Prepare for dumb 5DmkII questions...

RobertP

RobertP

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Robert
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Couldn't resist any longer

Bought from the worlds slowest website - http://www.wilkinson.co.uk/store/product.php?productid=18232&cat=265&page=2

So first question that I could answer by searching..... what's the deal with spare batteries? Are there any 3rd party ones that are fully compatible and use the same charger + display correctly?
And assuming not - Amazon the best offer for canon ones at the moment?

Second question... how bad is the on board mic for video? Guessing I need something that will clip into the hotshoe for decent sound.

More to follow no doubt when it turns up. Hope delivery is quicker than the website!
 
Woooo! Join the club. I bought a 3rd party battery grip (£40 I think) from the bay- then I can use 3rd party batteries without any melting etc.
 
The 5D2 shares the LP-E6 with the 7D. It's a chipped battery and there aren't chipped clones available yet. Malla's got a thread running today where someone quotes Kerso as the cheapest at £50.

Bob
 
Hi Robert,

Congrats on your 5D-II purchase - that's a good deal with the flash too!

Not sure about 3rd party batteries. I've got the grip and a second Canon battery... having said that, battery life from just one battery is incredible... you'll easily get a day's shooting from it.

The onboard mic isn't that bad actually, although it only records mono. It is sensitive enough to pick up most sounds from every direction, but beware to turn off the IS on any lenses as it will pick up the IS gyro sound.

Quick YouTube vid to demonstrate the mic... nothing special, just from a daytrip... you can hear my daughter chipping in :lol:

[YOUTUBE]ZFhx660tiOE[/YOUTUBE]
 
I hate battery grips so that is not an option.

No major outings planned for a while so I can watch Amazon for price changes for a few weeks without lack of spare battery being a problem.

Thanks.
 
Congrats - a fine choice :)

I went for a genuine Canon spare battery but have never used it.
I've only managed to flatten the battery in a weekend's photography twice (both before I got the spare). Both times were attributable to playing with stupid long exposures combined with heavy live view usage during dawn to dusk landscape workshops.
In normal landscape photography a charge will easily last approx 20Gb of RAW files, approx 600 RAW images with one bar still left on the battery indicator.
The spare battery is really only there for peace of mind :)

The built in mic isn't as bad as you think it's going to be. It's fine for 'I was there' video clips. It does pick up the lens IS rumble and whirr, but you can turn off the IS.
 
MC_Stoo said:
Hi Robert,


The onboard mic isn't that bad actually, although it only records mono. It is sensitive enough to pick up most sounds from every direction, but beware to turn off the IS on any lenses as it will pick up the IS gyro sound.

Quick YouTube vid to demonstrate the mic... nothing special, just from a daytrip... you can hear my daughter chipping in :lol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFhx660tiOE
Click to expand...

That was helpful thanks :)
 
Hi Robert,

Got my 5D Mark II before Christmas and I am completely blown away with the pictures I am getting. Same as you I was looking for a spare compatible battery and ended up getting original Canon one from Amazon.

First extra I bought was a Speedlite 580EX II flash, although the pictures you can take without flash at high ISO are very good.

Hope you enjoy your new toy when you get it, and look forward to hearing from you and seeing your pic's in the Forum's.

Regards: Dottyross.
 
Thought the raws were around the 20 to 30Mb mark?

The 5D raws range from 9 to 18 depending on the scene.
 
Thanks. the 34.5 meg ones must be pictures of grass and trees in leaf :)

Seems to be what makes huge files on the 5D in any case.

Excuse for buying the camera was our planned 6 week+ trip to Australia at the end of the year. Beginning to wonder if the netbook and a 500gb portable drive for backup will be enough storage.
 
Tee Hee :D
Your point is valid - but......

I will confess that since getting my 5DII 13 months ago I've been doing a lot of navel gazing about image quality.
I wasn't initially blown away by the image quality and investigation highlighted both an out of spec 24-105 (it was tolerable on cropped sensor but was awful on the 5DII) and poor technique from me.
Since then I've learnt an awful lot - diffraction, lens sweet spots, auto-focus limitations, using tripods properly, etc, etc - all backed up by getting additional 'L' series glass and a better tripod.

So I'd like to think I'm getting the IQ to justify those big files; but then again it's almost certainly true that I've turned into an anally retentive pixel peeping camera geek in the process :lol:
e.g. My review of CarolineS's Sigma 15-30 recently bought via TP
 
I spent some time rationalising the purchase decision ever since someone posted that the offer was there. In the end i decided that being new and shiny and that i wanted it was reason enough :)

My 24-105 is great on the mk1 so I'm expecting the same on the mk2.
 
Contrary to the above - on my recent trip to Tokyo, I managed to empty 2 genuine Canon batteries within the space of one day. This was mainly shooting through viewfinder with a couple of short video clips, that I want to montage later. Memory gets eaten like there's no tomorrow. On my old 40 and 50's I could use 2gb cards quite happily, and 4gb gave me enough extra to play with.

With the 5d2 though I think if you don't want to be changing cards all the time you should try and stick with 8 or above. I bought a 32gb when I went overseas, and it didn't last long at all :) As for the microphone - I bought a hotshoe mounted Hama for £30 online - it seems pretty good, although the hot shoe mount isn't great. There are many more expensive mic's but it'll do what I want :) If you are going to use it on a trip - make sure you have sufficient battery and memory capability - and of course take your charger. I'm glad I did - I was charging two batteries nightly for a week.
 
RobertP said:
Thanks. the 34.5 meg ones must be pictures of grass and trees in leaf :)
Click to expand...
Spot on :thumbs:

RobertP said:
My 24-105 is great on the mk1 so I'm expecting the same on the mk2.
Click to expand...

The MkII will be a little taxing around the edges for it when used at the wide end.....quality drops off very quickly once you leave the region normally filled by a crop sensor. The long end fares much better.

Bob
 
Well done Robert. It's all too easy to stress about spending these amounts of money on camera gear but as my dear old gran used to say, "There are no pockets in shrouds"

So go and enjoy every minute of it :)
 
Re: spare battery....

On one of the first trips I did with mine recently I opened the bag to find the camera left on and the battery fully discharged. Was I glad I had a fully charged spare......

Bought mine from Jessops and at the time they were doing a good price for a spare battery when bought with the camera.

They also recommended a Hahnel Unipal charger which can be adjusted to fit any battery. A good idea in practice but whether it will prove to be up to a long period of use, I don't know. The first one had a minor fault which made it useless.

Re: file sizes....so big that my 4 year old laptop can barely process them. Lightroom takes forever and seems to crash regularly. Fortunately I have a new pc almost ready to take over processing duties!
 
Canon Bob said:
The MkII will be a little taxing around the edges for it when used at the wide end.....quality drops off very quickly once you leave the region normally filled by a crop sensor. The long end fares much better.
Click to expand...
I also assumed full-frame to full-frame is going to be very similar quality wise, just a lot more pixels from the 5DII. What am I missing?

My recalibrated 24-105 is very sharp wide open at 24mm; pixel peeping shows the edges are very nearly as sharp as the centre; i.e. stonkingly good.
The other copies I tested were much softer at the edges and softer in the middle, but still plenty good enough for printing landscapes to A3.
I'm dead chuffed with mine and it certainly shows what recalibration is capable of.
Vignetting and CA were unchanged by the recalibration.

However, on my copy 105mm is the weakest focal length - pixel peeping shows it isn't as sharp as 24mm and it's the whole frame, not just the edges.
SRLGear test results also show a slight softening towards the long end of the lens.

Pixel peepers of the world unite :thumbs:
 
BouncyMelons said:
Well done Robert.

"There are no pockets in shrouds"
Click to expand...

:lol:

I do feel old sometimes but not quite that old :)

There was a little of that sentiment involved too though.






It's been over 2 hours now and still no despatch email :(

:)
 
DuncanDisorderly said:
I also assumed full-frame to full-frame is going to be very similar quality wise, just a lot more pixels from the 5DII. What am I missing?
Click to expand...

The original 5D has a relatively low pixel density which the lens is more than capable of providing detail right across the sensor. As the pixel density increases then the improved resolution in the centre of the image is not followed by the edges. It's not the that edges are worse on the MkII, just that they cease to be as good as the centre.

Bob
 
RobertP said:
:lol:

I do feel old sometimes but not quite that old :)

There was a little of that sentiment involved too though.






It's been over 2 hours now and still no despatch email :(

:)
Click to expand...

Well having been widowed at 40 you don't have to be that old unfortunately Robert. It's a life lesson well learned so please do go and enjoy it :thumbs:
 
DuncanDisorderly said:
I also assumed full-frame to full-frame is going to be very similar quality wise, just a lot more pixels from the 5DII. What am I missing?

My recalibrated 24-105 is very sharp wide open at 24mm; pixel peeping shows the edges are very nearly as sharp as the centre; i.e. stonkingly good.
The other copies I tested were much softer at the edges and softer in the middle, but still plenty good enough for printing landscapes to A3.
I'm dead chuffed with mine and it certainly shows what recalibration is capable of.
Vignetting and CA were unchanged by the recalibration.

However, on my copy 105mm is the weakest focal length - pixel peeping shows it isn't as sharp as 24mm and it's the whole frame, not just the edges.
SRLGear test results also show a slight softening towards the long end of the lens.

Pixel peepers of the world unite :thumbs:
Click to expand...

What exactly do you mean here by recalibration? Did you have an obvious problem, who did it, etc.......
 
Absolutly loving my 5DII :), easily get a full day of shooting out of a single battery, took 300photos on saturday and some video and it still had around half power left over will check when i get in as havn't charged it yet.

16GB card does roughly 500photos,
 
Jeremy,
At the time, the 24-105 was my best lens. I'd dismissed occasional softness to poor technique and that familiar statement that the 24-105 is not one of Cannon's best 'L' lenses; too much of a walkabout compromise.

However, going from cropped sensor 20D to full frame on the 5DII it became obvious there was a problem.
Using the worst setting, 24mm f4, some images had edges soft enough to see on a 6"x4" print.
I still didn't feel confident enough to take it straight to Canon, especially as the warranty had expired.
So I found two other 24-105 lenses and conducted detailed comparisons; they were pretty close to each other and mine was softer right across the whole frame; the edges were especially soft.

I approached Canon at focus on Imaging and got an email contact at Elstree.
I sent both a summary of my findings and an explanation of why I hadn't spotted it earlier.
They gave me a rough estimate of cost and time to service the lens and I sent it to them.
The lens arrived back with a cost breakdown and would have been nearly £70, but Canon offset the cost against goodwill and it only ended up costing me my initial postage.
There wasn't a detailed breakdown as to what they did, but it's now a superb lens.
It is demonstrably better than a 24-105 lens I tested against when I got it back.

I've nothing but praise for how Canon handled me - very reassuring for the future.

Doing detailed comparisons is not a trivial exercise and I had a huge learning curve to get consistent enough for the comparisons to be meaningful.
Unfortunately all the pixel peeping kinda stuck.
Discovering why my shots aren't always as sharp as I knew the lens is capable of has led me to be ultra-critical of my own technique.
The good thing is that my photography has come on in leaps and bounds, but my social skills may have suffered :geek:
 
Seems I'm going to need some larger cards at the very least. I'm into landscapes and don't need high continuous shooting rates so apart from getting the files off the card I can't see any reason to go for a super fast version.... assuming recording HD video does not need super speed CF.

Thinking the 30mb/s 'ultra' sandisks will do?
 
I bought this for my D300s:

Microphone

Its a bit better sound quality that the internal mic, but it doesn't pick up any of the internal motor noises from the camera/lens like the internal mic does
 
RobertP said:
Seems I'm going to need some larger cards at the very least. I'm into landscapes and don't need high continuous shooting rates so apart from getting the files off the card I can't see any reason to go for a super fast version.... assuming recording HD video does not need super speed CF.

Thinking the 30mb/s 'ultra' sandisks will do?
Click to expand...

I found that with a 25 mb/s card - when taking video, and then capturing a full size raw image, that the buffer couldn't handle it - and the video ceased recording whilst the raw was written. The Sandisk however seems to handle it ok... If you intend to cover a lot of video - you might want to consider the higher speed 60mb/s version...
 
RobertP said:
I hate battery grips so that is not an option.

No major outings planned for a while so I can watch Amazon for price changes for a few weeks without lack of spare battery being a problem.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

shame since if you use a grip you still get a battery reading with a canon OE and 3rd party in the grip.
 
Duncan,

Thanks for posting that....it looks like you had a bit of a bum lens which just didn't show on crop format. Glad Canon sorted it for you.

I'll keep an eye on the results i get from my 5d2, and if there's a problem, I'll know what to do.

Here's hoping you can get on with your image making now and stop worrying about your gear.....:)
 
I love the 110mb 16bitt tiffs :D

and everything about it is lovely I was playing with my 50/1.4 at f2 1/80 iso 1600in the restaurant earlier and it was lovely sharp as sharp with a creamy bg (L)
 
Anorakus said:
Oooh yeah baby... for anyone used to shooting on fine-grained film (any Kodachrome 25 users in the house?), the 5D mk II delivers on detail :nuts:

A.
Click to expand...

Used 64 but not 25 :(

the filesize made the guilds graphical designer go 'oooooo' which I approve of :D

for lazyness points I took a pic of the pc screen with film times on it and took it out with me and read it by zooming in and panning :p
 
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