.
It crops in camera (post capture?) but it does not seem to capture just the crop area, like some models do. So you may not get the benefits of the more traditional Crop Mode.
Not sure that's the case looking at how buffer and shooting rate are affected or not affected. in other words...is the 5Ds(r) cropping in camera from a full sensor read/capture...or only reading that area of the sensor that represent the crop mode FoV.
Yes, that is the case. JPEGs are cropped, and RAW files contain all pixels, but default to the specified crop.
Then in the case of 5Ds(r) JPEG's...does the camera records/captures the full sensor image then crop it and render the JPEG it writes to the card? ...vs reading/recording only the cropped area of the sensor. Would only make a difference in buffer/FPS performance...if any.
That's how I understood it to be with the 5Ds(r). In that case...there is really no practical benefit to Crop Mode in Raw.
