Phil Holland has posted a nice, in-depth review of the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, including a number of RAW files for people who want to do at-home pixel peeping and comparisons. Phil is a longtime 1DsMkIII user, and recently replaced his backup 1Ds with a 5DMkII.

He likes the viewfinder from the 1Ds Mark III better — for usability issues more than image quality or anything like that — but says the 5D Mark II does have a nice viewfinder. I’m sure anyone upgrading from an APS-C sensor camera to the 5D would be much more blown away by the viewfinder than he was.

Phil says that Canon’s new automatic brightness feature for the rear LCD display drove him nuts, and he quickly turned it off:

Canon implemented a new automatic brightness feature that uses a light sensor on the back of the camera to adjust image playback brightness based on the ambient lighting conditions. This is a neat idea, but drives me crazy as the image will literally change before your eyes. For instance, if you are shooting a sunset, the image you look at on the screen will look different if you are facing the sun or facing away from it.

With auto focus, Phil says the 5D Mark II is an improvement over the original 5D, but finds that the 1Ds Mark III is leaps and bounds ahead of either of them. He does mention that this will probably only matter to you if you do a lot of photography in very low-light situations, since there’s not much to distinguish them in well-lit autofocus performance.

As far as image quality goes, Phil finds that images from the two cameras are pretty much indistinguishable, as would be expected from the same sensor. He does note that images from the 5D Mark II were very slightly brighter and with deeper reds, and images from the 1Ds Mark III very slightly bluer, when compared. It’s a teeny tiny little difference, though, which you can see if you look at the sample photos he posted in his review, but otherwise doesn’t really seem worth mentioning (other than to point out that it’s there and then forget about it.)

Phil does seem to confuse a Bayer filter with an antialiasing filter, based on this paragraph:

In this “real world” example you can see that the 5D Mark II does a nice job of capturing detail. I chose a subject that has both subtle colors and lot of highlight, middle, and shadow detail. If you have ever shot with any of the higher end PhaseOne backs you’ll notice the still rather strong effect of the bayer filter getting in the way of true pixel sharpness on the 5D Mark II, but this is the way of digital SLRs. What I’m saying is the sensor itself and the lens used for this photograph could likely squeeze more detail out of this scene, but the bayer filter (which removes moire patterns) is softening up the image a bit. That said, these are amazing results for a camera at this price point.

I read through that paragraph a few times, and the only way it makes sense is if you assume Phil is talking about the antialias filter. The Bayer filter will get in the way of true pixel sharpness, but that’s because it’s averaging the brightnesses detected at neighboring photosites to determine the correct color, it doesn’t affect moire patterns. I’m also pretty sure that the Phase One backs use a Bayer filter as well, although I could be wrong — some Googling didn’t turn up anything definitive. The only cameras that wouldn’t use a Bayer filter are the Foveon sensor cameras and the early digital backs that did three separate passes — in a long, slow process — one for each color they were scanning. The antialias filter prevents moire patterns, but that’s separate from the Bayer filter.

As far as high ISO noise, it looks just a touch better than the Canon 1DsMkIII based on the samples he provides, and is one of the few reviews to admit that there’d be a use for the highest and noisiest ISO setting:

I think with more aggressive noise processing you can certainly use the ISO 12800 and 25600 images, if nothing else, for web reproduction. For me I think the highest I’ll be going is ISO 6400 to maintain print quality.

I’m always surprised by reviews that talk about how useless the highest ISO settings are and why would the manufacturers even include them. Why wouldn’t you want the option available, just in case you need it? I’d much rather have the option of shooting at ISO 61,200 and get something with a minuscule signal-to-noise ratio, than to wind up with no image at all (or, at least, a blurry image because I was forced to use a longer shutter speed than I should have.)

He spends several paragraphs discussing the 5D Mark II’s very interesting HD video capabilities, which are very cool and also have some severe drawbacks. There’s the 30 fps limitation that we heard about early on, but there are some other ones that are even odder. Apparently you’re limited to using the camera’s automatic exposure mode when you’re in video mode. Really? Huh? Canon is trying to turn their $3000 5DMkII into a point and shoot digicam? You can try to trick the camera and work around the limits (apparently a common way is to use an old manual Nikon lens with a mount adapter so that you at least get manual aperture control on the lens itself) but it doesn’t seem like there’s any technical reason why Canon couldn’t let you do video in manual exposure mode. It just doesn’t make sense. You do get two stops of exposure compensation in automatic mode, and exposure lock still works, so you might be able to trick it into the settings you want that way, but it’s still a very weird limitation on such a groundbreaking feature.

You’re also limited to 12 minutes of video per file, which shouldn’t be a big deal for most people. You’ll also get that CMOS “jello” effect, although that’s something you’re just stuck with if you’re doing video with a CMOS camera.

That said, he does offer this bit of awesomeness about the 5D’s video:

In reality though at this price point, even with the limitations of the HD video mode, it’s still an amazing deal. I’ve already shot footage that I could not shoot with rigs that cost me 3x the price of this camera and in higher quality no less.