9 “Big Boy” Steps to Serious Digital Photography with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II
1. Digital photography has become a serious hobby for you. You’ve been shooting with a bridge camera or entry-level DSLR, such as one of the Canon EOS Rebels. You’ve discovered a passion for a particular type of photography: portraits, landscapes, nature, macro, architecture, etc. You may even be making money with your camera, or could if you had a better camera. Now, you want a camera that will take you to the next skill level and pro-like image quality. The next step will be a big one, but you just might be ready for a Canon EOS 5D Mark II.
Read real customer reviews of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II here.
2. Although a bigger sensor doesn’t always signify “big boy” status, the 21.1-megapixel CMOS sensor in the EOS 5D Mark II does because it is full-frame. This allows you to capture images with the complete angle of view of a 35mm camera, eliminating the need for any conversion. In addition, a larger sensor allowed Canon to include 14-bit channel conversion instead of the 12-bit, analog-to-digital converters found in many other DSLRs. With 16,384 individual brightness stages in each color channel, your images and super-sized prints will show an almost perfect tonal transition from the grays through the highlights.
3. It’s the advanced technology in the DIGIC 4 image processor interfacing with the sensor that allows it to do such an excellent job at sharpness, color accuracy and contrast in both still photography and full-HD video. By giving the EOS 5D Mark II DSLR the new DIGIC 4 processor, it could also enhance standard functionality and give it even more “big boy” features.
4. An example of enhanced functionality is ISO sensitivity. The EOS 5D Mark II comes with a standard ISO range of 100 to 6,400, which expands to 50 to 12,800 in H1, and 25,600 in H2. Even the camera’s standard range is greater than the ISO 100 to 1,600 (expandable to 50 to 3,200) found on the EOS-1Ds Mark III, which costs thousands of dollars more.
5. The Canon EOS 5D Mark II’s power pack also permits an exciting capability: Lens Peripheral Illumination Correction. It detects light falloff in the corners of an image, which is often a characteristic of many lenses, even the best, and makes the necessary adjustment to give you a more balanced exposure across the frame.
6. Live View Mode is also a high-performance feature of the EOS 5D Mark III. You can zoom into any portion of the image by a factor of 5x or 10x and choose from three different Live View focusing modes: Quick, Live and Face Detection Live. You can also shoot full-HD video and record sound in all Live View functions.
7. Another Live View benefit is a shorter shutter lag when using Contrast AF because the mirror in the camera isn’t required to drop between exposures. This reduces the time from pressing the shutter release to exposure, and results in quieter operations. Another benefit is that the camera is using the main sensor to meter the light.
8. There was a time when serious photographers didn’t want still photography and video capabilities in the same camera, but that perspective has changed as more photographers are creating a single vision with both forms. The combination of the two in the EOS 5D Mark II gives you that opportunity to be doubly creative. Shoot Full-HD video at 1920 x 1080, or VGA, with a maximum 12-minute clip with the former and 24 minutes with the latter. Movies are recorded in Quicktime MOV format, using H.264 codec for video and PCM for audio. At 1920 x 1080, the bit rate is 38.6 Mbits/sec (approximately 4.8 MBytes/sec); at 640 x 480, it is 17.3 Mbits/sec (approximately 2.2 MBytes/sec).
Canon may not have consciously planned the high quality, dual shooting nature of the EOS 5D Mark III, but it can truly be said that it is two cameras in one. It is a super buy if you were only to shoot serious still photography with it and an equally wise consumer purchase if you used it primarily to shoot video.
9. B&H Photo Video’s regular price for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (body only) is $2,275.00, but B&H has extended its Canon Rebate Offers from January 7th to February 4th, 2012, saving you $100 off the 5D Mark II. For more information, visit
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=Canon+EOS+5D+Mark+II&N=0&InitialSearch=yes.
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