One more 7D note

Namely, that the thing I miss most is a little one: the inability to save all your standard settings and recall them.

Yes I know, you have the “C1-C3” exposure modes on the dial. They do not do me any good. For a start they cannot be named, so if you set mode C1 for sports and mode C2 for babies and so on, you are likely to forget what you set. And you cannot see easily what you have set (“C1 is what – Aperture mode with spot metering? Or what?) And you cannot recall them easily (if you could move C1 back to Av mode, I’d be happy enough!).

No, what this camera needs is a mode where everything is reset to your standard settings to give you a good starting point. NOT Canon’s factory settings. Your settings – that would be the guy who paid $2,000 for the camera.

I am reminded of this by an event today where I shot with fill flash – and the person was blinking in every shot. Reason: I inadvertently had the popup set for wireless flash. That causes several flashes – hence a blink in young people. Groan. And to top it off, for some reason I was in JPG mode instead of RAW mode. Must’ve nudged something. Groan.Never happened before in any of my cameras – literally.

Canon just lost me a shoot, essentially. And to avoid this happening again, I will have to carry a checklist and before every shoot, check 53 sets of settings ( a total of hundreds of menu entries – literally) every time against that list. How dumb is that? This deliberate disabling of functions to make more money (“want a basic function like that? Pay $9,000 for a 1Ds”) is annoying.

As I have said before – Canon should make the expensive cameras better – not do their marketing by deliberately disabling the lower-end cameras. Nikon has many more of these settings – although their menus are not the easiest, they do not seem to engage in this type of “marketing by annoying”.

6 thoughts on “One more 7D note

  1. Of course if Canon thought like a software company they’d sell software / firmware upgrades with new features. They take the old view that the camera is a closed box and apart from critical bug fixes for a year or two the only way to upgrade is to buy a new camera.

    If they sold upgrades to the software features would not have to let go of control of the camera software but could make more revenue at low cost.

  2. Indeed, the failure of these companies to think as a software company has always baffled me. Missed opportunity – do far. Though Nikon at one stage teamed up with – what, who was it, Fujitsu? – to do 3rd party development.

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