A few months ago, Canon offered an Instant Rebate of $100 for the purchase of a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. It's not much, but coupled with a Bing! Cashback of 12%, I got a pretty good deal on a the 5D2. I managed to sell my Canon EOS 5D for $1100, so pretty much I upgraded to the 5D2 for about $1000. This upgrade is pretty much for higher ISO capabilities and video. Other than those two, I find nothing else has improved from my old 5D. Anyhow, three months in, I've hardly shot any footage of video.
But earlier today, inspired by the Chase Jarvis' road test of the Nikon D7000, I managed to get off my butt and do something simple. I looked at my camera gear and looked for what has gathered the most dust. I found the Kirk Enterprises Window Mount and a Zenitar 16mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens. This will also give me a chance to test my recently purchased PhotoFast G-Monster 16GB 533x Plus Compact Flash card.
This is what the set-up looked like:
The lens is a Pentax screw-mount lens (M42). I have an adapter that lets you mount M42 lenses to Canon EOS bodies. Since this is a non-Canon EOS lens, there is no auto-focus and the aperture is set using the aperture ring on the lens. For this video, I set the aperture to f/2.8 and focused the lens to infinity. The camera was set to ISO 6400 and the white balance was set to Tungsten.
The movie was "edited" via iMovie. All I did was cut it down to 90 seconds. I have no idea how to post process these video files. Oh ... and I had to remove the audio to hide my road rage and filthy language. Just kidding. I was all smiles throughout this drive. Anxious and excited to see the results.
But alas, the end product ... is less than stellar. Its boring, although the fisheye effect is quite surreal in video.
As far as the equipment goes, I am impressed about the low light capabilities. I figure this is quite difficult for video cameras to achieve. The noise was quite visible though. I thought it would be cleaner. I shot three clips. The first one was a minute long. The second one was almost nine minutes long and the third, which contained the original footage in this movie, was a little over five minutes long. There were no pauses or any lag. I guess that means that the PhotoFast compact flash card also performed admirably. The window mount seemed solid. The Saab did quite well too. I was expecting the footage to have a lot more shake or vibration.
It's a lot better than the garbage that my Sony Webbie PM1 produced:
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