a fashion shooter

5D: THE BODY 
You can read about that elsewhere, but in brief it looks and feels like a slightly larger 20d.  

LCD: Very good! 
You can look at almost any angle and there is NO SHIFT in color or contrast or anything! Well done. HOWEVER, it’s is not nearly bright enough, even at the brightest setting. 
**The dark LCD issue has been addressed with the latest firmware version 1.0.3. Problem solved. 
SHARPNESS and the AA filter 
The 5D seems to require about ½ as much sharpening as my 1Ds2 and 1D2 files. Therefore I venture a guess that the strength of the AA filter is somewhere in-between 1Ds Classic and 1Ds II. (also, the 5D seems to be SLIGHTLY more prone to moiré.) Still, given the easy to use moiré filters, I’ll take a tad of moiré here and there for the added sharpness anyway. 

UPDATE 10-6-05 > I take it back. moiré seems no worse with the 5D than it is on the 1D2 or 1Ds2 on this camera. I shot about 75 frames of a dress which is made of several layers of mesh and should have been a moiré machine. but the 5D did not produce any moiré what so ever. I shot another garment which produced very faint hints of moiré, and the shots taken with the 1D2 showed the same traces in the same trouble area. So, it looks good thus far. 

UGLY JPEGs 
In my initial shots, the JPEGS look pretty bad. A lot less detail (and worse colors) than properly converted RAW files. And burned out and rough looking highlights. It’s no wonder many of the first 5D JPEGS which floated around the web scared everyone. 

If you insist on shooting JPEGS, I recommend you set the contrast at the Lowest Setting Possible (like you should with the 20d.) There is nothing to gain from higher contrast settings – they will just serve to blow your highlights. 

RESOLUTION 
The 5D seems to be resolving more than my 1Ds, with better colors and equal sharpness. I never felt that I needed more resolution that the 1Ds Classic provides, but it’s nice to have it in a smaller package with better dynamic range and less noise. 

DYNAMIC RANGE 
It seems there may be more room for recovery than with my 1D2, but the difference may be down to changes in the new ACR beta. I know that when I recover highlights from the 1D2 to this degree, some detail returns, but the highlights end up looking funny. So far the 5D seems to look far better in this area. 

One example: The image on the left is with no compensation. 
The right image is at -1.7 with Adobe Camera Raw. 

http://www.pbase.com/r_p/image/50061887 

What is interesting is that with the ACR curve set to either linear or medium contrast, most of the ground in front of that restaurant, for example, reads 255 in all 3 channels. Not sure if this recovery potential is due to changes in ACR or the camera. Anyway, you can see the flat curve below, you can see that all channels read 255, and the “0″ a the bottom shows where the mouse was when the converter read the RGB levels in the top right. 

http://www.pbase.com/image/50073351/original 

For what it’s worth, here is a comparatively lame DPP conversion set to -2 stops. Looks terrible, IMO. Kudos to Adobe ACR. 
DPP: 

http://www.pbase.com/image/50077479/original 

Also, I am used to getting weird halos and strangeness when using extreme exposure adjustments with other cameras. Here’s a tree converted at “0″ and then at “-2.5″. There is nothing ugly about the look of the burned out area before of after the exp. correction in my opinion. Good news. ( I know the 1Ds Classic would have gone all pink and funny looking in the highlights at -2.5.) 

http://www.pbase.com/image/50075093/original 

(in case you care, here’s the full shot with bright blue flare from my 50mm 1.8: 

http://www.pbase.com/image/50074659/original) 

The above kind of shot is important to me, as I shoot backlit and flared all the time. 
ACR is still in beta and there will be a bunch of other converters soon to handle the 5D files so we can see it’s real potential then. In the mean time it appears that Adobe have made ACR even better with highlights than it was before…and the 5D has proven to be a pretty good tool thus far. 

UPDATE 10-16-05 
In my opinion, the 5D is up there with the best of any current DSLR. I am very impressed with the dynamic range, and the colors are rich and deep. LOVE the colors for people photography and other stuff too. They are accurate and have a lot of punch, but are also very smooth with SMOOTH gradations betwen colors. I am not that happy with the color transitions with my 1D Mark II cameras (which I have used a lot, probably 100,000 frames by now), and the 1Ds2 often looks really funny to me, although I have gotten some really beautiful files out of it. 

In my opinion the 5D has really hit a sweet spot. It’s “cheap” (ha, ha, ha), light weight, huge LCD, and the files look “thick” like the Fuji S2 (lots of flexibility in post production,) not “thin” like the 1Ds Classic looks. 

I have posted a few rude test shots (including “flatiron” replete with moiré) and some studio shots:

http://www.pbase.com/r_p/5d_notes