Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Handling (7.00)

Start out with a hefty camera body, add a 24-105mm zoom that weighs nearly as much as the body does and before you know it you’re carrying around three and a quarter pounds of camera. On a practical level, that means one-handed shooting is a dicey proposition; just keeping the camera level with the weight of the lens tugging the left side down is a challenge for more than a shot or two. On the other hand (literally), cradle the lens in your left, thumb and forefinger holding the zoom ring, the other three fingers curled to create a platform for the camera bottom, and you have a secure, solid hold. It’s still a substantial handful, but particularly with the 24-105mm kit lens, the weight is perfectly balanced. The righthand camera grip is particularly well designed. The rubber textured covering provides a reliable non-slip hold. There’s plenty of depth between the front of the grip and the camera body to curl your fingers around. And the sculptured indent just below the shutter helps maintain a good vertical hold while positioning the hand with the index finger right over the shutter.

Buttons & Dials (9.25)

The dual-dial control strategy employed here is a mixed blessing. There are two separate dials, the top-mounted semi-circular Main Dial and the round Quick Control Dial on the back. Sometimes turning either dial will have the same effect: moving the sliders in Creative Auto mode, for example, or choosing a menu language. At other times the division of labor between the two is clear and easy to learn. While navigating the menu system, for example, turning the Main Dial moves from menu tab to menu tab, while turning the Quick Control Dial moves the cursor up and down through the individual menu. Elsewhere, though, there’s no rhyme or reason to the control division. For example, after pressing the leftmost button on top of the camera, the Main Control Dial changes metering mode, the Quick Control Dial adjusts ISO setting—you get used to it, but there’s no underlying logic to it. And while the use of a rear dial can speed movement through a long menu, it also robs us of the dual-purpose function of a traditional four-way controller, which not only navigates through the menu system but also allows quick access to four key settings functions.

Display(s) (9.10)

Like the Canon EOS 50D, the 5D boasts a handsome 3-inch LCD with 920,000 resolution, with a 170-degree viewing angle. Screen brightness can be manually adjusted in seven steps, or set to one of three Auto levels, with the camera relying on a sensor to keep the screen at that setting.

Secondary Display

The monochrome LCD screen on the camera’s top right side conveniently displays much of the viewfinder data without the need to squint. The button at the far right illuminates the screen for a few seconds.

Viewfinder (8.00)

The pentaprism viewfinder provides 98% coverage at 0.71x magnification. The diopter adjustment is conveniently located at the right side of the viewfinder, small enough to be unobtrusive but clicky enough to allow precise fine-tuning in the 3.0 +1.0m-1 range.

The eyecup can be removed by pushing upward, but it’s a fairly clumsy operation. Why bother? You might buy optional replacement eyecups from Canon, but the more frequent reason is blocking the open viewfinder while shooting with the camera mounted on a tripod—left open, light can stream in from behind and throw off the exposure setting. Both the Nikon D700 and Sony A900 solve this problem elegantly with a built-in shutter that opens or closes with a button push. Given the price of the camera, Canon should do the same.

Interchangeable focus screens are supported. Three compatible Eg-series screens are currently available: Precision Matte (provided with the camera), Precision Matte with grid and Super Precision Matte. They sell for about $45 each.

Image Stabilization (3.13)

The in-lens optical image stabilization that the Canon 5D Mark II uses did a decent job of compensating for hand shake, but it is far from perfect; at faster shutter speeds and with particularly bad hand shake, we found that it actually made things worse More on how we test image stabilization.

Our first test is for a low level of hand shake, such as when you are trying to hold the camera steady with two hands, or braced against a wall. In this situation, there is only a small amount of movement, but still enough to make a picture blurry, especially with a lower shutter speed. In our tests, we found that turning on the IS feature on the 24-105mm L USM lens that we used in this review made a significant improvement with horizontal motion (such as the camera shaking side to side); with a shutter speed of between 1/250 and 1/30 of a second, the images were much sharper. However, the IS feature had the opposite effect with shutter speeds at the ends of the range. At 1/500, 1/15 and 1/8th of a second, the images were less sharp with IS turned on; the correction that the camera is making is actually making the images a bit less sharp. To be fair, though; if you are shooting at 1/15 or 1/8 of a second hand held, you’re asking for trouble. We also found that the IS system had relatively little effect with the vertical shake; when the camera is moving up and down, there was very little difference between IS on and IS off.

Image Stabilization Comparison Table			Expand
	Low Shake IS Off	Low Shake IS On	High Shake IS Off	High Shake IS On
1/500
1/250
1/125
1/60
1/30
1/15
1/8

When compared with other SLR cameras, the 5D Mark II has middling performance. As the graph above (which shows the low shake, horizontal sharpness improvement for three cameras) shows, both the Sony A900 and Nikon D700 had significantly better performance. Both cameras were more consistent than the 5D Mark II, with improvements in sharpness at all of the shutter speeds we test at. The Canon 5D Mark II only beat the other cameras at 1/250 of a second; at all of the other speeds, the VR (Vibration Reduction) feature of the Nikon D700 and the SteadyShot feature of the Sony A900 did a more effective job in our tests.