Canon 5D MkII
I am not the primary digital shooter. I like film, I really like it, even thought it is troublesome in this digital age. But I was not always a film shooter. I didn’t even really start photography until I got a digital camera. I never owned a film camera when I was young. But since I started shooting film my main problem with digital was, that it looked, well, digital. Especially the colors never came out like I wanted them to.
Then I got the Epson R-D1s and this was the first camera where I had the feeling it didn’t look too much digital. But it is not the camera I would use at parties, or other situation where you need to quickly focus in dark light and shot tons of stuff.
So I always used my 30D, tried to make the colors as nice as possible and suppress the not so nice digital noise.
And then Canon announced and released the 5D MkII. A lot of my friends got one, the shot looked awesome and I wanted one too, but still I couldn’t convince myself of paying so much money for something I might only use for some party shots here and there.
But one day I was shooting with a friend who used a 5D MkII some party for a friend of mine and we later compared shots and his looked so much better in color and noise that there was no reason left not to buy the 5D MkII.
No regrets whatsoever. This is, hands down, the best digital camera I owned up to now. Besides the fact that full frame 35mm versus APS-C sized sensor, the quality enhanced that where done since the 30D are just amazing. I have never seen so good colors directly out of the camera and so much possibilities to make my photos look like the slide film colors I am used to.
Especially at night or when shooting in dark places the 5D MkII outshines my old 30D. Where the 30D maxed out at ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 was just an emergency with really ugly files, the 5D MkII created unbelievable beautiful colorful wonderful pictures at ISO 3200.
But with all the praise there are also some downsides. For one, the on/off button is still at the most stupid location ever thought off. At least it feels more stiff, but several times in my short ownership it turned itself off because the button is located at this horrible place.
There are still no buttons that can be free assigned with settings, like, mirror lockup. At least there is a quick menu where I can directly jump to the settings part, I do not need mirror lockup that often, still I wished I could do that with one button press (like on all my pro SLR cameras).
The movie part seems a bit an add on, but probably I need to get used to that. I have never shot any movie and I still have no idea what I could shoot. Shooting one frame or a video is something very very different.
But my biggest grief is that the autofocus system is unchanged and still very low class for such a high end camera. I know that Canon wants to keep the 1D line with their super AF system separated, but look at Nikon, they have a much better AF in their middle class line. Canon 7D has a better newer AF system. There was no way to do that in the 5D MkII? I somehow cannot believe that. In dark bad lit areas the AF can hunt. If everything else is really awesome, this is one thing that kind of bothers me a bit. I can live with it, but I know how different the AF on 1D bodies is. At least something better than the normal 50D series would have been nice.
So what is my verdict? An almost perfect camera. Picture quality alone is so stunning, that you can overlook the small problems like the bad placement of the on/off switch or the already senile AF system. The best proof for how nice this camera is the fact that I haven’t shot with almost any other camera since I own this one. Yeah, it is that good, makes me think about the film stuff. But that is until I hold some nice 6x6 or 6x9 slides in my hand and I still know why I love film.
