[Big G]

As great as my K20D is, believe me when I say the 7D is absolutely head and shoulders better, but so it damn well should be given that the 7D body costs over twice as much as the K20D plus it's a brand new offering.

Autofocus along with the frames per second is blisteringly fast, I'm gobsmacked at how fast and accurate it is, not to mention the ability to customise the focus / drive priorities for different applications. Low light autofocus is also brand new to me - the K20D was pretty decent for a static subject in good light, but as soon as the light level dropped significantly it struggled.

I've not had a chance yet to put it through its paces fully yet, the weather has been rubbish where I am, but I will report back when I do.

[Jebus]

@ Pingflood - for sure autofocus=quantum leap over Pentax (although forum member Kunik with K7 would disagree) -what about IQ?

Would you agree that the 50D/7D does not really outshine the K10/20D/K7 with regards IQ?

IQ isn't going to be a big difference no matter what new APS-C camera you buy these days. They are all excellent. There is so much awesome built into the 7D it's not even funny. It's the little things as well that make it so user friendly. Like how you can set a different focus point depending on the orientation of the camera. Say i'm taking a photo of an environment in landscape mode (Center AF point) I can quickly rotate the camera 90 degrees for a portrait and have it's AF point immediately change to the right spot without me changing a thing. It's a small thing yes, but there are a thousand other things like this that are really useful.

I'd say my 7D smashes the K10D and K20D in high ISO performance though, as it should because it's a relatively new camera. The Pentax K-x even smashes those 2.

[yeatzee]

Being the owner of a 50D and a 1Ds II, I can attest that even the 40D/50D bodies are a quantum leap over anything Pentax I've touched auto focus wise. In fact, the jump from my K20D to a 50D is greater than the 50D to a 1-series.

Im going to have to disagree here, at least with what I've seen personally. I have the lowly, often called pathetic K200d and we compared it to my friends newly purchased 50d. It was minimally better on AF-S and that was with the 50mm F/1.8, 50mm F/1.4, and the kit lens (not sure what the specs are on that). For me the DA 55-300mm, and kit lens were used. (I need more auto focus lenses :ugh

In AF-C it was quite a bit better.... good for him as he likes taking car shots (races) but for me (a macro shooter) that means nothing. But definitely not a "Quantum Leap" even against My camera's Achilles heel IMO. After all I've heard from you and others I was expecting it to be apparent it was far superior but I just did not find that to be so.

Now I am not bashing the camera, its truly a spectacular tool and my friend has taken some incredible images with it (some of which i want prints of). I just want to chime in with my own findings

[Big G]

Ok, after a serious play with the EOS 7D and a good read of the manual, here are my likes, dislikes and verdicts. Please remember that I'm coming from a K20D so my feelings will be based on switching from a body that's over 2 years old now. If you're a Canon 50D owner, or a Pentax K-7 user, you may feel differently about it. So here goes:

Good points / Likes

- The Autofocus. It's not great, it's absolutely brilliant. Very fast, very accurate, impressive low light performance to go with it. Better still, the ability to fully customise from single, to assisted-single, to cluster, to "all 19 AF points" to suit your needs is tremendous. You can also fully customise the AF sensitivity for tracking to prevent the focus being thrown by an object getting in the way (such as another player in a football game). The AF drive priorities can be set too so that the AF takes priority over the drive rate, and vice versa. Auto rotation of the AF points when moving from landscape to portrait is an excellent touch.

- The Autofocus. Did I mention the autofocus?

- Canon USM is clearly superior to SDM (comparing my USM lens to my 17-70 SDM).

- The 15-85mm USM is a very sharp lens and makes the most of the 18 MP.

- Having 18 megapixels to play with is great, but there is a caveat (see below).

- Frame rate. I don't need to use the full 8 fps just yet, but it's good to have under your finger when you need it.

- ISO performance. ISO 3200 is no problem for the 7D and noise is very minimal after some Noise Ninja attention. ISO 6400 starts to tail off.

- Weather sealed. Don't believe me? Look here. One point that kept me away from Canikon was somewhat wishy-washy stance on weather sealing on their semi-pro bodies. The 7D is the first affordable weather sealed unit - this was very important to me moving from the rugged K20D, I didn't want to give up the weather sealing.

- 100% viewfinder. What you see is what you get.

- Customiseable viewfinder. Don't like those black boxes for autofocus points? Turn the unused ones off in the menu! Don't like the grid? Turn that off too!

- The rear screen is excellent.

- All the buttons are in the right place. Metering, white balance, AF drive and ISO are all under my index finger.

- The HD movie modes are excellent and video quality is just supreme. I didn't think I'd care about video, but being able to shoot small videos to go with shots has been great fun. I've become an uncle recently, and making small videos of my nieces has been great fun and in great quality too.

- Long exposure noise reduction can be switched off completely, no more waiting around when I shoot 2 minute exposures.

- Build quality. It's rock solid, everything feels substantial and very good quality.

- Auto white balance and the metering system works without giving it a thought, even under tungsten - good job Canon.

- A large range of pro spec telephoto lenses to choose from plus excellent rental opportunities.

Bad points / dislikes

- The build quality comes at a price: it's big and it's heavy. If you're a fan of D90 / K-7 sized & weighted cameras, stop reading now and don't buy a 7D. On the plus side, it fits my hand perfectly and I find it very comfortable to use. The weight doesn't bother me however it may bother those that want to travel lightweight with a bunch of Pentax ltds.

- Maybe not a bad point, but it comes with the territory: this is a pretty complex camera and you need to invest a lot of time on getting to grips with it. A week later and I'm still reading the manual, and still running a few tests. It doesn't matter how much you think you know about photography, this is a serious camera for serious photographers - stay away if you just aim to take some holiday snaps or the odd picture of a flower. There is a lot of moaning and whining over on dpreview.com of people who are disappointed with the 7D performance, but on reading their posts it's pretty clear they just don't know how to use it.

- no TAv mode.... however there is an auto-ISO mode under the manual setting. Dial in your aperture, shutter speed, set the ISO to 'A' and it'll work the same way as TAv. My only problem is that you can't set + or - EV using auto ISO this way, I hope Canon address this in a firmware update.

- Mirror lockup. This is a minor niggle and could be construed as positive or negative, perhaps I'm stuck in my Pentax ways. You need to enable mirror lockup through the menu (disabled by default). This isn't that big a deal, but I was just used to be able to set it to a 2 second timer and let it do it automatically. It would have been nice to have the ability to enable, disable and 'when using self timer'.

- Pentaxians are bound to miss the rear eDial under the right thumb, but you very quickly adjust and I now prefer to have nothing cluttering up my thumb area. I simply move my thumb to the left and the eDial on the back is in perfect reach. YMMV.

- I'm not convinced 18 MP was the right thing to do, I'd have preferred 12 MP and vastly improved ISO 6400 noise. Infact, I think the Pentax KX at ISO 6400 is little bit better than the 7D based on what I've seen over at Imaging Resource. That said, APS-C doesn't do a great job of ISO 6400.

- No lends hood with the 15-85mm lens package?! Come on....

- No tripod collar with the 70-200mm f/4 L? Come on.... (plus it's about £60! - cheap imitation from ebay will do me)

- No HDMI lead supplied.

[pingflood]

- Mirror lockup. This is a minor niggle and could be construed as positive or negative, perhaps I'm stuck in my Pentax ways. You need to enable mirror lockup through the menu (disabled by default). This isn't that big a deal, but I was just used to be able to set it to a 2 second timer and let it do it automatically. It would have been nice to have the ability to enable, disable and 'when using self timer'.

Just curious -- why don't you just use the live view button? Effectively accomplishes the same thing as mirror lockup and is just a press away. I use that on my 50D whenever I do astrophotography.

Also, if you think the 7D is heavy, stay away from the 1-series.

[Big G]

Just curious -- why don't you just use the live view button? Effectively accomplishes the same thing as mirror lockup and is just a press away. I use that on my 50D whenever I do astrophotography.

Also, if you think the 7D is heavy, stay away from the 1-series.

That's a fair point, never thought to use live view, I will give that a spin!

I find the weight of the 7D fine, feels solid as a rock - I don't think it's for everyone though, particularly if small body size is important to you.

[pingflood]

That's a fair point, never thought to use live view, I will give that a spin!

I find the weight of the 7D fine, feels solid as a rock - I don't think it's for everyone though, particularly if small body size is important to you.

Yeah, I didn't think about the LV option at first either, but it is just a single button press and you're there. Also, if you enable Silent Mode (I would guess the 7D has it since the 50D does) you can make it vibrate even less...

[dylansalt]

IQ, IQ, IQ - how's it???

Considering the pics I have seen & downloaded the sensor seems to have quite a lovely natural but poppy color rendering.

Down size the 18mp file down to the KX 12mp and then judge the noise comparison.

I also find with the extra resolution that pictures exhibit an almost 3D quality to them and that the HD video is the best of any aps-c dslr.

Regards

Dyls

[Big G]

Image quality is brilliant. That's all you need to know.

[VHDEL]

Image quality is brilliant. That's all you need to know.

I'd have to agree, the IQ is excellent and focus is spot on every time for single shot candids.

[Big G]

Still waiting on good weather and lighting where I am, but here is an example with a 100% crop. You can see the silhouette of me crouching down, taking the shot in the reflection of the Swan's eye.

1/1000 , f/5.6, ISO 800 - cropped image.

[Big G]

... and a test shot whilst going for a coffee.

1/30s handheld @ 70mm, f/5.6, ISO 1250, no noise reduction applied, focus locked onto the eye.



50% crop



100% crop, you can see me taking the shot here

[pingflood]

At those ISOs it does look a lot like the 50D. Do you have any 3200/6400 crops to share?

[dylansalt]

Big G

Are these shots straight out of the cam without any sharpening applied?

[Big G]

Nope, these are converted RAW files with a tiny amount of sharpening (1.0 high pass sharpening mask).

I will get ISO 3200 and 6400 crops tomorrow for you to have a peep .