No camera is perfect, and no system is as well. Canon, like most camera manufacturers, does a good job of pushing forward on all the myriad of fronts that cameras require advancement on each successive generation. That said, the devil is in the details, or so the saying goes. As refined as Canon’s system is, there are still loads of little rough edges that could, and should, be smoothed over. These are 3 that I constantly seem to come back to wishing were smoothed over.

Better High-end Battery Compatibility

Put it this way, I should be able to slap my LP-E4 batteries form my 1D into the battery grip for my 5D or 7D and go shooting.

Yes, it’s a small gripe, though if you’ve read any of my material in the past, including my review of the BG-E11 battery grip, you’ll find battery compatibility is a long running pet peeve of mine. I’m sure that Canon has never lost a Camera sale because the battery in the 1D can’t be used in a gripped 7D/5D. Likewise, I’m sure nobody is dying because their $8000 camera and their $3000 camera can’t share batteries.

That said, why shouldn’t compatibility be the standard design? It’s just good system design, and it rounds over yet another little edge that makes our lives as photographers just a shade easier.

Ultimately it comes down to compatible batteries allow me to carry less crap when I travel. For example, as it stands now, if I’m traveling for any length of time I’m carrying:

• a charger for my 1D
• a charger for my 5D
• a surge strip to plug them all in so I don’t lose any of them
• 6 camera batteries—a primary and backup for my 1D and a primary and backup set for my gripped 5D

Give me my desired battery compatibility and I need to pack and carry half as much carp. Since I know I can get buy on a single LP-E4 a day, I can carry 1 charger and 3 batteries instead of the list above. What’s not to like about that.

Besides, it’s not as if it’s bad for Canon’s bottom line either. At best, it’s a wash; I’m buying fewer more expensive batteries instead of more cheaper ones. Nor does it seem like it should be a big engineering problem. The semi-pro camera’s already have to regulate and step down the 7.2v battery voltage to the 1.5-3.3V the electronics use. Heck it’s likely the regulators can already deal with the higher voltage from the pro batteries as it stands. Further, the problem of designing a compatible battery grip, isn’t any more difficult than designing incompatible battery grip.

More User Configurable Controls and more Config Options for those controls

Compared to plastic housing, buttons cost money. They require the metal frame to machined, and the plastic molds to have holes, they require a button, a weather seal, traces on the PCB, an IO port on the microcontroller, and so on. Following that reasoning, I would argue that if a button isn’t broadly useful, it probably should be made useful or omitted.

The easiest way to make buttons broadly useful is to make them user programmable. One of the nicest things about digital cameras is that nothing physically ties a button to a fixed function. Any button can do anything, it’s only a mapping in the software the defines what it does.

That’s the thing, with all the potential flexibility, there aren’t an awful lot of options to put it to use. Canon has certainly made some strides here starting with the 7D, and carrying it along quite nicely in subsequent releases (5D mark III and EOS-1D X). That said, the execution still is somewhat lacking. There are still single function buttons that can’t be programmed at all, and of the programmable buttons, there options per button are limited in non-intuitive ways.

For example, take the rate button. It doesn’t do anything in shooting mode, but it’s a whole button to itself. It only works if the camera is reviewing or playing back images. So why can’t I program it to enable mirror lockup when in shooting mode?

The top two options in my “My Menu”, mirror lockup and VF gird display, would both be something I’d love to be able to toggle with the press of a button instead of having to go through the menu.

RAW Histogram

The histogram has become one of those seriously important tools to a digital photographer, yet if you’re shooting raw, you really are shooting blind to some degree. Both the histogram on the back of the camera as well as the highlight clipping warnings are derived from processed preview JPEGs not the actual RAW data.

Why? Heck if I know? It’s not as if it would be hard to actually produce a RAW histogram that noted when the raw file was actually clipping, but apparently Canon—or AFAIK anybody else—doesn’t see that as a desirable or useful feature.

Instead, we get histograms and clip masks that show clipping often well before the actual RAW files clip. Some might argue this is a good thing, since it means there’s potential to recover data. I disagree. For starters, it means that once you start clipping, you’re off in no man’s land. You don’t know if the areas that are clipping are just a bit past where the JPEG clips and are recoverable, or way past where the RAW clips and aren’t. It’s just a guess.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally, I’d much rather know what exactly is going on in my exposures than having some adjusted approximation—or worse, using a really kludgy hack like a unity white balance to get accurate clipping information then having to fix every picture in post.

None of these are huge difference makers, and not having them won’t stop me from buying another Canon body, and nobody is going to die because they aren’t implemented. They are, however, small things that smooth over some rough edges that exist and that to me is just as important as anything else that can be done.