If you want to take stills you really should pony up for at least one Canon EOS lens. My 5DII came in a kit with the 24-105 f4L IS USM which is a stellar lens for snaps.

For creative video my collection of half a dozen manual Nikon lenses cost less on eBay than just one new or even a decent used Canon lens which I suspect is a major reason that many people are investing in Nikon rather than Canon lenses for video. The old manual Nikon lenses are just so much cheaper to buy.

Cheers

Nigel

I've got the 70-300mm F/4-5.6 IS, but I'm finding that I want to use the Nikon primes over the zoom in a lot of cases, even if I have to set up the shot old school.

To way in on the lens discussion, i purchased the 24-70 canon L lens which i love, but will most likely buy zeiss nikon-mount lenses for the remainder of the life of the camera. but i do love the 24-70 i shot for 2 or 3 hours last night and got some amazing photos in very low natural light.

That is the one canon lens I might buy besides the 50mm 1.8 I got just to have something to play with. Everything else will be Nikon/Zeiss for the day I probably switch to a Nikon body that has manual control with video. I don't see that happening with Canon.

The issue I most want to see addressed in a firmware upgrade are these horrible line-skipping and demosaicing artifacts I am getting. :(

Anytime I shoot golden water at sunset, I get horrendous blue/magenta artifacts.

You don't need new firmware, you need an optical filter. To fix it digitally, the sensor would have to be three times as fast. (It looks like they're sampling every third line or so.) The DSP would need enough power to do some vertical digital filtering as well. I would guess that we won't see this in HDSLRs for at least five years.

For now, I find that a Tiffen Soft/fx #1 works well in the 85mm - 105mm range.

Also, the artifact you're seeing might be due to the lens as well. Color fringing can occur on details that are slightly out of focus. The following link shows Purple Fringing and Longitudinal Chromatic Aberrations (LoCA):
Nikkor AF 85mm f/1.4D - Review / Test Report

Using a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 on a test pattern, the magenta/green fringes were terrible. I found that, rather than focusing with sharpness, it was more effective to hit focus by splitting the difference between the green side and the magenta side of the artifact.

Anyway, you might give some Soft/fx filters a try. In general, I'd go for #0 for a 200mm, #1 for 100/85, #2 for 50, and so on. Your results might vary, depending on the physical length of the lens and diameter of the filter. I found that a 52mm soft/fx #1 did nothing on a 24mm, didn't do enough on a 50mm, and was ever so slightly too aggressive on a Nikon 105mm f/2.8 AF Micro.

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/2914/86661481hu7.jpg

This is the type of artifacting I'm talking about. It occurs regardless of the lens I use, including the EF 24L. The bottom pic is a "corrected" version using a gaussian, masked blur on chroma.

Would a filter help with this? Is it essentially going to soften my 1080p?

Yes, a filter will definitely help. It needs to be done optically, rather than in post, as you've experienced.

The 5D MkII has an optical low pass filter that's optimized for it's 3,744 lines as a still camera. We need something that's optimized for 1,080 lines.

Unfortunately, we can't get a brickwall filter that allows full resolution at 1,080 lines, yet filters out 100% of aliasing at 1,081 lines and above. It's probably more reasonable to expect a filter to pass 1,080, yet filter 1,500 and above - or to pass 720 lines, and filter 1,081. The first case would be sharp at 1080 and would cut aliasing in half, but would not stop it entirely. The second case would stop all aliasing, and would be soft at 1080p, but would be perfect with Vimeo's 720p.

You might try a Soft/fx #1 on a 50mm lens, if you want 1,080 resolution and a bit less aliasing. Go with a Soft/fx #2 on a 50mm lens for virtually no aliasing, sacrificing resolution.

Tiffen also makes some filters that reduce contrast and perform anti-alias filtering that are made specifically to make video look less digital. I haven't tried them, but these could be a nice solution.

Note that RED offers really high resolution in their upcoming cameras. The idea is to shoot, say, 3k and end up with 2k or 1080p. There's no aliasing at 3k, but it's soft. Scale it down, and the result should be excellent.

In the discussion as to whether the 5D is primarily a still or video camera... in regards to its optical low pass filter, it's definitely primarily a still camera.

Thanks for helping me with this.

Yes, I'm planning to buy a Red DSMC. I just want to be able to shoot usable 1080p on the 5D2 in the meantime.

Any chance that the firmware upgrade might address this issue? is it even possible to fix with software/firmware?

It's not even remotely possible. Well, technically, it is possible, but it's about as difficult as a firmware that enables time travel, world peace, and anti-gravity. :)

I agree with Daniel. It would really take a hardware upgrade.

They got half of it right. Horizontally, they seem to be reading every pixel and filtering down, but the vertical dimension is lacking.

Anyway, give some filters a try. Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Each of your lenses might need a unique filter.