A week prior I found that these outer AF points work like a charm with the 85 1.2 lens in fairly bright light outdoors, but they apparently are not stellar performers when it’s dim. This is very disappointing in a $3000 camera. You will definitely do better with the 1Ds2 or 1Ds3 if you are shooting dim available light as I often do.  However if you are in a situation where you can use the center point 100% of the time the 5D2 AF should work fine.

This was not nearly my most adventurous photography, but the exercise did show me that the 5D Mark II files look fine in low light (when focused correctly,) as the 1Ds3 files do. Though the bad AF is an issue, I think the main problem here is that the red focus indicator lights up as if the shot is in focus, when it’s not. The 5D2 seems not to work better than the original 5D in terms of low light AF using the outer AF points. But at least with the original, the AF point does not light up if the shot is not focused. For $3000 it should indeed be better. Too bad they didn’t have the nuts to put all cross-type sensors in this camera like the $1000 40D has!

here’s one example of the AF issue:

off-center-af-issue-5d2.

And here’s one which focused ok:

5D Mark II

Here is an older shot where the 5D Mark I focused effortlessly, even though it was darker:

5D Mark I

UPDATE 12-22-2008

OK, so I just combed through a bunch of old shoot using the original 5D in essentially identical situations as the aforementioned bad AF shoot with the 5D2.

Where the peripheral AF points were used on the old 5D, I counted 40 in focus shots, 10 out of focus in one example; 40 in focus vs. 7 out of focus in another; 20 in focus vs. 4  out of focus in a third shoot. The lenses used ranged from the 50 1.4, 70-200 2.8, 85 1.8 – all used in the neighborhood of 1/30 or so, ISO 200, around f 2.8 or 4, and all on tripods. These were all full body shots like the example posted earlier in this thread. Facial features were used as focus points.

As I suspected, the older camera was FAR better at achieving focus with the non cross-type AF points in non-bright situations. So either this particular camera is not right, or something went awry with the AF update in the new camera.