…just locked up again. Second time today.
I came back to it ten minutes after reinserting the CF card and reformatting it. And I noticed that the LCD on the top was still on. A quick check: sure enough: no response to any button or switch – not even to the “off” switch. So again, take out the battery.
Lemon? Or a pattern?
…just hung up again. Again, not long after live view. No response even to on-off switch: nothing happens and top LCD remains lit. And again, it needed the battery removed to start responding to anything. Worrying, and as a wedding shooter, this would stop me (a hang could theoretically very easily corrupt the disk).
Some more “first impressions” after I have been using my Canon 7D for a few days. This is more a list of impressions, not a full review – but they are practical impressions. Here it is (and click for larger):
And the back:
As a teacher of photography and cameras, I am well familiar with all Canon cameras, so the first thing I look for is differences. And I see those in droves. Both compared to my 1D and 1Ds, and compared to other small-frame cameras and the 5D.
The list of innovations is enormous. And yet the camera feels immediately familiar, only in a better way. Well done, Canon. Great news.
So is it perfect?
Here’s another high ISO hand-held happy snap:
For now, this camera is meeting my requirements as a working pro very well; when I carry two cameras, from now on that will not be the 1Ds MkIII and the 1D MkIII, but rather one of those (the 1Ds3, most likely, since it is full-frame) and the 7D. I am very happy so far.
More news from the field soon!
OK, so now let’s try a slightly more scientific test for the pixelpeepers among us here. Here’s my Canon 7D.
For tonight’s second short test, I just used the Canon 24-70 f/2.8L zoom lens. Set to 24mm on the 7D, and to 38mm on the 1Ds MkIII, to give the same field of view.
I fired an umbrella-mounted studio strobe through pocketwizards, with the cameras set to:
Because of the varying zoom setting, which gives the same field of view, the two are still inevtably different – but being the same lens, and at f/8, this difference matters little. Essentially, this is a fair test.
We get, in both cases, a nice sharp image like this out of Canon DPP (that is all I used, and with no alterations at all):
Great picture on both cameras.
And that is where the story might stop. But because I am curious – how good is the 7D image compared to the 1Ds MkIII’s – I now crop to a 1200 x 800 pixel wide area in both cases. Here they are at full size (and you can click to see these crops unaltered, at their actual size):
7D:
And 1Ds MkIII:
When you click and compare both of these unaltered images, it shows how good the 7D is for a crop sensor body.
The white balance difference is hardly noticeable when properly exposed like this.
There is clearly a tiny bit more noise in the 7D image. But it is tiny, and the 7D has better blacks. The difference is so small that at this low ISO and with this good light, no real difference should be seen in practice. And with the 7D’s many other advantages, that is a great thing. This camera will remain at my side in shoots.
Canon 7D versus 1Ds Mark 3.
I was in a hurry so this test is by no means complete, and it is not quite apples versus apples. That said, I just shot a light in my studio with the 1Ds MkIII and with the 7D. Same lens length, effectively:
7D setup:
1Ds MkIII setup:
In both cases I took the image into Canon DPP and did not adjustments at all. I saved as 1200 pixels long, and I saved it as an original size crop at 100% JPG quality.
Large shots, 7D first:
Now for the real size detail, 7D first – click on each to see them at original size:
The first thing you see is that the white balance is off on the 1Ds MkIII, and is much better on the 7D.
Also, the 7D looks sharper. More noise – it is 3200 ISO vs 1600 ISO on the 1Ds – but it is noticeably sharper.
The other thing to note is that on the 1Ds, I needed several shots to get the camera to focus on the “Opus” name. Several were eway off. The 7D is behving more consistently.
Note also that it is easy to be fooled: on the display, the 1D image looks soft at all times, while the 7D image looks crisp, sharp, wonderful. But that is partly due to the display.
Next week I will do some proper controlled tests. But this already shows me they are at te very least comparable.
In the next week or so, I’ll do more of a review of the 7D. Still very happy with it: this camera is a major update to the GUI and is a lot of fun and focuses better than my 1Ds3 and 1D3. Video is fun too, although I am not sure I can spare another 5 Terabytes and 12 hours a day doing video post. Plus, taking video is nice but even a short video will be many gigabytes. So it’s back to driving around: no Internet can handle that yet.
I do wish they had not crippled the camera by design, by the way. Auto ISO, for instance, is a great feature. But why set automatically between 100 and 3200 ISO? Why not let me limit it, say to 800 or 1600 ISO? No doubt they intend that to be available only on the 1Ds Mk4. It would cost nothing to add it. Are we being manipulated for marketing purposes?
People talk about the 7D’s noise, I hear. Well, I saw that too – my first impression was, it seems noisy in Lightroom. On the other hand:
And look how a 3200 ISO JPG looks:
Real size sample:
Well, real sized when you click on it.
Noisy? I think that is great. Remember, this is full sized detail; shot at 3200 ISO, and taken from a JPG! A few years ago, 800 ISO would have been unacceptably noisy.
…just locked up. Out of nowhere. I was not even doing anything. Even turning it off did not do anything – I had to remove the battery.
I’m not concluding anything from this, but have to wonder: if this that famous Canon QC again? I shall await the software update…. months from now, presumably.
Okay… so I own a brick, until Adobe or Canon start waking up and fixing the fact that Lightroom, my core tool, cannot yet properly read 7D images. They come up noisy and with awful colour, using a “beta” camera profile and no way to select another. Adobe say they “hope” to get a fix for this into the next update (when? They say they are a long way off). See here.
Also, I just figured out that movies are ignored by Lightroom. Fair enough but since I use Lightroom to copy stuff off my memory card, which is then ejected and formatted (by me), that ignoring is not clever better would be to copy them for me to some location.
Now I lost the family videos I made yesterday. That is regrettable. Now I need to, from now on, load CF cards into two different apps. Not very desirable – Lightroom lives by the fact it’s the one tool I use for my entire practice, and it is failing here on two counts.
I went down to my local Henry’s store in Oakville yesterday (OK, I was teaching there) and bought a new Canon 7D.
This adds to my 1D MkIII and 1Ds Mk III. While it is not full frame, it does have an all-new focus system and it can drive speedlites from its pop-up flash. And it does high-def 29.97/25/24fps video. Reasons enough to add one!
It is now sitting next to me in Waterloo, Ontario with a 35mm f/1.4L lens on it – that makes it a fifty,of course, since 35 x 1.6 = 50, and you know how I feel about the “nifty fifty” (search for it on this blog if you don’t yet).
So far the 7D is looking good: I shall do a full review in the next few weeks.