Not much love here
I'm a big fan of Darwin's work. He's one of those photographers that makes landscape images I can stare at for long periods of time. I was pretty eager to read his take on the 7D.
I was quite surprised by the results….
From Darwin
“Of all the cameras we have ever used, we loved the handling of the Canon 7D the best. What a little sports car of a camera! We so much wanted to love this camera. But in test after test we constantly were disappointed in the quality of the files. For our purposes, landscape and nature photography shot using RAW images, the 7D just does not cut it. Darwin is definitely keeping his Rebel (a great camera for the money) for backpacking. We were so impressed with the Canon G11 that we plan to add it to our camera bags as an everyday walk around camera.”
Read More: http://darwinwiggett.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/the-canon-7d/
CR's Take
I'm super curious now if I'd get the same results. I'm going to give it a whirl if I get some time.
cr
142 Comments
Yeah, but what’s the point of the review if all he’s going to tell us is that the camera has refraction at small apertures? You can know that before opening the box or reading a single review based on the sensor pixel size.
The review is flawed – diffraction seems to have entered the reviewer’s mind after the fact. That renders every test invalid – no additional information is added by this review if diffraction mushed up the results.
I’ve been reading a lot of reviews on the 7D myself from a variety of places, and I’ve seen some images that were land-and-cityscapes that were very sharp and I’m wondering if these folks had lens calibration issues?
For example, in initial use of my 7D with the Tamron 17-50 F2.8 (which is a fantastic lens; I’ve used it on my XTi with great success), I was getting some soft images and some focus/blur issues, so I did some digging about lens calibration and micro-adjustment; I’ve heard a few shooters say they’ve had to micro-adjust their lenses in the camera. After I micro-adjusted my Tamron F2.8, I got images that were far and away sharper than they were previously, especially at the center of the image. This was only a first run micro-adjustment test (using a 430EX II flash as well) and a more strenuous and in depth test is planned. I absolutely love my 7D, and I will soon be testing it with the Canon 24-70mm L F2.8, and I fully expect to need to micro-adjust it to get the sharpest images possible.
You wouldn’t think that would be a necessity, but I spent a lot of money on the 7D/28-135mm kit, and there ain’t no -way- I’m going to send it back to Canon if I can fix whatever issues there are with the camera myself. And this camera is has more customizable features than I ever knew existed on a DSLR, meaning that in my opinion, I think any issue that a photographer might come across (that isn’t an obvious factory defect or camera/lens fault) can be addressed by the photographer in question with a little consultation of the manual and some trial and error.
You may be right, but Darwin performed his tests using manual focus with the LCD viewfinder. So lens calibration isn’t the issue here.
I have a 7D too and my initial impressions were: great for video, handles lovely, but picture quality is lacking for a camera in this price range. Noise as ISO 100 and the overall lack of sharpness (yes, even with JPG). Images don’t pop.
Perhaps when ACR 5.6 is out things will change a little, but as Darwin argues this isn’t really compensation. I’ll keep testing however.
+1
I bought it for the same reason. Just did 2 weddings with the 5DMKII and 7D combo… the result is not bad at all. You can’t really compare both camera, but working with them together make sense for me.
yep way too much noise at ISO 100.