I got my hands on a 1 day old 7D today and spent the afternoon working with it and my trusty 300D. This 7D came from the factory with the new 1.1.0 firmware already installed. Overall I was pleased with the camera and it exhibited none of the problems that Royce, Darwin and others have experienced.
Lenses for the 7D were the Sigma 150-500 and the Canon 18-200. I used the Nikon 18-200 for comparison but do note that the Canon 18-200 has been tested to have about 20% better resolution than the Nikon so the Nikon does have a lens bourne disadvantage.
After setting up the 7D properly I did some $5 bill tests and the usual AF type tests. But first some preliminary stuff.
One notices right away when putting the D300 to the eye and the 7D to the eye that the D300 viewfinder vie is WAY bigger. When you switch from the D300 to the 7D it feels like you suddenly backed up and are looking down a tunnel. Or when you go from the 7D to the D300 it feels like the world just opened up for you. I didn't look up the difference in size but qualitatively the D300 has the much bigger projected image onto your eye. Another thing I noted is that the 7D seems to have an awful lot of AF customization options, almost to the point of it being overly complicated for no reason but there are some nice customization features in there. Another thing I noticed during set-up is that Canon now has an option to not allow the shutter speed to go slower than 1/60 sec in Av mode with a flash on - that's a nice safety net that Nikon and others have always had. Figuring out how to turn on the multi-controller for AF settings had me baffled for a while since the custom function for that is NOT in the AF custom functions. Finding some of this stuff in the manual is pretty useless too. On several occasions the index for something pointed to a page that had nothing about the subject in it and other pages that did were not indexed.
Lens calibration came next. The 18-200 required a -5 setting and the 150-500 required a +10 setting using the Moire interference pattern method. None of my Nikon lenses and bodies have ever needed any adjustment. As an aside, I was quite pleased with the AF performance and overall sharpness of the Sigma 150-500. It seems that this is one of the good ones but much more testing would be required in different regimes to be sure.
Next it was on to the $5 bill test. I am hanging onto a crisp old one because the new ones don't have the pattern in the lower right that I like to test. The 7D marginally outresolved the D300 in this test however since the Canon lens, on paper, has significantly higher resolution, at best I can say the two cameras are in the same ballpark but in this test, I give the nod to the 7D. I also noticed that 7D files definitely can handle more sharpening before breaking up and require about twice as much sharpening than the D300 files to get to optimal sharpness before sharpening artifacts occur. This is inline with the theory that the 7D has a very strong AA filter. I didn't test noise beyond a simple blue sky shot at ISO 200 on both and the D300 files were slightly cleaner for noise. One thing I did note that for a given exposure (ISO, SS, aperture), the Canon is about 1/3 stop brighter than the Nikon.
Next it was out to the park for some tracking tests. Coots were willing to oblige and the 7D tracks as well as any Canon I have used if not better. This was using single point, normal, tracking priority settings. Since the Sigma was an f/6.7 lens, I used the Nikon 200-400 with 1.7x and here the 7D with Sigma lens outperformed the 200-400 with 1.7x. However using the 200-400 by itself or the Nikon 500 f/4, there is no comparison in AF, the Nikon absolutely kills it in acquisition and tracking. Unfortunately I didn't have a Canon 500/4 available for an apples to apples comparison but in summary, I was pleased with subject tracking on the water even with the relatively slow Sigma lens. This bodes well for AF with faster lenses.
So overall, I am pleased with what Canon has done with the 7D, at least this 7D since it seems the old QA/QC bugaboo has still not been solved by Canon. As stated before, this particular camera exhibited none of the softness or AF issues that others have noted but I did spend quite some time perfecting the AF with the micro adjustments for each of the two lenses. I would have no hesitation in taking this body out with a Canon 500 IS and TC's for some serious bird/wildlife photography.
I will play with the 7D a little more tomorrow and will add any additional info I come up with.
I had a couple more hours this morning and got to test the cameras capability of tracking flying pigeons. Now I am doing this with an f/6.3 lens at 500mm so my expectations were not high but the experience was actually much better than I expected. Even with a slow lens the camera had no problem staying on the subject even if the background was cluttered as long as I kept the autofocus point on the subject. Similar to all Canon's, if you get off the subject a bit, the camera likes to go to the background and won't ever come back unless you bump the AF button or shutter button if you use that to AF. But if you kept the AF sensor on the subject, it tracked the subject even when relatively small in the frame. In this regard the camera did about as well as a 1D mark IIn and that's with a relatively slow lens so overall the results were very positive.
I did do another look at the viewfinder and I think what it is is that the Canon has a higher eyepoint relief so more of the black frame is in view giving the illusion that the actual image size is smaller. Actually one of my biggest complaints about the D3x vs the 1Ds Mk iii is that as an eyeglass wearer, I can not see the whole frame without moving around a bit on the Nikon and I can on the Canon and sure enough the eyepoint relief spec on the Canon is higher. I think the same is true with the 7D having a higher eyepoint relief spec than the D300.
I did do some tests of AF in lower light (ambient lighting dictated 1/15 sec at ISO 200 and f/8) and found the AF to be effective locking quickly with very little hunting. The conditions weren't dark enough to test it with any worse lighting than that.
I hesitate to post the 100% crops because people will draw the wrong conclusions from them since I have no way to normalize out the Canon 18-200's 2400 l/mm resolution vs the Nikon's 2000 l/mm resolution. This is why I made the statements I did above in the initial posts. But it is clear that the 7D is not by design a camera that is flawed for either focus or resolution which some may have thought based on the findings of some highly talented photographers. I think it is an issue of large sample variation or initial production woes. This specific camera body, since it shipped with the new firmware is clearly not an early run camera and it performs very well.
As for doing the testing with "mainstream" Canon lenses (which they aren't - you are asking for very high end Canon professional lenses
), I did not have those at my disposal but trust me, if it looks great with a Sigma 150-500 and canon 18-200, it will most definitely look good with high end Canon pro lenses.As I stated in yesterday's post, I would have no problem using the 7D as my primary tool for birds and wildlife.
