RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

5D: First Thoughts

The bullet has been bitten and the Canon 5D is here with me now. While the U.S. rebates I mentioned last week didn’t affect the camera itself, the 5D has plummeted in price over the past few weeks. On October 1, Calumet… aka the really big camera store that all other Philly stores lock their pricing to, listed the 5D at around $3000. That was about standard nationwide.

Today, reputable, trustworthy, non-gray-market retailers are selling the 5D for $2200. Are they clearing stock for the 5D Mark II or some 5D sequel camera? I don’t care and neither do many 5D owners. The camera is and will remain to be solid.

In the past month I’ve been fortunate enough to have made nearly enough money with photography to cover a huge majority of the cost. For me, it was a really good month. In my quest to become a full-time photographer, reinvestment of earnings into upgraded gear is a completely justifiable expense.

When the camera arrived, I took it out to the South Street bridge to shoot some of the street art that lines the footbridge. After just a few shots, here’s my review:

The camera feels like the 20D and looks like its older sibling. Bigger body, bigger LCD screen, more ISO settings and a much bigger sensor. Almost all the buttons, functions and controls are identical and there’s very little learning curve switching from one to the other.

The difference comes when you lift it to your eye. For all you DSLR users out there, imagine a 24mm lens actually looking like 24mm. No crop means 24mm = wide angle. This kicks ass.

Then I hit the shutter.

A problem I had with the 20D was shutter noise. I shoot a lot of dance and a lot of dance has a lot of quiet moments that I want to shoot. But there was always the problem of the big [CLICK] in the middle of that silent, beautiful moment. I hated that and usually waited to take my shots when the music and/or sound was loud enough to drown out my shutter.

The 5D is… well it’s more like the Nikon’s I’ve heard snapping away all these years. Very quiet.

And now for the important part.

Review of IMG_0001

This was set at ISO 100, f/5, 1/80th of a second, (real) 24mm.

First the bad… or at least the imperfect:

Full frame cameras are known for vignetting, or light fall off at the edges of the frame, especially when shot wide open. At f/5, you can still see it in the corners. Still though, it’s easy to correct if I need to, I don’t care about it THAT much most of the time and it’s still a hell of a lot better than my slower 17-85 on the 20D.

Lens Distortion: The image is slightly distorted. Again, let me repeat that it’s still a hell of a lot better than my slower 17-85 on the 20D.

Color: Out of the box factory settings here and the sky is a little off. This will take more than a few dozen photos before I can form a solid opinion.

That’s all for the bad. Now here’s the good:

Everything else: but especially…

Noise/Detail: OK. On the 20D, I’d take a shot. Like all digital cameras, when you zoom in, the quality degrades, the image breaks down, you see nothing but speckles and digital fuzz. Even taken in the best conditions, 100% crops often looked frustratingly… shitty. Here’s a really, really unscientific comparison, but it will give you some idea.

First the 20D:

and a detail crop of pilot man there:

And for comparison, here’s IMG_0001 and a detail crop:

crop:

I think that about speaks for itself. For now, I’ve gotta get some photo-work done. I’d really love that 16-35.