One small 5d Mark II data point

[MikeBinOK]

On hearing a couple of favorable reports on the firmware upgrade for the 5D Mark II, I decided to bite the bullet and order one to replace my beloved but "ancient" 1Ds.  I was kind of hoping Canon already had fixed cameras in the pipeline in case there were hardware tweaks besides the firmware that has been announced, but when I received my camera today, I saw that it had the old firmware version.  After the sun set, I tried a couple of city shots at ISO 1600 and had none of the dreaded black dots.  I went ahead and upgraded the firmware, and still no black dots.  I doubt I will ever shoot sRAW (for me, it is just a thing that takes up RAM in the camera and gives me a chance to screw up by specifying it by accident in place of "real" RAW), so I didn't try the sRAW fix.

Anyway, I had no black dots either before or after the firmware upgrade, for whatever it is worth.  Just a few casual shots, so not a definitive test.  I ended up paying $63 extra to have the camera shipped to me overnight, so it would be ready to go with me on a short trip to Colorado tomorrow.  Whee!  I'm leary of shooting an unfamiliar camera on a trip, but I'm still gonna take it!

Totally off-topic for Bob--I have "McAfee Site Advisor" loaded on my computer thanks to my cable company, and it shows a "yellow flag" for bobatkins.com.  It says that downloads on the site contain adware, spyware, or other stuff that many people consider unwanted.  I have no idea of the reason for this (and I don't think for a moment that you have deliberately put such stuff here) but you might want to investigate by querying McAfee or whatever else you do about such things!  I have no clue if their suspicion is unjustified, or if there is something (possibly in the ads, which I understand that you don't control) unknown to you that justifies the the yellow flag.

[Bob Atkins]

Beats me why the site would be "yellow flagged". There really aren't any downloads here apart from normal HTML pages. There are a could of DOF utilities which are exectutable files, but since I wrotethem and compliled them and they'r eonly hosted on my own server I'm 99.999% sure they don't contain any "malware".

Could be the ads, but they're Google ads which also appear on many, many other websites.

It could also be just the fact that the site stores cookies for those logged into the forums. Some security programs flag cookies, which are no security risk but could be used to "track" users in some way. I don't use any cookie data here for anything other than enabling users to stay logged into the forums (and that's part of the SMF forum software, not something I wrote).

Glad your 5D MkII seems OK. I still haven't seen the black dots with the one I'm looking at right now, and it has the "old" 1.0.6 firmware.