When do I have to calibrate my 5D2?

Before jumping the gun. Did you read the full article??

Nope, let's see.

OK, I read the article and it is about autofocus. Will not help me much.

I've sent my 5D MKII into Canon twice and the 7D once for adjustments, tuning, calibration and cleaning. Each time they came back the quality of photos improved. Make it easy and cheaper. Join the Canon Professional and you get no cost cleaning once or twice a year as well as calibration. When I first got the MKII the autofocus was bad. The second time they actually replaced the mechanism. $120 to calibrate is more than the membership.

Thanks, Don. There is no such club in my region. Sending it abroad will be a lot of trouble.

I've microadjusted my camera and lenses myself. Micro-Adjust "has" only to do with how autofocus behaves (frontfocusing vs. backfocusing). I never heard anything else and Im a CPS member. You can do it yourself but forget the spyder cal or these paper charts, it's a waste of time. You will need a system that works with the parallax principle to get repeatable results. After microadjusting my camera I get tack sharp images. See my blog for more infos on that:

http://danielschweinert.com/blog/files/5afa6bfbda2a902dc841e86be989c9cf-12.html

@wideweb Maybe you have a different problem with your camera and they calibrate something else. If you manual focus with x10 magnification you should get exactly that what you see on the lcd screen.

Update: Since I suspected a new degradation process, I have sent my camera and lenses to the shop. I have received SMS from Canon Service telling me that they could not confirm any problem.

I have sent them two soft video files and I am waiting for their judgement.

Am I sitting too close to the monitor? Maybe I need glasses? Do I have to read the user manual again?

I would like all of you to send me your cameras for calibration from now on... I promise to take good care of them, and you will probably get the same one back that you sent me.

"soft video files" now you're talking! What exactly do you mean by soft video? The non moving objects are soft or the moving ones? Do not forget that video on 5DMarkII is the result of line skipping and it might not be THAT sharp as a still image.

Before I had it factory tuned and calibrated the actual video was "soft" or appearance of soft focus. For me even the photos had a softer focus than my old original 5D.