Apologies for not posting about the Canon 5D Mark II before now, but I’ve been slightly busy (what with a wedding to plan, attend, and a honeymoon to take…) But wow, what a camera.

Just in case you’ve been living under a DSLR rock, the 5DMkII will be a 21 megapixel camera that promises to have low-light capabilities to rival the Nikon D3 (the “expanded” ISO range goes up to 25,600 ISO.) And, just to make everyone drool, it’ll do full 1080p HD video recording via the live view mode. Crazy. From what I can tell it only does 30fps, not true 24p, which instantly knocks its usefulness down a few pegs, but it’s still pretty amazing-sounding.

It also has Canon’s new DIGIC IV processor, better battery life, and a 3-inch 920,000-pixel LCD display. The list price is supposed to be $2,699, which is pretty ridiculously cheap for a sweet full-frame DSLR and HD video recorder all in one. And when you combine the D3-level low light capabilities with the HD movie recording capabilities, you have a camera that does stunning low-light video recording, supposedly blowing away most of the HD camera competition.

Check out this post by Vincent Laforet for a low-light microbudget film shot in the weekend with 12 hours of pre-production on the 5D Mark II. Insanely good-looking (no post-processing was done to the clips at all, they just dumped them straight into Final Cut Pro and edited.)

I would accept one of these for Christmas. Thanks in advance.