camera

The Canon 5DmkII is a good camera. Actually, it’s pretty great. As my workhorse camera body, I’m always on the look out for firmware upgrades that add additional functionality. Last week, Canon released the latest edition of the firmware for the 5D and…nothing.

Ok, that’s not entirely true, but when all the dust settles, the ‘new functionality’ isn’t all that exciting. It fixes a few bugs and increases writing speeds to Compact Flash cards. Exciting right?

The firmware update (Version 2.0.9) incorporates the following improvements and fixes.

1. Improves the writing/reading speeds when using UDMA 7-compatible CF cards.
2. Fixes a phenomenon that occurs when custom function C.Fn III-2 is set to [5: IS start] to assign IS start to the AF stop button on the lens: When used with lenses that do not have an AF stop button, the IS function will not work.
3. Corrects some mistakes in the menu screens displayed in Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai.

With the 7D on the market supporting 60fps video (and for a fraction of the cost), you’d think this is a feature that they’d push out to 5DmkII users everywhere – at least to tie us over until Canon tries to convince us to upgrade to the 5DmkIII, whenever that might be. Sure, the 7D doesn’t hold a light to the 5D in terms of still photography, the 60fps video is definitely a ‘nice to have’.

At the end of the day, it’s still an improvement on the previous firmware version. You can find instructions and the firmware upgrade here.