Hey everyone,

Well its time for me to upgrade from my trusty Sony Fx7.
I film drifting, it is fast, smokey and sometimes in low light situations!

I am looking at going down the DSLR route. I am at a stage where it is the 7d or the 5Dmk2
I am aware of the full frame difference, I am aware of the 5dmk2 being better for low light situations. But is it worth the extra money? I tried finding some video comparisons but all i could find were pictures.

I have no lenses and edit on a fairly new iMac.

Cheers Sam

You also have to ask yourself two additional questions:

1. Do you need a lot of telephoto lenses for what you are doing?
If yes, then you are better off with the 7D because of its 1,6x focal length. For the same telephoto effect, you will always need higher focal lengths on the 5D. These are usually more expensive, and a lot heavier.
The other way round if you need extreme wide angles, the 5D will be better for you.

2. You say you are filming fast action in low light conditions: Will you be able to handle the focussing on a full frame telephoto lens with f2,8 or less? Even on an APS-C chip it won't be easy, but your focal lengths will always be 1,6x shorter for the same angle of view, so you will have a little higher depth of field to work with on the 7D.

And then you have to consider that video DSLRs are not exactly like eng-workhorses. They are not video camcorders, with most lenses you can't zoom while filming, you have to change lenses a lot, and you generally need to work around its shortcomings (like aliasing in moving wide-angle shots with a lot of depth of field).
If you're okay with this, you can get great shots out of a DSLR, no doubt about that.

I just bought a 7D, but I already had a bunch of APS-C lenses, so I didn't ask the question 7D or 5DMkII. If I had bought it only for video, I would have chosen the 60D, but I will be using it more for still photography, and the 7D has a better autofocus system and higher speed than the 60D.

7d/60d has 60p. Be cool to do super slow-mo with drifting. See 1000 fps on vimeo. Using twixtor.
7D 1000 fps on Vimeo

Thanks for the replies!

Heiko - I won't be getting rid of my Fx7 just yet and I will be using that for shots where I need to zoom in. Why would you go the 60d over the 7d for videoing? Is it purely because of the articulated LCD?

Greg - I have seen that video, its quite amazing what can be achieved!

I'm still not sold on this DSLR thing. I own a 40D and am more than happy with it for stills. It doesn't do video so why should I upgrade it to a $4000 camera just for a 'film' look? Sell me the idea and I'll think about it.

if you need extreme wide angles, the 5D will be better for you.



Not necassarily. There is a proliferation of super wide zooms for APS-C cameras which are often cheaper than lenses with comparable focal lengths on full-frame cameras.

The wider view of the 5d is only an advantage when applied to lenses that you currently own. Yes, any lens will appear wider on a full frame camera but there are more super wide lenses, particularly zooms, available which work only on crop sensor cameras. These APS-C zoom lenses start from 10mm and are often rectilinear - that's the equivelant of a 15 or 16mm rectilinear lens which will fit a FF camera. Not to mention the 8mm and even 4.5mm fisheye lenses which are available for APS-C. So if you don't already own a range of lenses in a particular system, the cheapest and easiest way to get super wide photo's/video with a DSLR is with an APS-C camera and super-wide APS-C lenses.

There are, of course, other undeniable advantages to a FF sensor though such as sensitivity and DoF.