Thoughts after two weeks with the 5D Mark II
I love this camera. I don’t hear that much on the online forums and that speaks volumes to me about the state of high-end DSLRs. For several years, Canon would release new cameras that were not only leaps and bounds ahead of anything else you could buy, but were significant improvements over the models they replaced. Remember how amazing the original 5D was, coming soon after the 20D? It was like a camera taken from the future.
The 5D Mark II is a great camera. But Nikon leapt ahead of Canon in the high ISO department earlier this year with the D3 and D700. And Sony released the 24-megapixel A900 to beat Canon for the high-resolution crown.
So I think people, used to the way that Canon has set the bar for years, are disappointed that the 5D Mark II is merely as good as the competition.
And that’s just fine with me because all these cameras are capable of amazing image quality.
But I’m not going to write about the image quality–or at least not about the most-talked about aspect. Or at least not much.
Image quality
For me, this is an upgrade from the 20D. The 20D is still a good camera but it’s four years old and there are a few things that frustrated me about it: beyond ISO 800, colors wash out pretty quickly and I have discovered that I love color; the 1.6x crop factor is frustrating–I know I could just buy EF-S lenses to get wider angles but I also have primes and it’s been comfortable and satisfying to use them at the focal length for which they were intended; and the viewfinder and LCD screen on the 20D just don’t make it reasonable to focus manually.
The 5D Mark II solves all these problems and more. The two aspects of image quality that stand out the most to me are the wonderful quality of color even at absurd ISO settings and the dynamic range.
Consider this picture of Christmas lights that I took handheld at ISO 6400 the other night:
I could never get that kind of color from my 20D even at ISO 1600. A better example for me is a picture of Maya at high ISO but I doubt it would be as significant for you.
Then there’s the dynamic range: how much of a difference between the lightest and darkest parts of the picture that the camera can handle. This time of year in the Pacific Northwest, in the little slivers of time when the sun is up, the sky is usually overcast so I have learned to point the camera down and keep the sky out of the frame because, without a tripod and blending multiple exposures, I can’t take a picture that can show detail in both the sky and the foreground. And those shining white expanses of sky are just ugly.
But this isn’t a problem with the 5D Mark II. I didn’t expect such a difference but I have been able to extract enormous amounts of detail from the shadows and midtones while holding the highlights. It’s trivial with a bit of Fill Light in Lightroom to make pictures that look like terrible HDR. But it’s useful even in normal situations. Look at this picture of Dawn while we were walking Maya in the park:
There’s no way I could have kept the texture in her hat and maintained the tones throughout the rest of the picture with my 20D. I have more extreme examples like this one but it seems more artificial than art.
Physical impressions
I thought the viewfinder would be the first thing that stood out for me but it didn’t seem as big as I thought it would after the 20D. However, after spending some time with the 5D Mark II, the 20D’s viewfinder seems positively tiny.
The first thing I noticed, though, was the shutter: both the button and the sound. The 20D’s shutter button has a distinct detent when pressed halfway (for setting focus and/or exposure) and when pressed completely. The 5D Mark II’s shutter doesn’t have that detent and it feels spongy. But I haven’t had a bit of trouble with using it and when I try the 20D now it feels flimsy.
The LCD screen is magnificent with its 640×480 resolution. I finally have a camera with an RGB histogram (and the camera can show both the RGB and the luminance histogram simultaneously). The resolution is easily high enough to either judge focus from a shot in playback mode or, in Live View mode, to focus manually. The 5x and 10x zoom help even more here. In some experiments (not online yet) with the Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens and the building in our Christmas village, the control I have over focus placement–and the quality of that focus even in the dim light cast by the decorative miniature buildings–is amazing.
By the scale, the 5D Mark II is heavier than my 20D but the difference is more than offset by the choice of lens. I find the 5D Mark II no harder to carry around than the 20D and it feels like a more rugged camera. The grip is a bit deeper, with a molded bit to go between the index and middle finger and it fits nicely in my hands. My hands aren’t quite big enough to palm a basketball one-handed but I can easily reach a tenth on the piano. So maybe that helps with the size of the camera.
I haven’t said anything yet about the movie mode. And it’s because I’m not sure what to say about it yet. I have tried it. And I can sense the power it offers. But video on the 5D Mark II is not like using a consumer camcorder. But then the results are not like those from a consumer camcorder either. So I have to experiment a lot more before I have anything useful to say about it.
Effects on my photography
The biggest thing this camera has done, though, is open my eyes to pictures I would never have considered before and it’s a change I just wasn’t expecting, no matter how much I dreamed about this camera. It doesn’t matter that it’s pitch dark outside. It’s such a novelty that I haven’t made anything worthwhile yet but it’s a wonderful experience especially, again, at this time of year. It’s dark when I wake up and dark when before I leave work. So before there were very few times when I could take pictures outside. But now I am able to do things like this, or this, or this, or this.
My apologies that this was so rambling but I have been putting off writing it and enough people are asking what I think that I figured it is better to put something out than to do nothing at all.
More later.
Good stuff Tommy. The quality of pictures you’ve posted is really impressive. Sometimes I’d think there were postprocessed, but I assume they were not.
Speaking about colors at night – just a few days ago I was trying to take a picture of Macy’s neon with the red shining star, at night, but it was so dissapointing to see the results – the star was not red at all, no matter what ISO I used… I guess it would look different with 5D Mk II :)
Thanks, Mirek. All my shots are post-processed to some extent since I shoot raw rather than JPEG. But whatever I do is pretty minor since I have gotten spoiled and don’t like to leave Lightroom.
Your problem with the neon at night is the exposure, and it’s a hard one. Neon light is bright and you have to dial down the exposure far lower than the camera’s meter will usually register. The Digital Rebel XSi has a spot-metering exposure evaluation mode. Try switching to that mode and metering off the neon. Everything else will go pitch black but you should be able to get the right exposure for the neon.
You have some nice photos in your Flickr stream, too. Thanks for commenting and posting the link.
HA! I knew they are too good to be true ;) But seriously – they’re still impressive. Postprocessing can help to some extent but won’t help too much with the dynamic range. BTW I’ve never tried playing with RAW, I have to check this out and see how much can I get from my XSi.
Neon – I actually did try the low exposure too, but as you said everything else was black. So the key is – low exposure to get good color and not overexposed neon and a high ISO to get details in the dark areas of the picture. XSi’s maximum ISO is 1600 which I thought was a lot when I switched from my compact camera but I’ve already noticed that sometimes it’s not enough.
Another way would be not-your-favourite HDR :) (what gives sometimes nice effects if it’s not overused).
Thanks for good words about my photos. Have you already abandoned your Flickr in favour of SmugMug, or you haven’t decided what to use yet?
BTW What Lightroom features do you like the most? I’ve tried the trial version and didn’t find it that useful, but maybe it’s just because I didn’t try hard enough or because I don’t shoot RAW (yet).
About Flickr vs. SmugMug: I’m not sure yet. I signed up for SmugMug so that I would have a place to host HD versions of video from the 5D MkII and decided that I would experiment with posting pictures there. I have always been frustrated that the photostream is so central at Flickr and that there’s no way to hide it or even de-emphasize it. But then Flickr has much better contact management than SmugMug and an easier way to direct people to subsets of pictures–it’s hard once a gallery has been collecting pictures for a while to tell someone to just go look at the last three or whatever.
On Lightroom: it’s not that useful if you don’t shoot RAW: even though it can adjust JPEG images as well, it’s just not worth the effort. But Lightroom wants to be your digital asset management tool as well. I spent some time trying to fight against that and stick with IView Media Pro (now Microsoft Expression Media) but it was just too much effort for not enough gain. Now that I have given in and use Lightroom as my DAM, I don’t have to leave the environment to do most things. It imports from my camera card, I apply metadata, adjust things like exposure, white balance, etc., and even post to SmugMug (or Flickr) from within Lightroom using plug-ins developed by Jeffrey Friedl.
Tommy, between you and my friend Frank, you guys are pushing me over the edge on this camera based on the high ISO alone. Good reading your impressions.
Billie: one other thing that has surprised me is the value of Live View and that gorgeous 640×480 LCD screen on the back. I don’t know if you use a tripod much but shooting of a tripod is a joy (and normally I hate it) with Live View. You get mirror lockup included as part of the deal, you can get the focus exactly the way you want it, you can see the histogram *before* you take the shot (at least the luminance histogram), and, as I discovered, you can even see if it’s too windy to take the shot because you can zoom in to 10x and see how much wobble is happening. I had no idea the wind would move my tripod so much.
I don’t think you’re going to see much difference in the color depth or dynamic range compared to your 5D but the differences there compared to my 20D are stunning. I just didn’t know what I was missing or I would have bought a 5D a long time ago–and then would have had to pass on the 5D MkII for a while. :)