A quick portrait of my grandpa. The detail in the full-size image is unbelievable.

My grandpa got a copy of Canon’s 5D Mk II lately, and I got a chance to play around with it.  It’s truly difficult to describe just how incredible this thing is.  It does ISO 25,600, and does it better than my 20D does 3200.  That, with 21 megapixels of resolution, incredible detail, and an utterly spectacular field of view and depth of field, just make for an unbelievable camera.  I’d love to pick one up myself, but of course it’s a little cost prohibitive.

I did a couple of portraits of my grandparents (quick ones, don’t look to these as models of perfect portraiture) at ISO 400, to see what it would be like to make a couple of frames and work with the RAW files out of it.  For starters, these things are huge.  We’re talking 20MB RAW files.  The speed boost I was getting out of RAW processing on my new desktop is pretty much gone when working with something like that, but it’s completely worth it: I can make ridiculous crops out of these images and still have perfectly viewable/printable images.  And with a little bit of USM applied, the sharpness is just astonishing.  Admittedly, this is the first camera I’ve used since my 20D, so I’m looking at several years of improvements all at once, but still, this is impressive.

A quick portrait of my grandma. At full resolution, I could fill most of my 19" monitor with an eye, and still see excellent detail.

Unfortunately, the video features weren’t quite as impressive as the still.  Yes, it does record excellent video, and with a small monitor for focusing and some big CF cards, it would make a pretty great platform for recording video.  However, the video stream it outputs is only 480p (while it can record 1080p to the CF card) and includes the focus guides and other information, effectively killing its usefulness in live video, and precluding the use of an external recording device (which would be exceptionally useful, since it can only record 12 minutes at a time).  That being said, the quality of the video is astounding: it’s full HD from a 35mm sensor.  Just needs a little improvement on the connectivity, and the recording length, both things I’m sure will be addressed in later versions.

And speaking of cameras, I’m actually going to finally get out and shoot again soon, albeit with my rusty old 20D.  Sometime this week I’m going to make the trip out to Robinson Preserve for the day, and go shooting with a friend.  Gotta love Summer.  Hopefully in a couple days I can come back to make a trip writeup with some nice photos.