EOS 1DMkII - First live event - Review

First event covered completely with the new EOS-1 series 1DMkII / 1DMk2 Cameras – A Real World Example Review

First impression of real world performance: It rocks

I just got home from the first real event since the upgrade, and I couldn’t be more impressed with the performance of these cameras. Tonight’s coverage included lots of dancing in near complete darkness. In addition, the bride is of course wearing a white dress which is very reflective to artificial strobe light. Using auto focus point selection, the 1DMkII cameras locked focus nearly every time, right off, no delay or hunting, and quick too. Accurate? AMAZING. I could see every detail in people's faces and clothing when bouncing flash.

This example image was captured in light so dark I could hardly frame the subjects in the viewfinder. I gave the shutter a half press and very quickly got the focus lock indicator (though I certainly couldn’t tell if it had actually locked onto anything or not). I captured the image and here it is. I can see every hair, every stitch in the bride’s dress, and every detail. The focus was not only close, but it was perfectly accurate. No front or back focus what so ever. In near complete darkness! I was able to do this again and again, and took home well over 100 perfectly focused images from the dance floor.

My 16-35, which I was about to give up on and toss in the trash - suddenly seems sharp again. Hmm. Odd? I'll know for sure after some pixel peeping on the actual files, but on the viewfinder, it sure looked sharp to me. Much sharper than I’d come to expect with the 20D. I’ve come to trust the auto point selection to find and lock the right subject so much now, that I stopped even looking through the viewfinder after a while. Candid stuff, I just pointed and fired. Perfectly locked on the intended subject the vast majority of the time.

Which brings me to my second point - this was my first test of the new Lightsphear "Photo Journalist" (Info Here). That too was just awesome. I've used the original LSII and liked it, but this was even better. It's a soft material, so you can bend it around. It's also clear and doesn't look like a beer cup taped to your flash. It looks more like a rum & coke glass. A major improvement. Anyway, those dark dance floor shots had a ceiling probably 15 to 18 ft above. Each image looked like it was softly overhead lit, with a giant soft box right over my head to fill in faces and details. I was very pleased with the lighting pattern. This example image was taken using the Lightsphear “Photo Journalist” with a Canon EX-550 flash.

Canon EOS 20D vs. Canon EOS 1DMkII - Review

Canon EOS 20D vs. Canon EOS 1DMk2 / 1DMkII - The Review

I just made the upgrade from Canon's wonderful 20D camera to the EOS-1 series 1DMkII / 1DMk2. After a few days of experimenting and testing, here are my initial thoughts.

1. Interface, Buttons, & Feel
This took a while to get used to. I've had this cam in my hands pretty well non-stop for the past 5 days. I just kept shooting, switching settings, reviewing, deleting, etc. Over and over. It's now pretty well become second nature. When shooting some test images today I actually found it hard to use the 20D! I kept pushing the wrong sequence of buttons.

Now that I've got a feel for it, the interface makes perfect sense. I don't think I could ever use a 1-serries along side a 20D or 5D because the buttons are functionally opposite. Shutter release is smooth all the way, without that distinct "click" like the 20D. I like this smoothness better. I felt the click always caused some shake when shooting super low speeds. Maybe just mental, but I never liked the click.

Shutter is about the same volume, but is quicker and snappier sounding. It almost sounds like an artificial click played by some P&S digicams. You'll still hear it in a quiet church, but don't think it will distract quite as bad as it's more of a quick snap, rather than the 'clu-clank' of the 20D.

Buttons require a bit more pressure due to the weather seals, but it's not too bad. LCD is much better than the 20D. Probably 15% larger and sharper. Plenty bright. The "N" is supposed to be even better.

Weight really isn't all that bad. With an "L" lens and batteries in the 20D with grip - the MkII has a tad more heft to it, but with a heavy lens to balance it out, overall it really isn't much more. The physical size feels just about the same as the 20D w/ grip. Reach to the shutter and buttons feels about the same.

I missed the joystick at first, but got used to it. You pan around zoomed review images much the same as the 10D did. Finger dial goes left/right and thumb dial goes up/down. You do have to hold the zoom button the entire time though.

Speaking of - for nearly every function, you must actually HOLD the button to make a change. You can't hit a button once to activate the function for 4 seconds like the 20D. Annoying at first, but I don't even notice it anymore.

2. Focus & Viewfinder
The auto focus AF is just insane accurate and zippy fast with USM lenses. Everything I could have asked for. Using "auto focus point selection" with all 45 points active is actually super smart. It just seems to nail whatever detail I wanted the camera to focus on.

I've got the custom functions set up so the center AF point is active when I hit the "registered AF point" button (one of the three thumb area buttons) - and I have it set to only activate while the button is actually pressed, then it goes back to auto when the button is released. This makes it super easy to "help" the AF by holding the button, focus/recompose, and shoot. Of course you can easily dial in a manual point by hitting another button (which in this case you don't have to hold) and pan the AF point using the finger and thumb dials.

A C.Function allows to adjust the sensitivity of AI Servo - basically the delay before the camera will attempt to re-focus on a object passing in front of the camera. I prefer the super fast, but it's selectable to 5 different sensitivity levels.

Focus in low light seemed dead accurate, but slowed slightly. If there's a detail to focus, it'll get it on the first pass, it just doesn't make that pass quite as fast as in good light. The 20D seemed to focus real slow with my 50/1.4 but on the MkII it's just as fast as anything else. It even ran my 100mm Macro super fast and accurate near 1:1 full macro. I've never seen a camera that can keep up with a tight macro shot.

LCD shot review has an option of super-imposing the focus point used over your captured image. Cool feature. Overall, focus is just super fast. In AI Servo it hung in there as an assistant pointed the cam out a car window at 80mph and tracked street signs at 8fps. All shots were right on accurate.

The viewfinder doesn't strike me as being all that different, but I can see slight differences in focus much better. Probably because it's a tad larger, brighter, and has a slight frost to the focus screen. (I really liked the focus screen of my old K-1000, full manual camera. Never had an OOF shot. I'm thinking of getting a replacement screen more like the diamond pattern of the old K-1000). Anyway, it's actually usable to manual focus if you wanted to.

3. Files, Quality, Settings
With the 20D, I never saw any real difference between jpeg out of camera, and Raw processed via CaptureOne C1 LE. In fact, I always thought jpeg was smoother and better looking. With the MkII, I can actually see a clear difference in that Raw picks up an amazing amount of detail.

Jpegs at default settings are notably soft. *However* it turns out this is a HUGE plus. Because there are zero jpeg artifacts, just smooth sensor data written as jpeg - sizing the image up yields astounding detail, and very few jaggies, halos, and other artificats. I took the 0 sharp setting (least amount of sharpening) and sized it up using the +10% method in Photoshop. I sized it up 12 times, then sharpened it. With the right final USM settings - the image was absolutely AMAZING. Nice and sharp without the artifices and quality loss normally associated with enlarging digital images.

Even without sizing up - these soft jpegs take USM very well and really sharpen up to something special. The USM setting I found best was 200%, 0.6 px, 2 threshold.

Noise - the noise seems a bit less than the 20D overall, but it's much better quality noise. The specs are small and very uniform. The 20D puts out a smudged blotchy pattern. The 20D was also terrible with banding the noise in a horizontal pattern above 800 ISO. The MkII / Mk2 seems to have very little color noise. It's mostly luminance. The noise doesn't seem to soften details much either - which means Noiseware does a wonderful job at removing it. Even 3200 is usable. Sure, it's a lot of noise, but again, no pattern, and very uniform so it looks more like super fine grain than smeared blotches.

4. Miscellaneous and other Cool Stuff
-I charged the battery when it first arrived. I haven't taken the battery out yet, and here it is 5 days later with the LCD on almost the entire time - and the display still shows a full battery. Way cool. The supplied charger is pretty big (but not very heavy), but it charges via a pair of pigtail plugs that clip into the battery. There are 2 of them, so you can charge 2 batteries at one time with a single charger.

-If you have FEC dialed in, the viewfinder light meter shows a tick for actual exposure, as well as a second tick that shows FEC. Also, if you exposure lock, as you recompose, the meter still shows exposure of the recomposed scene, but leaves a tick where exposure was locked at so you can see the difference.

-You can backup ALL of the camera settings (right down to how much EC you had dialed in the last time you were in Av mode) to a memory card. This includes all custom functions, all personal functions, what mode you were in, etc. I spent 3 days dialing in the camera, and when the second one arrived, it took only about 15 seconds to save, swap cards, and re-load them into the new cam exactly matching in every way. Super cool if you have 2 cams, but also, you could save your "Starting settings for a wedding day" to a small SD card and rather than checking 35 menus, you could just load up saved settings again and be all set.

-It seems much smarter with flash. My EX-550 flash strobes seem much more consistent than on the 20D. They seemed less prone to shut down from secular highlights. Catching a flash reflection in a window seemed to have very little effect on the overall exposure – where the 20D seemed to want to severely under-expose in this situation.

-Having that extra display on the rear for digital data is nice because you can now see everything. On the 20, you couldn't see what ISO you were on unless you hit the button. The MkII displays it in a couple places. Via C.Functions, you can customize all these displays to show about any combination of anything you could want.

-Custom tone curves - this will be extremely helpful for Jpeg shooters. Shoot a single image in Raw, then open it in the supplied Raw converter software. Using curves (just like PS curves) you can tweak the tone just the way you want it for that image. You can then save this curve back into the camera via firewire and the camera will use this curve when generating images in Jpeg mode. You can save up to 3 curves in the camera. With a bit of trial and error, you can put out Jpegs with the same warmth and tone value as print film.

I’ll continue to post more information as we begin to use the new cameras in actual live events.