More Observations of the Canon 5D Camera

Finally on Saturday I had a chance to put the camera on the tripod for some tests. One of the things I wanted to see was the difference in the noise levels at 100 and 400 ISO. I can't see much at all. This is good for me because I have shot TriX film rated at 200 ISO or Delta 3200 rated at 400 (with the Holga) for a long time so I just have a feeling for a film faster than 100 ISO.

There is good separation of tones in the shadows....now if the printer can keep them I'll be very happy.

Although the buttons are pretty much the same, I've now had time to go through and try all of them out. One of the things that I really like is that the settings can be in 1/3 stops. Just seems to work better for me.

I really love the fast "wake-up." With the 10D when the camera had shut down it took a couple of seconds after you slightly touched the shutter button for it to be in operational mode again. With the 5D it is like it is always "on."

Another thing that I'm noticing is that the bokeh with the 17-40 f4L lens seems better than it was on the 10D. Now I don't know how that could be because the glass in the lens didn't change so maybe it has something to do with the full frame sensor and how the light is focused on it.

With the full frame sensor, at 17 mm my 17-40 lens is really wide. I'm going to have to watch the stuff I leave in the edges when I have it zoomed in to 17mm.

To my eye it looks like my older and less expensive lenses are not going to give the image quality that I want. I've heard that the full frame sensor demands good glass.

In general the image look more like film and less digital.

The image in Camera Raw needs some sharpening at least to my eye on this monitor it seems softer than the 10D files. Although the general advise is to only "preview" sharpen in Camera Raw, my friend Ellie does capture sharpen in her conversion software, Capture 1. I tried that and I think I'll keep using that method for a while.

A full 12.8 megapixel image converted from RAW at 16 bit is about a 75 MB image. And at 12.8 megapixels a shot, I'm going to be wanting some 2 gig cards.