After much anticipation and much reading the long rumored Canon 5D replacement is on it’s way to the general public. I just got off the phone with my local camera shop, letting me know that the Canon 5D Mark II was released for order and shipment today and that they would soon have one in hand to allow customers to look at, play with, and test out before taking one home themselves.
Though the new model in the 5D series offers many improvements it didn’t live up to the hype that it had received via numerous rumor blogs. I believe that this is the next largely sought after camera that wedding photographers will long to have in their bags until the initial orders are filled. Sports photographers, and Sports Photographer Hobbyists as myself, will agree though that waiting to see what the Canon 5D Mark II was going to have in the way of features are by in large disappointed with the feature set for the fact that it isn’t much quicker than the tools already available for our use on the sidelines of favorite sports.
The Canon 5D (now mark I) has long been my favorite camera offering a nice full frame sensor with almost undetectable pixel noise until the frame would be so dark that you wouldn’t even want to be taking a photograph. The color tone and pixel depth has only recently been matched by Nikon’s release of the D3, a camera I would argue far superior on many fronts. In its’ day the Canon 5D was the first of its’ kind, offering a full frame sensor at a price that the Pro or Pro-Sumer could afford and features necessary for wedding/portrait photographers.
After Christmas is over, and many other holidays, I look forward to adding the Canon 5D Mark II to my arsenal of camera equipment for use at weddings and landscapes. My hope is also that the 1080p video recording feature will come in handy as I attempt to bring video as well as photographs of Gods’ glory to people who may never see it, and I dabble in the arena of landscape video-graphy.