Manual Control Options
As befits a camera of its station, the 5D Mark II has a huge selection of manual modes; pretty much every aspect of the camera can be tweaked, poked and otherwise prodded to the requirements of the shooter.
Focus
Auto Focus
The 5D Mark II has a 9-spot auto focus system which we found to be snappy and responsive, even in relatively low light. Four auto focus modes are available: Auto, One-Shot AF (which focuses when you press the shutter halfway down), Predictive AI Servo AF (which tries to continuously refocus based on the movement in the image) and AI Focus AF (which takes a similar approach). There is also a manual focus mode that disengages the motor and lets you do your own focusing. How easy this is to do depends on the lens; many Canon lenses have only a small focus ring, but others offer a bigger, more comfortable focus ring.
ISO
The 5D Mark II has a very wide selection of ISO settings, ranging from 100 to 6400 in one third of a stop increments. However, it doesn't stop there; there is also one lower setting (called L) that pushes the ISO down to about 50 and two higher modes (called H1 and H2) that push the ISO to approximately 12800 and 25600. We were not able to take any photos off the camera to judge the quality of images at these higher settings, but noise definitely seemed to be an issue at the H2 setting; iamges looked distinctly grainy on the screen. That's no surprise, but we'll have to wait until we get the camera into the lab before we can really judge the noise level.
White Balance
A good selection of white balance presets are available; Auto, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten Light, White Fluorescent Light and flash, plus manual white balance and a setting for directly entering the color temperature. The white balance point can also be tweaked by up to 9 stops in either direction, as well as tweaking it on the individual color axes. Auto white balance bracketing of up to 3 stops on either side is also available.
Metering
Four metering modes are available; evaluative (which uses 35 zones to judge the correct metering), partial (which uses an 8 percent area at the center of the image), spot (using a 3.5 percent area) and center-weighted average. That's a pretty standard assortment, which should cover most needs.
Shutter Speed
The 5D Mark II has a very impressive shutter speed range; the shortest is 1/8000 of a second and the longest is 30 seconds in the bulb mode. The standard flash sync speed is 1/60 of a second, but that can be sped up to 1/200 second with one of Canon's own flash guns.
Aperture
The aperture range depends on the lens installed, but the 5D Mark II has the standard connections that allows it to work with all compatible lenses, except some really old Canon manual lenses. It won't work with the EF-S lenses that come with some lower-end digital SLRs, though.
Image Stabilization
No image stabilization is present on the camera body; Canon puts those features into the lens on their SLR cameras. Some other manufacturers use sensor-shift stabilization , where the image sensor can move to compensate for hand movements, but Canon has not added this to the 5D Mark II. However, an increasing number of Canon lenses now include optical image stabilization, where an element of the lens moves to correct for small movements.
Picture Quality / Size Options
The 5D Mark II offers a good selection of picture quality and size options. The sizes offered range from 5616 by 3744 pixels down to 2784 by 1856 pixels, and two quality levels are available (fine and normal) for JPEG shooting. The 5D Mark II can also shoot both RAW and JPEG images at the same time, saving both files to the same memory card. This is very convenient as it offers the speed of JPEG, but also the tweakable image quality of having the RAW version available. The RAW files are approximately 25.8 MB in size, so you'll need a large memory card to store more than a handful of them.
Picture Effects Mode
The 5D Mark II eschews the usual picture effects mode found on point and shoot cameras; you can't add borders, speech bubbles or the like. This is no great loss, but one thing that is very useful is a range of color modes. Like most Canon SLRs, the 5D Mark II offers a number of picture styles that tweak the color and sharpness of the JPEGs, including modes for standard, portrait, landscape and faithful color. Although we have not tested the 5D, we have found that with other Canon cameras the Faithful mode is generally the most accurate for capturing and representing accurate colors.
