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Our professional camera of the year is conventional in one familiar sense: Its image sensor is the size of an old-fashioned 35mm frame. But that's what sets it apart from almost all other D-SLRs -- models with sub-35mm sensors that narrow a lens's expected angle of view. The big chip gives you the full wide-angle goodness of the largest AF lens selection in the optical world, at a price that redefines the category.
Most digital SLRs with 35mm-sized sensors have either never made it beyond prototype or gone the way of the dinosaur. Large, lumbering, and beyond the reach of middle-class photographers, they had been reduced to a single species -- Canon's own EOS-1Ds Mark II -- until the Canon EOS 5D came along. The 12.7-megapixel EOS 5D not only halves the size and weight of its full-frame sibling, but costs way less than half its price. It's significantly cheaper, in fact, than its only twelve-megapixel competitor, Nikon's professional D2X, a camera with a physically smaller, APS-C-sized image sensor. Affordability is relative, but Canon's midsize EOS 5D is arguably the first full-frame professional digital SLR for the rest of us.
What's the advantage of a "full-frame" D-SLR? We can think of three. First, when you put a Canon-mount lens on the camera, it produces the exact same angle of view as when that lens is used on a 35mm camera. The image isn't "cropped" the way it is by D-SLRs having smaller sensors, which in effect increase your working focal length by a factor ranging from 1.3X to 2X, depending on the model. This is especially valuable on the short end of the focal length range, allowing wide-angle lenses and zoom settings to retain their expansive coverage.
The full-frame chip's second advantage is image quality. Its sheer resolution permits tack-sharp prints of 20x30 inches and beyond. But because the bigger chip accommodates bigger pixels without reducing resolution, and bigger pixels gather light more efficiently, 5D images have extremely low noise (the digital equivalent of "grain") even at equivalent-speed settings as high as ISO 3200. This makes the camera ideally suited to shooting in low existing light. Its output is actually smoother at high sensitivities than that from the costlier 1Ds Mark II.
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Canon EOS 5D
12.7 megapixels/CMOS image sensor
Full frame (no FOV crop)
2.5 inch LCD screen
About $2,700
A full-frame, 35mm-sized image sensor makes its first appearance in an affordable, midsized digital SLR. The bigger chip gives you exceptionally low image noise, a huge optical viewfinder, and the expected angle of view from your made-for-35mm Canon-mount lenses.
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Finally, because the 5D's viewfinder doesn't have to be "cropped" the way it does with D-SLRs having smaller-than-35mm sensors, it's 50 to 80 percent larger in area. This makes framing and focusing, manual included, much easier.
Among the 5D's other ample virtues are a very large continuous shooting buffer (17 RAW and 60 JPEG frames, at 3fps); a fast nine-point AF system; and a true 3.5 percent spot meter. We found the camera solid, comfortable, and fast handling—yet quieter and less obtrusive than its professional rivals. All in all, it reminds us of how shooting 35mm used to feel.
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