There are many folks, some more reasonable than others, who have faulted Canon for using the same 9-point autofocus layout in the new/real-soon-now 5D Mark II as the current/previous 5D.

This superb image set of Our New President, Our New Vice President and their Families, before and during the Chicago Victory Speech were taken with the original 5D by David Katz/Obama for America. As I write this, over 1.25 million folks have viewed some or all of these 82 images. I will wager that not one of them thought, “boy, if there were more autofocus points and they were more widely dispersed, these would have been even better.” Not one.

But there is always the next toy. The original 5D’s LCD, now nearly three years old, can makes it sometimes seem more like a film camera with histograms. It is not water tight. The frame rate is pitifully slow…

…and it has a sensor that is (still) as good as any and better than most. Despite all the nattering, in the right hands the 5D shines. The Canon EOS 5D is, still, an excellent general purpose tool. It will remain, for some time to come, a better camera than most of us are photographers.

I got sucked in…

Normally I have the good sense to steer clear of photography forums. Too often these are the hangouts of folks with firmly held opinions unencumbered by facts.

I’m more of a facts type of guy.

The 5D Mark II seems to have brought out all the usual suspects. Among the poorly reasoned arguments and tortured logic presented as facts is the persistent complaint that Canon was wrong to put a 21 MP sensor in the 5D Mark II. Except for landscape shooters and maybe some commercial types, no one needs that many pixels. In an homage to all that Nikon can serve up at the moment, the consensus seemed to be that 12 MP is, and will continue be, all that most folks need.

I currently shoot with a 21 MP 1Ds Mark III and also shot the original 12 MP 5D for most of two years. Assuming that Canon has retained the image quality of these two cameras (and early samples seem very promising) it is my experience that more pixels are better than fewer.

I hate dislike vertical 3:2 aspect ratio images. It is, more often than not, just too damn tall. I much prefer the a traditional 4:5 vertical crop.

21 MP gives you the luxury of tossing pixels out and doing so without remorse. The standard 5624 x 3736 pixel 1Ds3 capture is reduced to 4887 x 3736 when cropped to 4:5. The crop results in a 50 megabyte tiff file. The math is far less favorable to a 12 MP camera. The original 5D starts at 4372 x 2906 pixels and drops to 3310 x 2650 when cropped to 4:5. The cropped tiff weighs in at 25 MB.

Similar arithmetic applies to horizontals. Here 3:2 is tolerable but something more like 2:1 or it’s close HD cousin 16:9 look even better.

For the folks who just can’t seem to afford all the storage that larger RAWs and JPEGs produce. With one terabyte bare drives costing $160 or less, storage is the cheapest thing in my photographic ecosystem.

And if you are still unconvinced. Canon feels your pain. In addition to two reduced size JPEG sizes, the 5D Mark II has two pint sized RAW file sizes. sRAW1 is a 10 MP capture and, in an homage to the omnipresent web banner, sRAW2 weighs in at 5.2 MP.