New Canon 50D or used 5D?

While talking to Chuck West, the pro photographer who accompanied us on the cattle drive (shown here – the cowboy photographer at work), he made an interesting point about the choice of lenses he’d made for the trip. (I was on assignment from a magazine to write an article about the trip, so only taking photos in an amateur capacity.)

He uses a Canon 5D (which is a full-frame camera), and he only brought the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L with him. Space was at a premium, and we were going to be on horses all day, so lots of lenses (and lots of lens changing) wasn’t on.

The 24-105mm clearly makes most sense on a full-frame camera, where you could go from genuinely wide to pretty zoomed, and so don’t need an additional wide-angle lens most of the time.

On a crop body like my XT, it’s equivalent to 38-160mm, which might give you some extra reach, but isn’t actually as useful.

If you were trying to cover around the same 24-105mm range on a crop sensor camera, I guess you’d go for the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, and while it gets some pretty good reviews, its main strength seems to be versatility rather than flat-out image quality. I can’t see pros like Chuck going for it.

So even if you had a swanky new 50D, for this job you’d be carrying two lenses – maybe the pricey but good EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM and something else for the long end.

Upgrade paths

I’ve been pretty comfortable swapping lenses a lot – I love shooting with the 2 primes I have, so they’re often on and off the camera in conjunction with one or other of the zooms I use. But Chuck’s stripped-down kit got me thinking about my upgrade plans.

With the imminent arrival of the 5D Mark II, I’m actually thinking that a used 5D might be my next camera.

A used 5D would only be slightly more expensive than a new Canon 50D
– the other camera I was thinking of.

But for me, the 5D has benefits beyond the lens fitting convenience. The chief of them being image quality.

I don’t think the 50D’s Live View or higher MP count will really mean much too me, especially as it seems the 50D’s 15 MP count has come at the expense of marginal (at best) improvement in image quality over the 40D.

It’s true the LCD’s better than the 5D’s, and the frame rate is faster, but again, I don’t know if those things really make enough difference to me.

I’m still not decided, and it’ll be next year before I plump for one or the other, but right now I’m leaning 5D.