"The EOS 5D Mark II boasts a new 21MP CMOS sensor, an expanded ISO range of 50-25,600 and a wealth of improvements and new features including full 1080p HD movie recording, live view, 3.0" 920k dot LCD, DIGIC IV processor, increased battery capacity and sensor dust reduction. UPDATE: Body-only prices: US: $ 2,699, EU: € 2,499, UK: £ 2,299." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

Is this not the coolest digital camera yet?! - Susan Beebe

Holy cow, this is the first time I am thinking about migrating to Canon. Price is very competitive. - andrei_c

Looks like the competition is working -- Canon one ups Nikon - Brian Sullivan

I'd like to see some, you know, side by side image comparisons before I crown winners based on feature lists... That said I very much hope Nikon releases a firmware update to support live video in the D700. - Kevin Fox

Not likely, Kevin; video recording isn't a simple software feature. To do it right you have to put dedicated hardware onboard. - Gabe

Quicktime 1080p H.264; 38.6 Mbits/sec - Paul Buchheit

It's AVC and it's HD; I'm not sure how to tell if it's AVCHD. - Gabe

Gabe, the Digic image processors are dedicated hardware. I so appreciate bug fixes, but hate how Canon, and other makers too, provide no feature updates in their firmware upgrades. Like computers, digital cameras would be awesome with software-upgraded features. - John Lam

John: The DIGIC processor is an image processor, not necessarily a video processor. Rumor has it the 5D2 processes video with a separate chip. It would not surprise me at all if DIGIC and EXPEED (Nikon's version) have no capability to create realtime video. Kodak's SLRs were always great because they always added such cool features in firmware updates. But they sucked because those new features were only possible due to the fact that they didn't have dedicated circuitry, which made them slow. - Gabe

I wonder if this one can do panoramic type shots. - Manjeera

I was just thinking: Shooting RAW images at 21 Megapixel can eat my hard disk after a single weekend.....Should i invest in Seagate/WD? :-) - Ron Shoshani

You could always use the 10MP mode, Ron. - Gabe

does anyone know whether it will allow manual shooting for video? nikon d90 doesn't, which kills if you want to wear the indie hat and start playing around with colors/exposure/aperture. - Alvin Woon

Amazon taking preorders now. canogacamera.com says within the hour they'll have a link up. - Michael Herf

I heard from a couple of friends that the new Nikon is terrible for shooting video, due to utlizing a "rolling shutter", resulting in artifacts such as in the iPhone photo mode (i.e. live video preview before shutter release). Wondering how the 5DMkII handles this and whether or not the mechanism has something to do with these cams being SLRs and thus due to technical restrictions and/or video being more or less an afterthought. - Mustafa K. Isik

Mustafa: an electronic shutter takes up half the space of each pixel, so the usual trade off is between a proper video mode and an extra stop of low-light performance. It may be possible that Canon figured out a third solution, but it's likely to have the same problem (seeing as all the sample videos were shot on a tripod). - Gabe

Here is a Flickr 25600 ISO Group. So far only Nikon ... http://www.flickr.com/groups... - Franz

Ⓖabe: Thanks for the info. Can't wait to see more video footage taken with the camera in handheld and moving mode. - Mustafa K. Isik