Dear All, I finally bought a 5D II with the L 24-105 kit lens.
It was worth the wait. In the meantime I found a great deal saving further on the bundle and receiving 3 years international warranty for free.
The trade off between waiting (February or next summer?) for a 5DIII and getting a super discounted 5D II now, wasn't worth waiting longer. I know when the nee one will be released the 5DII will drop its price further.. But I'm sure I did the right thing waiting for the end of Photokina.
It is an exceptionally good camera, with the right lenses might be having a long life. 24-105 L is definitively slow and I confirm that in low light the 5DIII lets me miss the 350D!
I wish it was designed to be more flexible for less serious applications and travel and have a "wider" choice of zoom lenses (I miss the 18-270 Tamron on crop, the one Canon sells is an impossible lens) but hey.. there is no perfect camera and is not the camera making a good photographer, is the photographer using a good camera only for convenience.. :-)) hence if you think you need a new one, think twice why you cannot do without and you will become a better photographer first..
Thank you all for your contributions to this post.
A camera is a tool to make photographs. Realize that that today's 5D Mk II only exists because of the sale of previous, and now obsolete, bodies. So the question to ask yourself is if the tool is valuable enough to buy for your work. How many pictures will you miss without it.
If you are a pro then you have to get more or higher priced sales to offset the depreciation that every body undergoes. If you are an amateur ask yourself how much are the better photos worth to you over the time you will use the tool. You will have the same decision to make about a Mk III, MK IV, MK V.....?
I have gone through 6 body upgrades. I find that, for me, buying the newest body (that meets my needs) at introduction means I can sell the old body for the most. An alternative is to keep the equipment until it is worth nothing due to the march of technology. I still have two Nagra tape recorders that, at one time, sold for $12-14,000 today they are worth nothing-artifacts of a past time.
I do low light work. Each body I bought (over 6 years) has had better hi ISO. A one stop hi ISO improvement makes ALL your lenses, effectively, one stop faster. Now I mostly shoot with one or two F2.8 zooms. The D3s has a two stop advantage over any Canon so, for my use, a Nikon FF system is cheaper than a Canon with super fast primes.
This thread reminds me of all the Nikon forum posts about the D700 FF body.
Whether it is the 5D or D700, many are hopefull for a replacement any day now, but in reality no one knows when it will come.
Enjoy your purchase, you will certainly enjoy it. I thought that I would add that I attended Photokina and was told that the 5d Mark III was one year away from release by a Canon representative. I did not have the impression from the conversation that it was anything less than a Q3 2011 date he was talking about.
Given Canon announcing 120mp sensors, the bottleneck on cameras seems to be the processing and storage of the files.
The 5D II came out a year and a half after the 1D3.
The 5D II uses a single Digic IV while the 1D3 is dual Digic IV.
With Dual Digic IV, a 5D III probably could be 30-32mp.
Which is about double the 1D4.
The 5DII was about double the pixels of the 1D3.
On the other hand, the 5D has usually been announced in August.
Also the 1DS3 was announced a year before the 5DII and the 1DS2 was announced a year before the 5D.
It will be interesting to see which will be the first 30mp camera.
krementz wrote:
Unless your business is buying and selling cameras, don't sweat it. Cameras depreciate; in less than a decade every Canon camera you buy will be essentially worthless.
Very true, a couple of years back, I bought a good working Kodak DCS460 6mp DSLR from 1990.
New cost was $35,500 in 1990, 9 years later, $100! Its High ISO mode was ISO 80, nominal was 50.
What is amazing is the way FF camera prices are holding up. 5D's still go for 1100-1200, and 5D MK II have very little depreciation after almost 2 years.
evertdoorn wrote:
I'm pretty sure a 5d mk III won't be seen untill 2011
Me too... the 5II is still over the Nikon offering, and I guess Canon is doing its best to release a great 1Ds4 !
If the longevity of the 5D is an indication, there will not be a Mark III for a while. The 5D was the best FF standard sized body out there for three years, and its superb performance kept it selling for long after it might have been replaced by a Mark II.
Even with the middling performance of the Mark II's AF, and its slow fps, the IQ is out of this world, and it's still selling. I recently heard from a pro working with two of them in Europe that it's the hottest camera used by professionals there, both for its still IQ and that of its video. A recent TV documentary nominated for an Emmy this year was shot with the 5D2.
I wouldn't hope for a Mark III so quickly given the above. Just MHO.
The time to buy a 5D II is when you want to take pictures... Seriously, you have to figure in to the "price" all the images you will miss by NOT having one. I can tell you right now, the day you die there WILL be a better camera AND it'll be cheaper. Do you want to wait for it?
I wish the 5D II were $1500 but most people sell them used for nearly 2K and it's $2500 new in most stores.
It is worth the price though, just cause I'm cheap, does not mean I should not buy it. lol
schristie11 wrote:
I wish the 5D II were $1500 but most people sell them used for nearly 2K and it's $2500 new in most stores.
It is worth the price though, just cause I'm cheap, does not mean I should not buy it. lol
The best you're gonna do for a while yet is a refurb from the loyalty program when trading in an old camera. I jumped from a 1d2 to a 5d2, and holy crap... Haven't had a chance to do anything serious with it, but I"m pretty amazed from my testing of it.
