Canon Australia guy..

Had a good talk to a friendly Canon bloke last night while playing with the 5DMK3. He said as keen photographers we should all be thanking our lucky stars that it is an Olympic year. He said the new stuff and good stuff is all going to start rolling out very soon. That includes:

The 200-400 should be on shelves by May!!!
Canon is concentrating on pumping out 5D3's
Battery grips won't be available for a couple of months
Forget about a 5DX, they are obviously very happy with the 5D3 and it will have a 4 year product life. The larger senser with 14:1 signal to noise ratio is their idea of what we need and they have delivered.
Mega MP cameras are on the drawing board, but don't be hanging by your .... waiting for one.
He was at pains to point out that Canon's FPS rates were all with mirror down and other competitors quote rates with mirror lock up so we have to all be aware of that when chasing that fast frame rate.
Production of the 5D2 will continue at least until August, they still consider it a very competant "35mm" camera and at $2200 is a bargain for anyone.
No electricity for 4 months last year was the thing that hurt their factories. They had big concerns over the number of inspections by Government, emergency services and countless hundreds of people after the disaster last year and R&D security was a big worry. I could tell last night when they jumped on a girl that slipped a card into the 5D and tried to take some shots.
The guy I was chatting to does go to events with black tape on protype bodies and he said they get a real laugh out of/ the rumour sites and thinks that they are about 95% wrong and only close to correct only about 4 weeks out from a release date.
I only wish this meeting was in a sushi bar and not at a camera launch and then I could really believe all that stuff above.

Great report Steve.....so...how did you like the 5DIII?

The menu is different and will take some getting used to. Feels very 7D-ish. 12800 ISO shots of a pretty model on the night, transferred to a large screen were very, very good. AF is super good. The Canon bloke said there will not be a f8 AF focus fix for the 5D, just not enough processing power even though the Digic 5 is 17 times more powerful than the Digic 4.
Certainly looks well worth the upgrade to me, the senser and the AF and ISO are huge improvements.

I've heard from elsewhere that there will be an f/8 firmware fix for the 1DX.
So if the sensor is capable of it, and it's the same sensor in the 5D3, then it's only a matter of time before Magic Lantern hacks something into it...

(that said, f/8 focussing "works" on my 7D with 70-300L + Kenkox1.4, in that AF isn't disabled, but the sensor just isn't capable of any good results, it just hunts back and forth because f/8 is just too narrow. I suppose any camera can be hacked to 'allow' f/8, but that doesn't mean it'll work if the sensor isn't good enough...)