5DmkII or 7D. Jeez this is tough

[Mike Hollingshead]

Thanks Oscar, that is good to hear! Second I ever have money to spare again I will be picking up one of the two. It has to rule up in the badlands for Milky Way shots at 3200 ISO or so. Maybe even 6400 and remove the color noise. I've seen some CRAZY Milky Way TLs done with the 5D and a fast wide angle and it has me interested.

 

[Derek Weston]

would love to have the 5DmkII for night sky star shots.

Believe the fellow over at astropics.com uses this, or one of the earlier version full frames. (in tandem with a fast wide angle, of course)

I put my fast wide angle to use recently in a trip out west with my T1i:

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/1240/img1717.png

Not bad. That's 11mm, f2.8, 3200iso, and 30 a sec exposure. (removed a bit of color noise and dinked with a few other things... Flagstaff wasn't helping being off just east...few clouds were working in as well)

Just outside of Flagstaff looking west.

 

[Bryan Stokes]

Mike / Anyone

Can you recommend any CF models that are proven to work well in a 5D?

I picked up my 5D2 really quite cheap (for the UK) but it did not come with a CF card - no worries, I will just get one.

So... 8Gb or 16Gb, what speed, SanDisk / Lexar or other - so many questions....

FYI: here in the UK a 5D2 runs at £1660 or $2,567 - Ouch!

I'm a huge fan of Sandisk. I would go with an Extreme III. (all you need to shoot video is 8mb/s, even though the Extreme III is 30mb/s) As for the size, that is purely a personal opinion, but I would go with 16GB cards.

Bryan

 

[Darren Addy]

Echoing Bryan...People seem most pleased overall with the SanDisk Extreme III or Extreme IV cards. For my crop cam I use a 4GB SanDisk Extreme III and will buy that brand again soon (in a larger capacity). With a full frame camera, I think you will want at least an 8GB and probably more than one for a chase (depending upon how often you can pull images off it onto a laptop).

Honestly, if you are looking great lenses for astrophotography you don't need autofocus. In fact, you don't need auto-anything. You don't even really need multi-coating. (IMHO a wide lens that performs poorly at the edges is not a wide lens. It may say a wide mm focal length, but it if looks like crap on the edges what is the point of that width???) Astrophotographers would get better images by getting a m42 (screwmount) adapter for their camera mount and getting some excellent vintage glass such as:
Auto Takumar 35mm f2.3
or
Super Takumar 35mm f2.0

These lenses will give you great performance (especially on a crop camera) as they were designed to cover a full 35mm frame (in the days of film) and the speed you crave for very little money compared to todays autofocus plastic-bodied lenses.

 

[Greg Campbell]

Honestly, if you are looking great lenses for astrophotography you don't need autofocus. In fact, you don't need auto-anything. You don't even really need multi-coating. (IMHO a wide lens that performs poorly at the edges is not a wide lens. It may say a wide mm focal length, but it if looks like crap on the edges what is the point of that width.) Astrophotographers would get better images by getting a m42 (screwmount) adapter for their camera mount and getting some excellent vintage glass such as:
Auto Takumar 35mm f2.3
or
Super Takumar 35mm f2.0

Indeed.
There are some excellent lenses in M42, Oly OM, Leica, Nikon, and several other mounts, that will work nicely with your Canon body. See
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/eosfaq/manual_focus_EOS.html

When shooting star trails, lightning, astrophotography, etc. AF becomes more of a PITA than anything else.

 

[Allan Jeffers]

I guess seeing as I don't shoot birds or sports and I already have 2 other crop cameras, the 5DmkII is my choice... that is, if I can raise the funds. CF cards? I use Sandisc as well

 

[Adam Adkins]

For the self-cleaning sensor on the 5D II I have a question.
Every time I turn on and off the camera (which is VERY often) it cleans the sensor. Is it bad for the sensor to have something rubbing against it (such as in self-cleaning) so often? It seems it would be to me.

 

[Greg Campbell]

For the self-cleaning sensor on the 5D II I have a question.
Every time I turn on and off the camera (which is VERY often) it cleans the sensor. Is it bad for the sensor to have something rubbing against it (such as in self-cleaning) so often? It seems it would be to me.

I think the 'cleaning' mechanism involves high frequency vibration, possibly in conjunction with a static dissipating charge being applied to the sensor. I'm pretty sure there aren't any Itty-Bitty windshield wipers going back and forth!

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

For the self-cleaning sensor on the 5D II I have a question.
Every time I turn on and off the camera (which is VERY often) it cleans the sensor. Is it bad for the sensor to have something rubbing against it (such as in self-cleaning) so often? It seems it would be to me.

I just disable it and clean it when it needs cleaned.

I never use the On/Off switch on any of my cameras. Just let it time off after a minute or whatever. One less switch to wear out.

 

[Adam Adkins]

I just disable it and clean it when it needs cleaned.

I never use the On/Off switch on any of my cameras. Just let it time off after a minute or whatever. One less switch to wear out.

So you disable it because you believe that it WILL wear the sensor?

 

[Allan Jeffers]

I have left my 30D on the "On" position for a few days. Forgot about it. I got to watch out though cause sometimes I forget to change the settings to turn the camera off after X amount of time. I did that once after a time lapse shoot and forgot to turn the camera off. No wonder the battery was almost dead lol

 

[Chris Allington]

So you disable it because you believe that it WILL wear the sensor?

I think hes referring to cleaning it manually with the mirror up, I have always had the auto function on and haven't had a problem with sensor wear because of it...

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

So you disable it because you believe that it WILL wear the sensor?

I disable it because it can be used when needed. With equipment like this I'd rather just have things working only when they are needed. Don't want to have to send it in to get fixed cause it wore itself out unnecessarily.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

For those in the JPG vs RAW dilemma arena this might be worth looking at/into. I've always just shot RAW, but mildly reconsidered it reading that Ken Rockwell mumbo jumbo on it the other day. Lots of why he just uses JPG makes sense and he's a smart man. It was talking me into going that route, or at least considering it for the first time.

I haven't shot JPG at all since getting into DSLRs in 2004. Only one time that I can think of. Until last night and doing star trails. With those it simplifies things to just have them in JPG. I was sort of surprised just how clean they were at 400 ISO for 30 seconds. I toyed with noise reduction before I went out but wasn't seeing a difference on the LCD at that ISO and quicker shots. So I put it back to disabled.

Anyway, noticing how clean they looked made me remember something I had came across reading reviews on the camera. Something about noise reduction still being applied even with it set to disabled. This to JPG files, not RAW.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos5dmarkii/page24.asp

And this quote from page 22 on that review:

It's obvious from looking at the RAW files in the comparison on the next page that the 'disable' setting is still applying quite a lot of noise reduction at higher ISO settings, and that the Standard(default) setting is using fairly strong NR above ISO 800.

Just concentrate on the right two images down that page of examples. 2nd from right is JPG noise reduction set to disabled. Right one is RAW file that doesn't have noise reduction being done to it. That is a pretty huge difference if you look at the detail loss on the JPG, evidently thanks to that noise reduction still being applied while set to disabled. Just look at the 50 ISO one! Hell all of them even the low ISO ones. RAW ones you can see the separation in the feathers down low. JPG "no noise reduction" are smoothed to hell. That seems so silly to me, but must be some reason they do it. Probably JPG artifacting or something they are trying to get rid of?

Surely not the end of the world, but for the detail picky it's worth noting. No wonder my stacked 400 ISO JPG star trails looked so clean lol. Camera is applying noise reduction to the JPG if you want it or not.

Of course on that page they word it a bit different and say...

At lower ISO settings this is just the usual advantage we see using ACR vs JPEG (and basically comes down to superior demosaicing)

So maybe nothing all that new or startling to most. Sure is a heck of a difference in detail from JPG no noise reduction and RAW no noise reduction.

 

[Allan Jeffers]

I am now starting to wonder if I should invest in another lens to replace my two cheaper ones like my 24mm f/2.8 that I don't use much because I don't like its results as well as my 50mm which is the cheapo one. Good optics, but slow to focus, no distance scale and is just plastic.

Better glass = better IQ

But the newer cameras have better noise control at higher ISO and lower light, but once again the higher megapixel count kind of causes noise with the smaller pixels being crammed into the same amount of space.

I am just going around in around in circles.

FYI, the new glass I had in mind was one of the following:

Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L
Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS
Canon 24mm f/1.4L
Canon 25mm f/1.4L
Even a canon 50mm f/1.2L

All cost roughly half of what a 5DmkII would cost