A few weeks ago, Canon confirmed that in certain extremely dark situations, the excellent 5D Mark III’s LCD’s backlight leaked light onto the camera’s auto-exposure sensor. Oh no! Our friends at LensRentals.com took apart one of the newly fixed models — and the solution is so simple we can’t believe it works.
We got our first “new” 5D III cameras today, the ones with the light leak fixed (above). You know me, I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to take one apart and see what was different. I had photos from the ‘prefixed’ 5D IIIs from a previous post (below), so comparison would be easy. Let me say it here first: I knew this was going to be the fix since the first time I took one apart: Canon has this very cool black tape they used to cover circuit boards (I’m assuming either water resistance or electrical shielding or both) and I figured they’d just slap another piece over the top LCD light. Which is exactly what they did. Yes, I’m making fun, but it’s a perfectly good solution and it works flawlessly.
And because I know you have enquiring minds: I did power the camera up with the shell off in a dark room. There is no more leak.
Dr Roger Cicala is the founder of Lensrentals.com. Since the company has long since outgrown his ability to manage it, he is now the Director of Research and Quality Assurance for Lensrentals, meaning he spends all day taking photography things apart and figuring out how they work.