Canon EOS 5D Mark II

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.