Canon 5D mark i banding

[sotos97]

I have been doing some test shots today with my favorite 5D - The faulty 5D mark i. 

I bought this in June and have taken around 6000 shots. In some of the shots I have seen the notorious banding issue. Tried some indoor shots today and it was very apparent, also in cases where I didn't pull shadows. I used the 50mm 1.4 but have seen it happen with the 85mm 1.8 as well. Is there any way to fix this or prevent it from happening? I am not a hopeless romantic, I have a 5D4 but I will not give up my 5D mark i, it renders beautiful images.

[sotos97]

I don't know why you are so negative towards jpeg photography. A lot of people dial in their custom profiles on Canon and Fuji and shoot jpegs with great success and sell their prints as well. Canon put a lot of work into jpeg rendering in camera and that's why the features exist to use them. I shoot jpegs happily and raw as well and many times I will go for the raw file but others I will slightly touch the jpeg.

[ebiggs1]

"I don't know why you are so negative towards jpeg photography."

Beyond it being inferior to Raw, I have nothing negative about jpg.  My difference is, I make them myself from the raw data. My feelings are that I know better than the camera.  The camera 'guesses' what is correct. Albeit it does so fairly well and on simple snap shot type photos, it is OK. It is just another choice, if you are satisfied with your results by all means do it.

However, keep in mind jpg is destructive. Every time it is saved, whether you edit it or not, it degrades. Raw does not.  When the cameras renders your Raw to jpg image it throws away data that is lost forever. If you had a shadow, for instance, you wanted to see if you could recover more detail, Raw has far more to work with than a jpg because the camera has trashed most of the detail. Same thing with color temp or WB or actually any editing adjustment.

The reason your camera has a jpg option is, you can not view or see a Raw file. It must be converted to something like a jpg. Even when you select jpg, the camera shoots Raw. There is no such thing as shooting in a jpg file format. The camera always shoots in Raw file format. 

[sotos97]

Some of my jpegs have been featured in online magazines and I never received a comment indicating that they knew it was a jpeg. Getting it right in camera is an art form by itself which is hard to achieve, especially for lazy photographers today that think dynamic range will save their butt every time.

[ebiggs1]

I made my case and you made yours. There is an end to it but, my friend, the "art form" is in post editing where there are infinite adjustments instead a very few in-camera settings.

Hope you get the banding issues under control.