The price to performance of used cameras is absurd. My view is that digital photography tech hit maturity in 2008 with the release of the Canon 5D Mark II and Nikon D700.
There is an overwhelming amount of professional gear out there at rock bottom prices. Consumer gear can be a blast when it’s cheap enough. The right camera for a style of shooting is going to be better than whatever the newest camera happens to be. (Unless you’re doing sports/action/wildlife. AF tech is getting absurd.)
I have had batteries fall apart, fail within months, and with a capacity far below what’s on the label. It’s difficult to find good quality third party batteries.
There is an easy way ANYONE can inexpensively capacity test camera batteries. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to capacity test camera batteries. It is a simple DIY project that only requires, ~$30, a screwdriver, and pair of wire strippers.
All lenses aren’t equal, especially when it comes to vintage and early digital camera lenses. Modern lenses will give you images that are razor sharp corner to corner. Vintage lenses can set themselves apart by how they render, the color you can get with them, interesting bokeh, or other characteristics not valued by current photographers.
On the other hand, many vintage lenses are not good. Their performance may not be good enough to set them apart from other lenses. Worse, as time has gone on some lenses have defects such as haze, fungus, balsam separation, or degraded grease, that will render them worthless because of the difficulty in repair.
I’m somewhat indiscriminate in my purchasing of gear, so I get a mix of good, bad, and average. The lens reviews will help you find a lens worth owning. These are popular film cameras that recieve frequent lens questions.
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Marketing jargon and elitism are as big of a problem as the overwhelming number of choices out there.
There are an overwhelming number of camera models to sort through.
“Flagship” professional cameras have aged significantly better than swaths of newer entry level bodies. They will have additional features, we likely be weather sealed, have superior specs, customizable buttons, and accessories.
Canon released 192 EF lenses. There are 20 Canon EF-S lenses, that are not compatible with the Canon 5D mark II.
Copies of the camera are selling for around $200. With a large enough budget, it can make sense to upgrade. The 5D mark III, mark IV, and 1D X series all have better autofocus.
EF-S lenses are not compatible with the 5D mark II, or any camera with an EF mount. They can be identified because they have a white square to indicate where to mount them to a camera.
Here are the 6 best cameras I could find for less than $100. Take note of memory card requirements. Make sure to get a charger included because none of them can be charged by USB.
Prices are pulled from eBay using the ‘Completed Items’ filter.
Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, thrift stores, Kajiji, Gumtree, Yahoo Auctions, flea markets, swap meets, garage sales, and estate sales are other good places to look.
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Lens mounts can have hundreds of compatible lenses. Price lists allow you to quickly narrow down your search.
Comparable lenses tend to have similar uses prices. Specialty/niche use cases can have large differences in price to performance between systems.
My favorite because of the quantity of inexpensive quality glass available. Great for the majority of budgets under $750 when considering a complete kit.
LP-E6, LP-E6N, and LP-E6Nh batteries have different capacities. They are all forward and backwards compatible.
There are 19 different models that are compatible with the batteries.
In my testing, all third party battery manufacturers overstate the capacity of their batteries. Considering the price of OEM Canon batteries, third party options can still be compelling.
These are the 19 models that use LP-E6 batteries.
The Canon 5D mark II has a type II CompactFlash memory card slot. Type II slots are wider so microdrives could be used. Any Compact Flash card will fit.
An SD to CF card adapter can be used. As long as the SD card is fast enough, the maximum speeds I tested were 18MB/s continuous write and 20MB/s continuous read.
For Magic Lantern RAW video, only the fastest CompactFlash cards are will work. This is because nearly 100MB/s write speed is needed.