Trouble with my new Canon 5D Mark II

A week ago I made a decision to switch from Nikon to Canon. I had been dreaming about getting a full-frame camera for ages and finally could afford to get one. As most of my old Nikon gear were for crop-sized sensors, I had no option but to sell everything. This meant that I was free to look at other systems than just Nikon.

My final selection came down between Nikon D700 and Canon 5D Mark2. I chose to go with the 5Dmk2 for reasons not relevant to this post. To be totally honest both of these cameras are far superior than my photographic skills would require.

OMFG, I love my new camera!

After the initial honeymoon/sleeping-with-the-camera period was over, I was little bit dumb struck by the results: they weren’t quite what I thought them to be. The camera produces great images in good light. And in darkness. But way too often I end up trashing images because there’s something wrong with them. Either colors are way off, there’s something wrong with the exposure or there’s an ghoulish color cast that renders the image unusable.

First I thought I was doing something wrong. With the amount of settings in the 5Dmk2, there’s a change I accidentally have something, somewhere set the way it should not be. And coming from the Nikon system where each button has a single, designated function – more than once I’ve found myself accidentally changing white balance settings when I actually was trying to change evaluative metering mode.

WTF?

For the past week I’ve been blaming myself and my lack of skills for the strange results. There’s been a lot of swearing, head scratching and sometimes even screaming. And the manual has seen it’s fair share of reading through. But the more I spend time with the camera, the more I notice that there’s something funny going on:

The results from the camera are never uniform.

With other cameras I’ve had and used, if there was something wrong with the image, the culprit was never too hard to find. Usually it had something to do with the camera operator. My problem solving in cases when something went wrong used to look like this:

Image too dark/white:

change exposure, aperture or ISO

Colors somehow off:

Change white balance or batch fix everything in post processing

With my new 5Dmk2 it looks more like this:

Image too dark/white:

shoot again with the same setup at least 5 times to see all different results

Colors somehow off:

over-expose by 1 stop

Ghoulish color casts in some parts of the image:

see if this creates a cool artistic look but shoot again to produce different results

Examples

It’s really hard to describe these or even show with few images but here are some that in my opinion highlight some of the weirdness I’ve experienced with the camera. All images are directly from the camera, no Photoshop or processing other than to change the sizes to fit this page.

Example 1

Taken just seconds apart. Only thing changed is the shutter speed.

Example 2

A burst of two images. Same manual setting for both, taken on the same second. Notice the green color on the bottom left corner. When seen larger, it runs through the whole bottom part of the image.

Example 3

Another example with the weird colors, this time red and green.

Example 4

Example of the camera Auto White Balance.

Not fun

To say that the experience so far with my new Canon 5Dmk2 has been frustrating would be a slight understatement. Doubting my skills as a photographer and generally feeling failed has gotten to a point were taking the camera out is not fun anymore. And this is just the opposite I was hoping when purchasing this camera.

I seriously hope that the camera I have is a lemon, that it just needs a little fine tuning.

Or that someone can point and say what I’m doing wrong here.

I’m sending this back to Canon to be taken looked at. Hope it’s not going to take months.