I’ve seen a lot of debate about the canon 5D versus the 5D mark II recently on the net. It’s easy to find the stats and the lab tests, most favour the 5D mark II in terms of performance, but say that with the big price difference unless you are using it for work, you can’t really justify the expense that the newer 5D mark II carries. In a nutshell, I think this sums it up. I use both cameras for work, so I know a bit about them both, so I’ll put in my two pennies worth on the debate and why I favour the 5D mark II over it’s predecessor and I will leave out most of the jargon. To be honest, I don’t know what most of the stuff means. I learned to shoot with film, I know how photographs work and I apply the same principles to digital photography and I am learning more about the technical aspects as I go along.
I started using the 5D about 18 months ago. It was my first full frame DSLR and I reaped the benefits immediately, especially on the wide shots. It’s a 12 megapixel camera, that’s more than enough for jobs I do for The Japan Times and is more than adequate for the photos I have to send to Lonely Planet. It was canon’s lightest full frame DSLR, so it is easy to carry about when I am out on jobs, I also bought a battery grip for it to make it a bit more practical for work. It shoots iso 100-1600 which I find to be fine. The back screen is pretty small, but I don’t look at images so much during a shoot, so it doesn’t make that big a difference for me. To get to the landscape, portrait shooting functions you have to go through the menu button on the back which is a bit of a pain, you have to scroll through it for everything actually which isn’t so good when you are in a hurry. The biggest drawback I find from it though, is the fact that when you are changing lenses a lot during work (especially when traveling in foreign climes) you do get some dust spots. No problem when it’s just pics for yourself, but when you have to send them off to an agency you have to spend a lot of time during your edit removing dust spots. Going through 500 shots and taking each dust spot out (sometimes between 5 and 10 on a shot) can be a right royal pain in the bum. I have to say though, the nice people at the canon shop in Shinjuku did clean it for me for free a few times (although I have heard they started charging for the service now….maybe designed to make us all go out and buy new models with sensor cleaners). Also, when you are shooting rapidly, the sensor was a bit slow so after maybe 15 shots in rapid succession I wouldn’t be able to take shots until it was all saved to my card which was a bit of a pain when I was shooting fashion week in Tokyo this Spring. Other than that, it never gave me any problems in terms of writing data to cards.
Then, canon released the 5D mark II and it took away most of the gripes you really could have had about it’s predecessor. Most importantly for me, there is an inbuilt sensor cleaner which makes my editing life much easier. The iso goes from 50 to something ridiculous like 24000. I would never use that, I think I have shot on 3200 iso a couple of times, but it still is a little bit noisy for my liking, so hopefully that is something canon will rectify in the future. Importantly though, you can set the iso to automatic which I find to be great during the day when you are moving in and out of very bright and then dimly lit areas. Makes for a much better exposure and you don’t have to mess about with it. At night though, if you don’t set the iso manually it usually defaults to a high iso like 3200 which makes for noisy shots. Another big plus for me is the fact that on the back panel there is a button dedicated to shooting mode, so you can flip between modes a lot quicker. In terms of frames per second, it’s not a lot faster, you get almost an extra frame per second with the 5D mk II, but importantly the new sensor (digic 4) is a lot faster and writes the data more quickly. I do find the colour processing of the 5D mark II to be a bit sharper as well, so all round I get much better images. It’s a whopping 21 megapixel camera, the images are huge, it does help me for images I send to Lonely Planet as they sell on to customers who may require large prints for posters and the likes, but unless you are doing this, you don’t need the whole 21 megapix. I always shoot on RAW as it makes editing easier, the new 5D mkII does have 3 different RAW modes which gives different size images (21 megapix, 10 megapix and 4 megapix). I used the 10 megapix seting once and it was a disaster. I shot a wedding and the pics came out all bent and looking stretched in aperture (the mac software I use to edit with) but I managed to deal with them using the canon software, but had to convert them all to jpeg). Additionally, the HD video function of the 5D mark II (not available on the 5D)
really is cool. I use L series lenses which makes the videos really sharp, I do hear though that with the regular lenses it’s not quite as good.
All in all, the 5D mark II is a much better camera than the 5D. It has to be, otherwise it wouldn’t sell. It is expensive, but you get what you pay for. For a pro who uses it for work, the mark II is a must, for someone who wants to advance their skills and start to get some more photo work, the 5D is more than enough. If however you are loaded, just skip all this and buy the 1D mark III. If I was earning enough I certainly would, but that’s another story.