Digital Home Thoughts: Review of Canon 1D Mark II

Weight and Size
Note that I listed the camera’s weight (3.5 pounds with battery and without lens) as both a pro and a con. This is a personal thing and I don’t mind the weight at all though I can understand why some people would. The feel of this camera is very solid giving the impression that it would be at home in just about any environment the photographer chose to use it. Most of the pictures I’ve seen of this camera do not adequately show its size. The body alone is 156 x 157.6 x 79.9 millimeters (6.1 x 6.2 x 3.1 inches). With the 35 - 350 lens and lens hood attached, the camera’s depth increases to 320 millimeters (12.6 inches). The size of this camera is such that I can rest its base on my left shoulder while holding the lens’s tripod mount in my left hand. This provides a fairly stable platform and aligns the viewfinder’s eyepiece perfectly with my left eye.

First Impressions
Moving to this camera from the Canon D60, I found many of the controls to be familiar to me. However, there are more of them on the Mark II and the operation of several is different than the D60. With a single menu on the D60, after pressing the menu button, selections were made by simply turning the navigation wheel on the back of the camera then pressing a button in the middle of that wheel to activate the highlighted menu option. On the Mark II, there is no button in the middle of the wheel. Furthermore, moving the wheel by itself has no effect on the menus. While disconcerting at first, I resorted to actually reading the manual and found that menu control is a two handed operation. On the Mark II, there are five menus available and to move between them, you must hold the menu button down while moving the large wheel on the camera’s back to cycle through the menus. Once on the desired menu, it is necessary to hold the Select button down while moving the wheel to the desired option. Once a desired option is highlighted, simply releasing the Select button activates it. This same scheme follows throughout all the menus for both set up and playback. The logic of this method goes along with the professional standard of the camera. By requiring simultaneous use of two controls, the ability to accidentally invoke an option is almost nil. Likewise almost non-existent is the ability to accidentally delete a shot you have waited patiently to obtain because the Delete function is also a two control operation. Once I sorted all of this out, it took me only a few times to get used to the operation.

Like the 35mm Canon EOS-1V, the Mark II has 45 auto focus points available. By default, the camera is set to automatically select which focus point or points to use. That’s right, it will focus based on the image at multiple points in the viewfinder. At first, I did not like this feature. But, with a little practice and option resetting, I’ve sorted out the logic behind this method. For a large number of the pictures I take, the object or objects I want in focus are not necessarily those closest to the camera. For this reason, I have the camera set to use only the center AF point and I control what it focuses on. However, if I was photographing a sporting event or a bird in flight, having the camera select the AF point(s) would be a great improvement over me trying to keep that center point on the subject. That, combined with the camera’s AI Servo focus mode and continuous fire frame capture explains why this camera has already become so popular with sports photographers. With the camera in AI Servo (continuous focus) mode, as long as the shutter release is held half way or all the way down, the camera continues to hold in focus whatever is in the chosen focal point(s).