Is my new camera better?

Here's my POTD for January 3rd.
Really beautiful day today; 3C and sunny.


This morning I received a query through my pbase account from someone who was wondering if the Canon 5D MKII was worth the upgrade. Here's my resonse:

Yes, I find the 5D II to be a worthy upgrade to the 5D. The 5D has incredible image quality, but the user experience falls far short of the Mark II:
- The live view for manual focusing is extremely useful
- I had to send in my 5D MK I in three times for cleaning so the self cleaning mechanism is very important to me.
- The 14 bit files are yielding smoother gradients, which is very useful to someone like me who takes quite a few landscape shots.
- I have not calibrated my lenses yet (will do so next week), but I think I can squeeze out just a little more sharpness out of a few of my lenses with it.
- ISO 3200 is very usable as long as you use DPP for processing. For ISO 6400 you have to be very careful to expose correctly otherwise there will be too much noise.
- Focusing has not been a problem for me at all although I am not a sports shooter.
- I think the 5D MK II has ever so slightly better dynamic range.
- Highlight tone priority works great for snow shots.
- The LCD is vastly better

Thus far there have been two problems:
- Even though the sensor cleaner appears to work well, I have quite a bit of dust in the viewfinder. I had hoped they would have fixed this.
- I had a small cluster of hot pixels appear after my first few shots. Running the manual clean for a few seconds with the lens on appeared to resolve it.

I have not seen any evidence of the black dots issue, nor have I been looking for it.

Resolution aside, in everyday use you would be hard pressed to tell photos from both cameras apart although I would give a slight edge in IQ to the 5DII. On the operation side the differences are significant; I have taken both cameras out a few times now and always grab the 5D MKII. I would buy the camera again just for the operational differences.
To me it was a very expensive purchase although I am enjoying it immensely.

I hope my comments have been useful.

Here's my POTD from January 2nd. It was a very blah day and the lighting levels were quite poor. As a result I had to use my fasted lens, the 85MM F1.8. It's a great lens for portraits although it's slow to focus and its minimum focus distance is only about a meter.



Here's one other shot from yeasterday the simply shows off the cropping capabilities of a 21 MP camera. This image, even after cropping was still about 1200 x 1000 pixels in size.


Original 21MP image: