Which one - 5DmII used or 6D new?

I have sold my 7D, and am looking for an upgraded replacement. I have found 5DmII for $1,500 used (with 41K actuations) and 6D new for $1,699.

I take photos as a hobbyist.

Which one is recommended?

With the cost that close, the 6D is the better camera but 1.5k seems a bit high for a used 5DII. If you look in the classifieds here, $800 to $1000 is more the range.

There is one 5D2 listed on Kijiji Calgary for 950. If you want the 5D2 the price you're looking at is too high. Does it come with a lens or accessories for that price? I would expect similar prices in Victoria.

The 6D is the better camera, and it is what I chose for my first full frame.

csongadar . . . What do you mostly shoot? The 6D is vastly superior to the 5D2 for Astro, and it is excellent in low light. Also, are you aware of the price increases that will affect Canadian buyers as of April 1st? If you want the 6D, you probably don't have long to pick it up at $1699.

Almost all of the 5dmk2's I've seen for sale in Canada are at or less than the C$1000.00 mark - with actuations from around 8K to 40K, doesn't seem to affect the prices. So that price is high, for that shuttercount.

I've sent a pm.

gjl711 wrote in post #17926683
With the cost that close, the 6D is the better camera but 1.5k seems a bit high for a used 5DII. If you look in the classifieds here, $800 to $1000 is more the range.

That's Canadian... not USD. Prices seem right for the 6D.

Go 6D. The 5D2 is a few years older tech.

For the kind of subjects I see in your 500px gallery--landscape and portraits--the 6D is the best choice from Canon's lineup. I would not bother with a used 5DmkII, the 6D is better for your purposes. The few advantages the 5DmkII has mostly benefit professionals (dual card slot) or video shooters (headphone jack, anti-aliasing filter).

absplastic wrote in post #17928270
For the kind of subjects I see in your 500px gallery--landscape and portraits--the 6D is the best choice from Canon's lineup. I would not bother with a used 5DmkII, the 6D is better for your purposes. The few advantages the 5DmkII has mostly benefit professionals (dual card slot) or video shooters (headphone jack, anti-aliasing filter).

The 5DII does not have dual card slots

gjl711 wrote in post #17928273
The 5DII does not have dual card slots

My bad, you're right.

Thanks all. I am settling for 6D.

The big advantage of the 5D II is the AF joystick. I think you can co-opt the rocker on the 6D, but it's still not as fast.

KnightRT wrote in post #17931187
The big advantage of the 5D II is the AF joystick. I think you can co-opt the rocker on the 6D, but it's still not as fast.

For me, what makes the 6D AF point selection a bit annoying is not the placement or style of the D-pad vs joystick, but the unintuitive way it cycles through the points. If you have the top center Af point selected, a right press on the d-pad selects the one to the right and slightly down, but another right press does not select the far-right AF point, instead it selects all the points. To get to that far right point, you either need to push the d-pad down then right, or diagonally down and right. And if that's not bad enough, neither the index finger dial nor the rear dial let you cycle through all the points, just the current row or column and "all points". This just doesn't feel right to me. I never had these issues with the 60D or 5DmkII because they don't have those two extra points left and right of center, and the finger dial cycled through all the points individually.

That's annoying.

I imagine it'd be more annoying if there were more AF points. That's what concerns me with most current bodies. Fuji's X-Pro2 is a good example: 200-something selectable points, which you can reduce to 70-something for "speed". Well, I don't want 70. I want 5, widely spaced. That's all it takes to pick a point that won't cause focus shift with fast lenses when I recompose.

My use case is typical: something is happening and I have maybe three seconds to pick a point, focus, recompose, and shoot. The reviews seem to think it's a benefit that I can pick exactly the right AF point in such a way that I don't have to recompose, as if I had all the time in the world to cycle through them all with whatever kludgy interface is currently in vogue.

Zone AF doesn't solve the problem because I can't control which AF point it picks in the zone, which will inevitably be someone's eyebrow unless they also have eye detection. The latest designs seem to want to you to give up on manual point selection entirely. Until it's hooked into my brain, that's a nonstarter.

I'm waiting for the return of Canon's eye-controlled AF or, lacking that, the ability to tap (better yet, to drag) on the unlit touchscreen when my eye is to the finder and have it pick an AF point. Every review loves the AF joystick, but honestly, even that is about an order of magnitude slower than I'd like the point selection process to be.

Yeah, I remember the eye-control you are talking about. My Elan IIe film camera had something like that (which seemed unnecessary with just 3 AF points). I'm not sure if it was a precise enough tech to get it to work with 61+ AF points.

The joystick/d-pad inputs are a pain. Like you, I am a single AF point shooter, at least when shooting non-moving people, and changing points does sometimes slow me down. One nice thing that the 6D and 5DmkIII have is the orientation-linked AF point selection, where the camera remembers which AF point you are using separately for portrait and landscape orientations of the camera. 5DmkII does not have this. Neither the 5DmkII nor 6D has the registered AF point option that lets you temporarily change the AF point and then pop back to your favorite point with one button press.