Canon EOS 5D Mark II Body only 21.1 Megapixel

I'm writing this review after using the camera for over 2 months. Some of you may have read my other camera reviews in the past and I am glad the reviews have been helpful to many.

I am a Canon/Nikon guy. I have lenses from both brand, from macro to telephoto, primes and zooms. I keep lenses from both brand because they offer the BEST in DSLR market. And I often upgrade to newer model if they offer significantly better performance/quality/Resolution.

For Canon, I've had D30, Rebel 300D, 10D, 20D, 5D, Rebel XTi, 40D, 1DS Mark III, and currently using 5D Mark II.

In Nikon camp, I've had D300, D700(full frame sensor), and when they put out D3x in end of 2008, I thought this was going to be pretty much the keeper for a while as I would not need any higher in resolution and performance. Interestingly, this was about the same time Canon released their 5D successor, 5D Mark II. I really liked the performance and image quality of Canon 5D. It was featuring Full Frame sensor at 12MP high resolution and very low noise in high ISO shooting. The main reason I downgraded this to Rebel XTi was the frequent dust spots on the 5D sensor that I had to either clean it really good often or do spot healing in photoshop. Both takes time, and if you are like me, I hate spending time doing this kind of stuff. I'd rather have lower performance camera with some kind of dust proof so I can shoot. I didn't expect much from EOS Integrated Cleaning System, but after using it for sometime w/o any dust spots on the sensor, I sold my 5D and kept XTi hoping for 5D successor to come with same EOS Intergrated Cleaning System.

They took too much time coming up with 5D Mark II, so I had to step into Nikon market getting D300 and D700. Wow! What a difference. Great image quality, low noise at high ISO, Sensor cleaning system, Faster frames/sec, well built, very well thought-out menus and buttons... One time, I needed to get into higher resolution images - 20+mp and my only option at that time was Canon 1Ds Mark III, so I got one but returned it back 5 days later because I thought 1Ds Mark III didn't justify $4500 over Nikon's D700 just for the extra resolution. There were rumors also that D3X was in the works. Well, you can read more about my Nikon reviews on my other review pages, but I'm writing all this to say one thing. Sure, D3X is much robust, faster, higher res. camera than 5D Mark II. But if you think about the features and affordable price compare to Nikon D3x or Canon 1Ds Mk2, it's not to hard to choose what's the winner here. I'd probably sticked with D3x if they only offered Sensor cleaning system... LOL.

So, is 5D a good camera? Yes, you bet!
It's a full frame sensor camera, which means your 50mm lens is working on the camera as 50mm. With crop sensor cameras, you multiply 1.6x to 50mm so 50mm becomes 80mm lens which sometimes is good and sometimes bad depending on the shots you are shooting.

For my type of work, I require best image quality and less-to-no noise. I compared the 5Dmk2 ISO image quality with my D700 and D700 has the winning quality all the time, and that's not surprising because they share about the same size sensor and 5Dmk2 is putting twice more MP than D700 - thus creating noisier images at high ISO. For my work, I always use ISO200 or lower and lighting is pretty much all controlled, but up to ISO800 is quite usable too. Anything higher will require some type of noise reduction.

I'm out of space, but also HD video is +.