Robthebrit
Explorer
I posted the other day the wife got me the new 5Dmkii but I hadn't had chance to use it, well at the weekend I got to play with it a little...
The body feels great and its very sturdy, the weather sealing is much better than the original 5D. The button layout is pretty much the same as the original 5D which is pretty much the same as all other Canon cameras, there are a few tiny differences. The LCD is huge and very bright, the picture quality is amazing. The view finder has 98% coverage and is also really bright.
The menus are really nice to use and the quick select screen shows the same info as the LCD but everything can be quickly changed with the little thumb-stick. For the things that I change often like exposure compensation or F stop I can do much quicker from the standard controls. However things like the the drive mode or focus mode can be set much quicker from the LCD menu, as on the older camera these items can be changed from the standard controls but it takes a few button presses.
The has a number of obvious features that were missing from the original 5D, A 2 second/10 second timer for example. The RC1 IR remote that works with pretty much every camera from the Digitial Rebel upwards now works with the mkii. The batteries are different from the original 5D, the 5D took BP-511 while the mkii takes an LC-E6. The batteries are almost identical in size but the new E6 battery has more capacity, the batteries are so close in size that if you have cameras that use both batteries you'll need to be careful, you could probably jam the wrong battery in the wrong camera. The down side to a new battery type is the investment in a good collection of batteries needs to be made again. Also along with the new battery type comes a new hand grip which is not cheap but is fully weather sealed and is made from magnesium like the camera body.
The camera has much better battery management. All the batteries all have a unique serial number and you can register multiple batteries with the camera and the camera will record their charge state. This is great when you are in the field as you can look at the list and know which batteries are charged and which aren't. The camera also gives lots of stats for the battery, how many shots it has taken, a very accurate discharge level and its recharge performance. If you have the handgrip the stats are given separately for each of the two batteries in the grip. As for battery life I took about 150 pictures with a single battery (no grip) and the camera is still indicating 91% charged.
The picture quality is insane, it seems to defy the laws of physics, although on the other hand 21mp, while great from big prints or tight crops, makes huge files and requires a beefy computer to handle them. The RAW files at full resolution are about 25-35Mb each, I have 50 pictures in 1.5gb. The RAW format is still CR2 but you will need the latest version of Adobe raw or Lightroom 2.2 to read them (don't have Aperture so I don't know anything about it). All the shooting modes including green square can now be set to RAW, on the old 5D the auto modes only shot jpeg. There shooting mode dial now has c1,c2,c3 which can be programed any way you like - I use them as aperture priority with different iso settings.
The camera RAW images are 14bits per channel (16384 levels) which is insane for grabbing details from shadows but remember jpeg can't handle this level so passing around high quality photos gets tricky. The problem gets compounded because all the modern flat panel monitors can handle 10 or 11 bits per channel (1024-2048 levels) and OSX and Windows Vista can both drive monitor at that channel resolution. So while the monitor cannot display the true color resolution of the images its a lot better than the old 8 bit monitors and a lot better than jpeg (both are 256 levels). While using lightroom you get an image which looks great on screen and then you save it as a jpeg and there is a lot of detail lost and more color banding than expected. Obviously jpeg is no worse or better than it ever was its just the new high bit depth cameras start to show its limits, ultimately the jpegs are never going to look as good as the raw images. If you want to pass adjusted full quality to somebody else you either need to use DNG, 16 bit TIFF or 16bit PSD.
It seems Canon have finally fixed the automatic exposure, I used to always shoot the 5D under exposed by 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop. The Mkii seems to get the exposure bang on with no manual adjustment. Just letting the camera do its thing results is fewer clipped pixels but this is probably equally related to be high bit depth of the images as much as it is related to the camera picking a better exposure.
The shooting speed is fine for me but it has some custom settings to do noise reduction at high iso settings and long exposure. These seriously slow the shooting speed down, the long exposure noise reduction can take as long as the exposure but the results are outstanding. From what I can figure out the camera measures the noise on the sensor by effectively taking a picture with the shutter closed for the same exposure time as the real shot - anything the camera picks up must be noise. This noise image is then used to correct the real image. Like I said the results are outstanding. The high iso noise reduction is not quite as slow but it will decrease your shooting speed to about 1.5-2 shots per second.
The iso range is insane, the normal range is 100-6400 with L (64) and H1 (12800) and H2 (25600). The pictures at iso 6400 are perfectly usable, at H2 there is about as much noise as the original 5D at 6400. If you take full sized images, enable the custom setting for high iso noise reduction, do some noise filtering in Lightroom or Photoshop and shrink the output image to something like 2048 then the iso 25600 setting is perfectly usable. At this setting at F2.8 you can take hand held pictures of the stars!
The Live View mode is something I am not too keen on, the whole system really doesn't work on an SLR camera but I can see how it would allow you to get the shot where you can't possibly see through the view finder. On the 5DMkii you push the live view button to start and stop live view (this is the same button as the direct print button), when you enter live view you hear the mirror flip up. While in the mode you can press a new button called AF to focus the image. Focusing in done in two different ways. The first mode uses the traditional AF sensor and while this mode is really quick there is a problem, the traditional AF sensor is behind the mirror as its typically used when you are looking through the viewfinder and push the shutter button half way. At this point the mirror is normally down but in live view the mirror is up! When using the AF sensor in live view mode when you push the AF button the mirror flips down and flips up again while its takes a focus reading. If the focus is quick this may only be 0.2 seconds but if the lens starts to search for the focus the mirror can be down for a while and during the time the mirror is down there is no image on the screen. Live view as another mode for focusing which you can set from the menu and this works by processing the image from the sensor in much the same way as a digital point and shoot does. This mode seems to work equally well but is a little slower, probably because it has to process a huge amount of data. Some people will love live view, some won't. I'll take it or leave it at the moment, I'll report more when I have used it more but it just feels awkward.
The camera will take movies at 1920x1080, progessive, 30fps (full HD). I don't have a SD card that can write data fast enough so I experimented with movies at 640x480. I personally am not that good at taking movies and people who are good will use it a lot more than I will. When recording a movie the focusing is done with the mirror up and you can push the AF button at anytime to force it to refocus. If you want to mess with zooming while recording then you really need a tripod. When in movie mode lots of the exposure settings are fixed when you start shooting and do not automatically adjust. This is fine for somebody who just takes movies because they can and use it to shoot their kids but I don't think there is enough control for somebody to use this camera for real video work. After saying that, if you can find a way to use the camera then results are outstanding and you get to use any SLR lens in your kit bag.
One cool thing about the AF button is you can set the lens to manual focus and then push the AF button and it will focus once which typically gets you in the right ballpark (This only works with some lenses).
The mkii has the electronic sensor cleaning but the camera is brand new so the sensor is clean. I'll have to report back as to how the cleaning and the better weather/dust sealing work. The sensor on the original 5D was a real dust hog so the bar isn't set very high. The camera also has an digital spot removal system. You take a picture of a white piece of paper at f22 and the camera look for specs and makes 'dust delete data'. This data is then used to digitally remove specs from future images. I have disable this as I want to see how the cleaning and sealing systems hold up.
I haven't used the camera with the flash attached so I cannot comment on how it works. It seems to have the same controls and adjustments as the 5D and I assume it works the same or better.
Some people have reported black pixels or patterns in the noise at high iso settings. I don't seem to have either of those problems but camera came with firmware version 1.0.7, most of the reports of problems were with earlier firmware so maybe that problem is fixed.
Thats pretty much it for now.
Rob
The body feels great and its very sturdy, the weather sealing is much better than the original 5D. The button layout is pretty much the same as the original 5D which is pretty much the same as all other Canon cameras, there are a few tiny differences. The LCD is huge and very bright, the picture quality is amazing. The view finder has 98% coverage and is also really bright.
The menus are really nice to use and the quick select screen shows the same info as the LCD but everything can be quickly changed with the little thumb-stick. For the things that I change often like exposure compensation or F stop I can do much quicker from the standard controls. However things like the the drive mode or focus mode can be set much quicker from the LCD menu, as on the older camera these items can be changed from the standard controls but it takes a few button presses.
The has a number of obvious features that were missing from the original 5D, A 2 second/10 second timer for example. The RC1 IR remote that works with pretty much every camera from the Digitial Rebel upwards now works with the mkii. The batteries are different from the original 5D, the 5D took BP-511 while the mkii takes an LC-E6. The batteries are almost identical in size but the new E6 battery has more capacity, the batteries are so close in size that if you have cameras that use both batteries you'll need to be careful, you could probably jam the wrong battery in the wrong camera. The down side to a new battery type is the investment in a good collection of batteries needs to be made again. Also along with the new battery type comes a new hand grip which is not cheap but is fully weather sealed and is made from magnesium like the camera body.
The camera has much better battery management. All the batteries all have a unique serial number and you can register multiple batteries with the camera and the camera will record their charge state. This is great when you are in the field as you can look at the list and know which batteries are charged and which aren't. The camera also gives lots of stats for the battery, how many shots it has taken, a very accurate discharge level and its recharge performance. If you have the handgrip the stats are given separately for each of the two batteries in the grip. As for battery life I took about 150 pictures with a single battery (no grip) and the camera is still indicating 91% charged.
The picture quality is insane, it seems to defy the laws of physics, although on the other hand 21mp, while great from big prints or tight crops, makes huge files and requires a beefy computer to handle them. The RAW files at full resolution are about 25-35Mb each, I have 50 pictures in 1.5gb. The RAW format is still CR2 but you will need the latest version of Adobe raw or Lightroom 2.2 to read them (don't have Aperture so I don't know anything about it). All the shooting modes including green square can now be set to RAW, on the old 5D the auto modes only shot jpeg. There shooting mode dial now has c1,c2,c3 which can be programed any way you like - I use them as aperture priority with different iso settings.
The camera RAW images are 14bits per channel (16384 levels) which is insane for grabbing details from shadows but remember jpeg can't handle this level so passing around high quality photos gets tricky. The problem gets compounded because all the modern flat panel monitors can handle 10 or 11 bits per channel (1024-2048 levels) and OSX and Windows Vista can both drive monitor at that channel resolution. So while the monitor cannot display the true color resolution of the images its a lot better than the old 8 bit monitors and a lot better than jpeg (both are 256 levels). While using lightroom you get an image which looks great on screen and then you save it as a jpeg and there is a lot of detail lost and more color banding than expected. Obviously jpeg is no worse or better than it ever was its just the new high bit depth cameras start to show its limits, ultimately the jpegs are never going to look as good as the raw images. If you want to pass adjusted full quality to somebody else you either need to use DNG, 16 bit TIFF or 16bit PSD.
It seems Canon have finally fixed the automatic exposure, I used to always shoot the 5D under exposed by 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop. The Mkii seems to get the exposure bang on with no manual adjustment. Just letting the camera do its thing results is fewer clipped pixels but this is probably equally related to be high bit depth of the images as much as it is related to the camera picking a better exposure.
The shooting speed is fine for me but it has some custom settings to do noise reduction at high iso settings and long exposure. These seriously slow the shooting speed down, the long exposure noise reduction can take as long as the exposure but the results are outstanding. From what I can figure out the camera measures the noise on the sensor by effectively taking a picture with the shutter closed for the same exposure time as the real shot - anything the camera picks up must be noise. This noise image is then used to correct the real image. Like I said the results are outstanding. The high iso noise reduction is not quite as slow but it will decrease your shooting speed to about 1.5-2 shots per second.
The iso range is insane, the normal range is 100-6400 with L (64) and H1 (12800) and H2 (25600). The pictures at iso 6400 are perfectly usable, at H2 there is about as much noise as the original 5D at 6400. If you take full sized images, enable the custom setting for high iso noise reduction, do some noise filtering in Lightroom or Photoshop and shrink the output image to something like 2048 then the iso 25600 setting is perfectly usable. At this setting at F2.8 you can take hand held pictures of the stars!
The Live View mode is something I am not too keen on, the whole system really doesn't work on an SLR camera but I can see how it would allow you to get the shot where you can't possibly see through the view finder. On the 5DMkii you push the live view button to start and stop live view (this is the same button as the direct print button), when you enter live view you hear the mirror flip up. While in the mode you can press a new button called AF to focus the image. Focusing in done in two different ways. The first mode uses the traditional AF sensor and while this mode is really quick there is a problem, the traditional AF sensor is behind the mirror as its typically used when you are looking through the viewfinder and push the shutter button half way. At this point the mirror is normally down but in live view the mirror is up! When using the AF sensor in live view mode when you push the AF button the mirror flips down and flips up again while its takes a focus reading. If the focus is quick this may only be 0.2 seconds but if the lens starts to search for the focus the mirror can be down for a while and during the time the mirror is down there is no image on the screen. Live view as another mode for focusing which you can set from the menu and this works by processing the image from the sensor in much the same way as a digital point and shoot does. This mode seems to work equally well but is a little slower, probably because it has to process a huge amount of data. Some people will love live view, some won't. I'll take it or leave it at the moment, I'll report more when I have used it more but it just feels awkward.
The camera will take movies at 1920x1080, progessive, 30fps (full HD). I don't have a SD card that can write data fast enough so I experimented with movies at 640x480. I personally am not that good at taking movies and people who are good will use it a lot more than I will. When recording a movie the focusing is done with the mirror up and you can push the AF button at anytime to force it to refocus. If you want to mess with zooming while recording then you really need a tripod. When in movie mode lots of the exposure settings are fixed when you start shooting and do not automatically adjust. This is fine for somebody who just takes movies because they can and use it to shoot their kids but I don't think there is enough control for somebody to use this camera for real video work. After saying that, if you can find a way to use the camera then results are outstanding and you get to use any SLR lens in your kit bag.
One cool thing about the AF button is you can set the lens to manual focus and then push the AF button and it will focus once which typically gets you in the right ballpark (This only works with some lenses).
The mkii has the electronic sensor cleaning but the camera is brand new so the sensor is clean. I'll have to report back as to how the cleaning and the better weather/dust sealing work. The sensor on the original 5D was a real dust hog so the bar isn't set very high. The camera also has an digital spot removal system. You take a picture of a white piece of paper at f22 and the camera look for specs and makes 'dust delete data'. This data is then used to digitally remove specs from future images. I have disable this as I want to see how the cleaning and sealing systems hold up.
I haven't used the camera with the flash attached so I cannot comment on how it works. It seems to have the same controls and adjustments as the 5D and I assume it works the same or better.
Some people have reported black pixels or patterns in the noise at high iso settings. I don't seem to have either of those problems but camera came with firmware version 1.0.7, most of the reports of problems were with earlier firmware so maybe that problem is fixed.
Thats pretty much it for now.
Rob
