Canon EOS 5D

...fraction bigger than the true Canon battery and it got stuck fast in the 5D - so much so that I had to prise it out with a screwdriver! Use only Canon batteries in the 5D!

Lens magnification - The big sell for me on the 5D was the 1:1 35mm sensor size. I own a 17-40mm f4 L and a 28-135mm IS lens. Luckily, I never bought any EF-S lenses for the 20D. You can't use EF-S lenses on the 5D so if you've got a 20D or a 30D - don't buy any ...
...3.1 as with the other Canon bodies but if you are using an ultra-wide lens, beware - the software cannot cope with images captured at 20mm or wider. It's not directly possible to fool the software either as the effective focal length is embedded in the image and the software reads it and refuses to stitch images that are too wide. Of course, when I used the 17mm lens on a 20D, the minimum effective focal length saved in the files was 27.2mm so it ... more

I owned a 20D before this and so my view is relative to that camera. The 5D feels very much like the 20D and 30D in that it is pretty much the same size and operationally very similar except for not having any kind of built-in flash.

Pro users argue that not having the pop-up flash is not a disadvantage because nobody would seriously use such a weak flash but I miss not having it on the 5D. While the flash on the 20D is indeed very weak (GN12), it often found use for quick, last resort use when there wasn't time to dig out the "proper" flash unit. It also serves a more important function as a AF assist light in very dark situations. Admittedly, having the flash pulse rapidly to allow the AF to "see" in the dark can be disturbing to subjects but it's better than having an out of focus picture. Without the built-in flash or any other AF illuminator, the 5D sometimes struggles to focus in low light. I also have a 430EX and 580EX flash and both of these provide excellent red LED AF illuminators which usually allow the 5D to focus quickly and accurately in dark places. Buying one of these "accessories" is a must - after all the 5D has no flash at all so you will quickly feel the need to shell out the extra £185 - £200 for a 430EX flash - quite a big hidden cost on what is already an expensive pro-sumer camera body (more than double the cost of a 20D).

Weight - the first thing you notice about the 5D is that it's a bit heavier than the 20D. Not much heavier but if you walk around all day with it you'll notice. Add to that the not insubstantial weight of one of the flash units and you're looking at a camera package that weighs over 1.2kg... and that's before you add the lens! For me that means a total package weight in my hands of nearly 2kg! Another consideration for those who take photos outdoors in public places (markets or whatever) is that a user with a 20/30D and the pop-up flash looks like a pro-sumer tourist to the subject but a 5D user with a big 430EX (or worse the monster 580EX) looks almost like paparazzi and so can arouse suspicion and so ruin the chances of a friendly smile - I've even been accused of being from the DSS or the tax office by some with a guilty conscience...

Image - you can read all about it elsewhere. Can't fault the 5D for resolution. The sensor is excellent and I now take advantage of cropping the images as there is resolution to spare. This is useful for very wide shots of buildings where if you tilt the lens horizon up you get the leaning building effect. Now I can take the picture with the horizon level and just crop the image later to exclude the bit of unwanted foreground. You could use some special distortion correction software but this is another option afforded by the luxury of spare resolution.

One thing to note is that the new "picture styles" that replace the presets on the 20D have a marked impact on final image. If you don't read the guide and just assume that the "Neutral" or "Faithful" settings are the "best" then you will see rather soft looking photos out of the camera. The low pass optical filter on the sensor means that alias patterns are reduced but some digital sharpening is required. In the "Standard", "Portrait" and "Landscape" settings, the colour balance is shifted and sensible levels of sharpening applied for you. Choose the "Neutral" or "Faithful" settings and you will initially be disappointed and may have to adjust every image on the PC - as was intended for those modes. You can modify the presets and also save your own so things can be tuned to your liking. If shooting in RAW mode, you can choose whether to use the "picture style" setting from the camera or apply a different one in the DPP software - the "picture style" is just another recipe that is saved with the RAW data to be applied or ignored later. Obviously, if you shoot in JPEG then the recipe will have been "baked in" and can't be undone later.

Lens choice is going to be important as the full-frame sensor can see all the way into the corners of the lens - where it will be the weakest in terms of distortion, chromatic aberrations, soft focus, vignetting and so on. Spend extra on the glass - you know it makes sense!

The sensor performance is the same as the 20D with the exception of a Low ISO 50 setting. In practice, I found that the dynamic range was less in this "L" mode (it has to be enabled in a custom function menu - the same as the 3200 "H" mode). ISO 100-400 are so clean anyway that it seems a bit pointless and you risk camera shake so why bother... You can see the reduced maximum dynamic range in the DPP RAW processing software histograms.

Dynamic range in RAW is very wide and the DPP software can usefully push or pull an image by up to 1 stop with no crushing and then convert to the 8 bit JPEG.

The 20D was a bit poor at auto white balance in common room tungsten light and the 5D isn't much better - often going with a heavy amber colour cast. Switching to the fixed tungsten setting helps and in any event you can usually easily fix any cast in the DPP software with the "one-click" white balance eye dropper (assuming there is something grey or whiteish in the photo to use as a reference). A useful feature is the DPP recipe. This allows you to determine a white balance (and other settings) from one photo and apply them to any number of photos. So under the same lighting circumstances you can fix one photo in a set and then apply the same corrections to all the rest automatically.

Dust - Yes the 5D has no ultrasonic dust cleaning feature and yes, I have had to clean my sensor of dust with a blower. The next generation of bodies will have ultrasonic dust shakers (the 400D that will replace the 350D in Q3 2006 has this). On the up side, because the 5D has a massive sensor, any dust takes up less real-estate as a proportion of the whole image and besides you never see dust marks unless you shoot at f14 or higher - I noticed some on mine when shooting macro at f22. Another reason to buy the better L series lenses - they are weather-resistant designs with extra O-rings and so on.

Battery performance is still very good but the 5D does eat it's batteries faster than the 20D did - probably down to extra image processing and the bigger LCD screen (that it shares with the 30D). LOOK OUT! I had a 3rd party battery that was fine in the 20D but was a fraction bigger than the true Canon battery and it got stuck fast in the 5D - so much so that I had to prise it out with a screwdriver! Use only Canon batteries in the 5D!

Lens magnification - The big sell for me on the 5D was the 1:1 35mm sensor size. I own a 17-40mm f4 L and a 28-135mm IS lens. Luckily, I never bought any EF-S lenses for the 20D. You can't use EF-S lenses on the 5D so if you've got a 20D or a 30D - don't buy any EF-S lenses if you plan to upgrade to full-frame later!
The difference can't be overstated enough! If you're a fan of wide angle - get the 5D. Full-frame is the way to go and with the 17-40mm you get a fantastic wide to almost standard lens in one - it's by far my favourite of the two lenses. Don't kid yourself - the 1.6:1 mag factor makes a huge difference. My friend also had a 20D and a 16-35mm L - he's also now bought a 5D and is a very happy bunny (well apart from the fact that he's now got a redundant 10-22mm EF-S lens).

There are a couple of "gotchas" though... Firstly there is some illumination fall-off at the corners of the image - but only sometimes. If you use an ultra wide lens on this body you will see illumination fall-off when the lens is wide open - it's not a defect, it's physics. You never see this effect on the 20D or 30D, not because they are better cameras but because their smaller sensors do not "see" the edges of the lens - they take their view from the central portion of the image only. Stop down to f5.6 or more and the problem is all but eliminated on the 5D. Good practice would lead you to stop down anyway as most lenses have a sweet spot of performance in the mid f range anyway. If you have to go wide open, consider increasing the ISO value by one stop instead. The sensor is so clean of noise that you can easily go to 400, and 800 still looks respectable. The 5D now has 1/3rd stop ISO steps for this very reason.

The second "gotcha" is in the software bundle. You get the same PhotoStitch 3.1 as with the other Canon bodies but if you are using an ultra-wide lens, beware - the software cannot cope with images captured at 20mm or wider. It's not directly possible to fool the software either as the effective focal length is embedded in the image and the software reads it and refuses to stitch images that are too wide. Of course, when I used the 17mm lens on a 20D, the minimum effective focal length saved in the files was 27.2mm so it worked in every situation. Now on the 5D, files are saved with the true 17mm focal length and the software won't play ball. You have two choices - shoot panoramic images at 20mm or more or do a fudge by saving the 17mm images in a format that strips out the EXIF data and then stitch them at the minimum 20mm manual setting in the software. You could use 3rd party software but then that's another hidden cost to this camera...

Storage - Bank on buying at least a 2Gb CF card - and a fast one at that (100x or 133x). The files this thing saves are MASSIVE - JPEGs weigh in at about 5-7Mb and RAW at 12-14Mb but can balloon to 18Mb depending on the scene (RAW files are losslessly compressed). No TIFF option is offered as the files would be so ginormous as to be silly. You'll need to buy lots of PC hard disk storage too... The JPEGs that the DPP software creates from the RAW files are bigger than the in-camera ones - around 12Mb each! A fast processor is going to be required too - 3.2GHz or better if you want to develop 2Gb worth of RAW images (about 119 frames) in less than lunch-time.

Noise and speed - One thing that bothered me about the 20D was just how loud the shutter mechanism was - REALLY LOUD! Made it embarrassing to use in churches! It was fast though at an eye watering 5fps. But as I'm no sports photographer I only used it's capability once - to capture a cat jumping in the air. The rest of the the time the noise was intrusive and if accidentally put on continuous shooting, the virtually machine-gun rapid burst was enough to make you jump with suprise! The 5D is a much quieter beast and I find it's 3 fps more than adequate. It sort of makes a whirring noise now compared to the industrial KER-CHUNK sound of the 20D. The buffer is also much bigger and so it can take large JPEGs almost indefinitely at the stated 3fps, provided the CF card can keep up.

Finally... what about the 1D? 16Mpixels? Don't bother unless you really are a pro AND routinely print Tate Modern sized wall hangings AND routinely take photos in extremely dusty and wet places (it's got more weather-proofing than the 5D). It's massive, it's heavy, it costs - you really don't want to know...

Nov 2007 - Long Term Update
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Having owned this camera for over a year now I can confirm that it's still a great bit of kit!

I upgraded the EF 28-135 IS to a EF 24-105 f4L IS and bought a EF 70-200 f4L IS - both very worthwhile investments and the 5D really delivers great results with these lenses.

The newer IS lenses, especially the 70-200 use a lot of power and this combined with the already higher power use of the 5D has meant that I've had the battery run out a couple of times during a day. I'll investigate these new high capacity batteries that have started to appear but after the last episode with a non-Canon battery, I'm a bit wary. Alternatively I might have to go with the battery grip but this adds size and weight to what is already a quite big and heavy package.

I used to use a shoulder bag to carry my kit but after travelling around on holidays with the newer heavier lenses, I had to opt for a full back-pack. If you're a bit unfit you'd better get into training before buying this camera. Having said that, the 5D and a 24-105 is a fairly friendly combination and does for about 80% of my photos. That's why it's being offered as a package deal by several retailers now.

Dust… I was prepared for cleaning the sensor from time to time but I was surprised to see dust getting into the inside of the focus screen. Canon saved a few pennies on a dust seal for the focus screen and as a result dust can get into the viewfinder and while it doesn't affect pictures taken, it is annoying to see bits of fluff in the viewfinder and it's a fiddly task to remove the focus screen and clean it out. I'd have expected better from such an expensive body.

The DPP software has been upgraded over time and now includes useful noise reduction settings for RAW processing that allows reduction of chroma or luma noise separately. By selecting to reduce chroma noise only, you get rid of the colour noise that looks "digital" and leaves the less obtrusive luma noise that looks reminiscent of film grain - which can be a nice effect in itself. Leaving the luma signal alone also means that noise can be reduced without softening the image. This all means that I can comfortably use ISO 1000 now and get excellent results.

I upgraded by storage to a couple of 8GB CF cards so I no longer need to take my laptop on a two week trip (8GB = 498 RAW images at ISO 100). Curiously, as you increase the ISO the RAW files get bigger and the shots remaining estimate on the display gets smaller, as noise in the images makes them less compressible.

Discounting on the 5D is increasing, improving its value for money and while the 40D is a good upgrade to the 30D, it still uses an APS sized sensor so still doesn't compete with the 5D. If you want a full-frame DSLR for less than the price of a small car, the 5D really still is the daddy! 

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