Monday, February 8

TAH-DAH! – The Canon 7D

It snowed in Lancaster this weekend. 24"! So I walked my new Canon 7Doutside as it was tailing off and peered South along North Lime Street. That's my home there to the left. And here's the original.. first picture I took with the new camera. It's about 11am on Saturday morning.



And it shows that I made a mistake! For my purposes, the camera does NOTHING that my 40D could not do. There was absolutely NO reason for me to have shelled out hundreds of bucks more for this machine. More pixels? Well, yeah, but lots of new noise as well. Bigger blow up or more cropping options? Okay, but the 40D allowed me all that I wanted. The 7D images are hair less contrast (flatter) than the 40D - and simply don't pop as dramatically without a lot of post processing work. The camera will do, but I can't recommend it. Instead... buy a used 40D, or consider the Canon 50D.

Now... what about the sort of images that I finally enjoy producing? Okay... look at this...



As you can see, the 7D image allows me a bunch of information so that postprocessing techniques bite well. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I'd hoped for more vibrance and a greater tonal range and can't find them in the new images. Oh, it does allow video. And yeah, that's one of the reasons I wanted the thing for our Peruvian trip. But now that the trip's been postponed until at least next OCTOBER.... well I've got an option that I probably won't play with until this summer. By then who knows, perhaps there will be some super sales on the 7D and I would have saved some money... or maybe by then my lust for the new machine would have gone flaccid?

Oh well... I own it and it's no worse than the 40D. It wasn't a step backward... But forward? Nah....

5 comments:

Gina said...

oh .. that is such a shame after all the anticipation ...

pity we cant return a camera within a short timeline because it doesnt suit like you can a dress or shoes ..

>>> Gina
http://fyneimages.blogspot.com/
http://ginaseye.blogspot.com/

Angel Corrochano said...

Whatever I feel that the new camera does not satisfy him as at first were its dream. I hope that soon, the use of the new camera, makes change him of opinion.
Warm greetings

Anonymous said...

Now I wish I had sent you some Sraw files to play with before you made your purchase.
Like you, I got some weird noise issues when there was an abundance of white or light gray in the frame, even at low ISO.
The best converter (assuming you shot raw) I have found is the bundled Canon DPP software at settings of Sharpness=3, Contrast=1 and Saturation=1. That seems to bring the 7D files into the realm of what one got with the 40D.
The second best is the pure DNG converter from Adobe. Don't ask me why it seems to work better than bringing them into ACR or Lightroom, which I would guess uses the same converter, but it worked for me.
Some reduction in noise can be had by reducing the file size to Mraw. Kind of defeats the purpose of having the more MP though, doesn't it.
Try the video, that comes out very nice, given the right glass.
Steve

Andreas said...

Oops! This is very, very weird. Actually I expected a tad more noise than in my D300, at least on pixel level, but that should easily be more than leveled by the plus in resolution. Weird indeed.

And feature-wise, well, just from the specs the 7D clearly looks like the best APS-C format camera on the planet - ever.

Hmm ... you're sure you are not pixel peeping? As I said, on per-pixel level it can't be better than the 40D, though it shouldn't be much worse either. The quality difference should be obvious after bringing them to the same size.

Weird indeed. And then, probably it does not matter a bit. As I always say, for someone like you, who invents more than half of his pixels, the actual camera is completely unimportant :)

Btw, I greatly like what Global Warming did to Lancaster. Would be glad to get some of that snow :)

John Roberts said...

If only the "professional" testers were as honest in their evaluations. But they've got advertisers to satisfy, and so everything is always more and better. Oh well, I'm sure you'll enjoy the video capability.