Canon EOS 5D
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| 12 Months of using the 5D Mark 2 22/07/2010 We have been using the 5D Mark 2 for just over 12 months now. It is used for shooting anything from 'black tie' type functions to studio sittings, landscape shots to industrial shoots. We don't use the HD video capability as we are 'stills' photographers only. In my opinion the key elements of this camera are; FULL FRAME SENSOR HIGH ISO CAPABILITY BUILD QUALITY PROCESSOR QUALITY FULL FRAME SENSOR The full frame sensor enables a true wide angle shot to be taken with a 24mm lens. I know these days you can get 16mm lenses for 'ultra-wide' and of course fish eye lenses, but bear in mind only 10 years ago, most Pro's would be happy to have a 24mm lens on their film camera, and most amateurs could only dream of owning a 24mm lens! We use a 24-105 Lis, which gives great results coupled with this camera. At the 24mm end there is vignetting which is a consequence of the full-frame sensor. It is worth bearing in mind that all but the very best quality lenses have a sweet spot, this is one reason APS-C sensors were originally used on the Canon D-SLR's, to negate the vignetting and 'soft' focus issues caused by the digital sensor at wide angle, only the sweet spot of the lenses were available. If you move to a 5D Mark 2, you will have to be prepared to invest in some quality glass. Whilst the sensor is superb in terms of image recording quality, it also highlights lens quality issues. HIGH ISO CAPABILITY As I mentioned we shoot 'black tie' functions, and this camera comes in to it's own for this type of work. The light levels are invariably low, and quite often mixed light sources (especially if there is a disco set-up). We have used up to ISO 3200 for capturing images, and then printed these at A3 for clients with no noise issues on the print. Again we use 'L' lenses, normally the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0 L IS USM Lens and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L USM Lens, and the quality of shot in these low light conditions is more than acceptable for selling of images and prints. Adversely, if you put the ISO down to 50, the image quality is stunning, some of the best I have seen from a digital SLR. BUILD QUALITY The magnesium body feels sturdy in your hands, the rubber socket covers are well made, and after 12 months we have had no issues with ingress in to these sockets. The camera is comfortable to hold, and is used by myself and my wife, who also says the camera is comfortable. One niggle I have is that the ISO button is not in the same place as on the 1d, Canon have moved the 'backlight' button for the LCD screens there. After 12 months, because I use the 1d as much as the 5D Mark 2, I am still occasionally pushing the wrong button to adjust my ISO when actually looking through the view finder. If you will only be using the 5D, this will not be a problem. PROCESSOR QUALITY The Digic IV processor is leaps and bounds ahead of the old Digic III. Tonal range recorded is excellent. We convert a lot of our images to black and white, and without any real post processing, we are getting great neutrals in the conversions. With some minor tweaking in Adobe CS5 Photoshop (PC) the results are very good. Colours are well represented, although I am yet to see a digital camera that records natural greens (grasses etc.) as they were, they invariably require some tweaking, especially for printed output. CONCLUSION If you are Pro or Semi-pro, this is definitely the Canon camera for you. It is well built, not too heavy, and is capable of producing great quality images when coupled with quality glass. If a very keen hobbyist, you will not regret it, but avoid pairing third party, or lower end Canon lenses with the body. If you are in to sports / wildlife, you would be better with the 7D (or 1D mark iii or iv if you can afford it). The hobbyists would be best to go for the 50d, as it's frame rate is excellent. I still use a 40D as a back up for my 1D Mark iii. Portraiture and wedding photographers should not need to think about which camera to buy. If you are a canon user, this should be your work horse. By Chris M East Midlands, UK | ||||||
| What a fantastic camera 24/06/2010 Wow!. I had a canon 30D before and when I started using the 5D Mk II it blew me away. I haven't started to scratch the surface of what it can do but I'm already extremely happy. Don't expect to sit down and read the user manual before you use it - it's got 250 pages! I just put it to fully automatic and went shooting. The photos were excellent but there were some things not to my satsfaction (needed more aperture or shutter control) so I read the relevant bits of the manual and tried again. The ISO range of the camera is such that if you leave ISO speed in auto you will not get a bad photo (unless you are trying to use it at night in a dark room!). I took it into a gloomy cathedral recently and all the photos were brilliant. Then there's the video camera! It shoots video at HD TV quality with sound. The only real problem I see is that it takes such good photos I am now not satisfied with the quality of my lens. More expense on the horizon! By Mr. Alan Williams-key Madrid | ||||||
| canon 5d mk2 review 16/06/2010 I've just recently purchased the 5D mk2 after being very satisfied with the mk1 for a period of a lot of years and so far, i've been more than delighted with the results. I'm a wedding photog and was looking forward to seeing how it faired on a wedding. I was even deciding at one stage to keep using the old faithful mk1 for the majority of pictures then deciding to use the mk2 after i had taken the main shots. I needent have worried. The quality of the results are simply stunning as i always shoot raw then convert to Jpeg in Adobe but i had problems in downloading the upgrade from the Adobe site so i ended up using the software that accompanied the camera. The canon software supplied is superb and seems so much easier to use than Adobe. I haven't had chance to use the video mode on the camera yet but looking forward to it immensely. By Lord Lichfield UK | ||||||
| Best camera on the market! 09/06/2010 I am a Canon lover and this is the best Canon Pro Camera on the market in my opinion. It's a massive jump in quality from the Mark 1 and the addition of HD video opens up the possibility for multi-media jobs. It's lightweight compared to the 1d. You can't go wrong with this camera. By A. Dunn Belfast | ||||||
| The Catherine Deneuve of cameras 29/05/2010 I've had one of these since January. I upgraded from my original Canon 5D, and I get the impression that a lot of people have made the same transition. I was intrigued by the full-frame movie functionality and all the new features that became standard after the original 5D came out, such as Live View and a built-in sensor cleaning mode. I was also impressed with the graceful way that the original 5D has aged - it is very old in digital camera terms, but the image quality is still very good as of 2010 - and I expect the 5D MkII will grow old just as gracefully. Since buying the camera I have shot a few thousand images and lots of movie footage, and I have taken it on holiday to Barcelona, mounted it on my bicycle, and used a wide range of fast and wide and sharp manual focus lenses. I have no regrets. I don't have the time or resources to subject the 5D to a thorough technical evaluation. Plenty of websites already do that, with ISO comparisons and so forth. The reviews were uniformly positive. For a week I had access to both my original 5D and the sequel, and it was interesting to compare the two. Apart from a larger screen, some shifted buttons, and a more angular prism, the MkII is hard to quickly tell apart from the MkI. The MkII's shutter makes a clickier sound than the original 5D's hollow clack. The memory card door still feels a bit flimsy. I preferred the original 5D's on/off switch. It took me a short while to get used to the repositioned top panel buttons - they have all shifted one place to the left in order to make way for the backlight button - and I still haven't quite memorised the appropriate combination of button presses and dial twiddles to change settings without looking at the screen (each of the buttons has two functions, which you select and edit with the finger and thumb dials). The screen is of a higher resolution than the original although it was not the revelation I was expecting. It has a clever automatic brightness control that works well. The interface feels a little slower than the original 5D, no doubt because it is shifting much more data. When I zoom right into a RAW file, the camera takes a moment to sharpen up the preview image. There's a noticeable but slight delay when scrolling through images, and it takes a short while to write a burst to the card. The first 5D felt instant. Canon still has not fixed the oddness whereby the front dial changes the aperture in AV mode but the shutter speed in Manual mode, which is mighty irritating if you do a lot of flash photography and switch between AV and Manual frequently. The autofocus system appears to be the same as before. It has a diamond pattern of autofocus sensors that are clustered around the middle of the viewfinder. The corners are bare. I do a lot of portrait shooting, with the camera on its side, and I would have preferred a simple 3x3 grid of autofocus points, spaced evenly across the frame. If you use "rule of thirds" composition then the 5D's autofocus system isn't much use because there isn't an autofocus point in the right place. It has 5x and 10x magnified live view which is extremely useful for manual focus. As before, the stock focus screen isn't ideal; I have installed the EG-S "super precision" screen, which is slightly better although don't expect a miracle. In practice I find myself using Live View almost as much as the legacy optical viewfinder. As a stills camera it's essentially a 5D with twice the resolution and better light sensitivity. When using the original 5D I had no fear of ISO 400 but was wary of ISO 800 and ISO 1600, although I never felt that I was just wasting memory card space when I shot at ISO 1600. With the Mk II I have no fear of ISO 800 and not much fear of ISO 1600, and for that matter I have pushed shots at ISO 3200 with impressive results. When the images are sized down from 21mp for the internet the noise becomes even less apparent. The extra resolution is handy, although it's not going to transform your image-making and it certainly hasn't transformed mine. I haven't done any tests, but my instinct is that the 5D MkII's RAW files seem slightly softer than the original 5D's at 100% zoom, and I'm not just copying that opinion from Digital Photography Review. When sized down slightly, or sharpened, or sized down and sharpened, they are very crisp. I like to think of it as the crispest 12mp camera ever made. If it was just a stills camera it would be a bit silly. Unless you're a professional with a client who demands a certain file size, or you expect to do a lot of cropping - and if you are, you probably aren't reading this - twenty-one megapixels is absolutely ridiculous. It's overkill for most applications and, conversely, it's underspecified for high-end landscape and architectural and copying work. You'll be disappointed by the relatively sluggish file handling and enormous files that are four times the size of your screen and will take ages to upload to Facebook. BUT it's also a movie camera. Not a camcorder; think of it as a proper motion picture camera that you have to put on a tripod and think about. You have to plan ahead, focus manually, think about the storyboard. Clips are limited to twelve minutes maximum, which is a problem if you expect to leave the camera running and then edit later on. The 1080p high-def files are about 300mb per minute and require a fast computer to play, and some editing software throws a fit unless you have a beefy computer. The camera does not record 720p, which is a lower but still very high resolution and is easier to work with, and it doesn't record at 50fps; the 7D and most other digital SLRs including the 550D do this. The only other video option is a 640x480 VGA mode which is just silly, and I have not used it. I believe there's a legal reason why the clips are limited to twelve minutes, which might also explain why the 640x480 resolution exists. Something like 720x480 - DVD resolution - would have been more useful. I am only a hobbyist, and I don't have to use the 5D in a professional context. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with fisheye movies, defishing the frames with software; I've had fun making timelapse footage with VirtualDub; I've had fun filming bike rides, with the camera mounted on my handlebars with a Gorillapod; I've had fun filming things with my old Porst 55mm f/1.2 at f/1.2, which blurs out most of the frame except for a very narrow plane of focus. And if I do happen to take a wonderful picture with a sharp lens, picture libraries will not turn it down because the camera was inadequate (the sensor cleaning mode is handy in this respect, because it works well and saves time despotting dust, a major problem with the original 5D). It's gratifying to think that I have a kind of miniature Vistavision camera in my hand and that I could be Gordon Willis if I made an effort. If I was a film school student I would want to kiss the 5D MkII, except that I wouldn't be able to afford it. If I was a working professional I suspect a 7D or 550D would be a better choice, because they are slightly cheaper and more versatile, and the 7D has a tougher body. When the camera was new it was limited to automatic movie shooting at exactly thirty frames a second. Subsequent firmware updates have given the user manual control over aperture and shutter speed, a built-in audio level meter, and the frame rate is now (in the UK) selectable between 23.97 and 25fps. It will be interesting to see if Canon continue to update the camera's firmware to include 720p and 50fps. It's a positive thing that they have kept working on the camera, although it has the side-effect of making the manual obsolete. I have flipped through the manual once or twice. It seems sensible enough. The only thing I needed it for was a problem whereby an old flash unit didn't fire in Live View (you have to turn off the Silent Shooting option), but that's a pretty esoteric thing that almost nobody else will need to know. Still, the 5D has been a hit with indie filmmakers because it can produce a filmic, 70mm look on a much lower budget. If you have to shoot video interviews for the special features on a DVD, or make a short documentary about anything where you can set the camera up on a tripod and you don't have to move it too much, and you don't want to carry around a big professional camera rig, it's your camera, although again a 7D or 550D might be more sensible. A 550D would save you money for lenses. The 5D's video has two major limitations. The first is the "rolling shutter" effect, whereby if you pan the camera too quickly the picture seems to undulate. You don't have to pan the camera very fast for this to become apparent. Because of this, if you're shooting an action sequence with a hand-held street chase it's not the best option. The second limitation is that the movies are "finished" in the same way that JPEGs are finished, which is to say that there's no movie RAW mode. If the white balance is greatly wrong when you capture it you can't easily correct this after the fact. Video shooting uses the current Picture Style, and if your selected style has heavy sharpening, the video will have heavy sharpening, and you won't be able to get rid of it. As for the rest of the camera, it's nice to have the new things that became standard after the original 5D came out. Live View is useful for manual focus; the sensor cleaning mode is a godsend. There are however a lot of things that Canon could have added. There's no electronic spirit level, no built-in remote flash trigger, and no in-camera HDR or panorama stitching. None of these are essential features but I would not have minded them. The 7D has a couple of these already, and the built-in remote flash trigger would have been particularly useful. Nikon's cameras have had this option for some time. Is the 5D MkII worth the best part of two thousand pounds plus fifty pounds for a second battery and another fifty pounds for a couple of big memory cards? I have pondered this long and hard, and on a rational level I believe the answer was yes in 2008, no in 2010. The 5D's technical edge over the 550D is very slight, and for the same money you could buy a 550D and a very nice range of lenses. Furthermore the 5D's full-frame sensor complicates wide angle lens selection immensely; if you want to go wider than 24mm you will not find anything in Canon's inventory that is sharp to the corners. Nikon, Zeiss, and Leica sell some superb ultra wide lenses, some of which you can mount on the 5D, but Canon's forte is medium and long telephoto. The company has always had a blind spot at the wider end of the range. A 550D would give you access to the EF-S range, including the 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, which does not have a direct full-frame equivalent (at least not with image stabilisation). The 5D MkII's full-frame sensor does however make sense if you plan to use fast, wide angle primes such as the 24mm f/1.4 and 35mm f/1.4. And that is that. No, while I'm at it, the batteries. The MkII uses a new type of battery that has a chip in it, which tracks the power level, shot count, and recharge performance of each individual unit. These batteries are physically similar to the older BP-511 models and they last and last. At the time I originally wrote this review the batteries were only available from Canon, and were very expensive. There were some Hong Kong / China eBay clones, but they didn't have the chip and required their own special charger, which made foreign trips a bother, because you had to carry this special charger in addition to the Canon model. However, in the last couple of months fully-compatible chipped batteries have become widely available for about a quarter the price of the official model. Whether they are clones, or simply Canon models made for the Far Eastern market, I know not. I have a couple of these - in Canon boxes, almost identical to the battery that came with the camera - and they work fine, they haven't blown up the camera and if they do I will tell you. By Mr. A. Pomeroy Wiltshire, England | ||||||
