Digital Photography : Canon 1D Mark II
My Canon 1D Mark II with the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L lens mounted. Photo taken in July 2005 with my Digital Rebel and Sigma 50-500mm lens.My current main camera is the Canon 1D Mark II, a product mainly used by the press, professional photographers and ambitious amateurs. While I only fell under the latter category when I bought it in May 2005, I felt that I had cursed the long shutter lag and slow autofocus speed of my Digital Rebel for too long, and that I needed to "step up" if I wanted to be serious about my photography.
While the Digital Rebel was a nice camera to get started with, the 1D Mark II definitely helped me produce better sports pictures. The camera is capable of taking pictures at a burst speed of 8 frames a second and unlike its smaller brother, doesn't have a crippled Autofocus Servo (AF Servo).
The 1D Mark II has an 8 Megapixel sensor with a focal length multiplier of 1.3. The 24mm wide end of my 24-70mm lens thus becomes a 31mm in 35mm film camera terms, and on the Sigma 50-500mm, the maximum reach is equivalent to 650mm.
The low-light performance is amazing - images shot in ISO 800 still look less noisy than those taken at ISO 100 on most compact digital cameras; and a sizeable amount of my sports pictures that get printed in the newspaper are taken at ISO 1600.
The other main difference to consumer-level SLRs such as the Digital Rebel is the ruggedness of its built. It feels much more solid in the hand, and its weather-sealing is much more appropriate for the different conditions one might encounter while out and about. I've successfully shot in heavy rain, snow and dust storms.
Links to other websites
- Canon EOS-1D Mark II Review @ dpreview.com
- Glossary @ dpreview.com (explains many of the technical terms that I used above)