7D Mark II Reported Issues

[East Wind Photography]

Thought I would start a thread today for issues noticed with the 7D Mark II.

I will start with one issue I discovered today shooting a Soccer game. First of all my setup:

7D MKII with 300mm F2.8L IS II [ AFMA +8 ] Ok got that taken care of. The one issue I noticed is a lag from the time the shutter button is pressed to when the AF locks on. No hunting just a noticeable lag in acquiring initial focus. Most may not notice but in sports it can make the difference between getting the shot and not. This condition does not exist on my 5DIII so it's something specific to the 7DII.

I was using center AF point only (though the condition exists on all of the AF area settings I tried).

Hopefully this is something that can be resolved in a firmware update. Hopefully someone here may have discovered a setting which minimizes this issue.

 

[dak723]

I would return the camera and exchange it for another. It sounds faulty. See if the new camera has the same issue.

 

[Grant Atkinson]

Have you checked what settings you have for the Ai Servo 1st Image parameters..setting it to Release Priority will get your first frame in a burst off quickly, alternately, having it set for Focus priority will cause it to take longer before the shutter will release and can delay shooting. The same settings can be applied to the rest of the images in the burst, in the menu Ai Servo 2nd Image Priority.

These two settings are under the Pink AF menu tab, and the second menu screen, tab 2. Perhaps set both options to Release and Speed and see if it feels the same.

 

[East Wind Photography]

I would return the camera and exchange it for another. It sounds faulty. See if the new camera has the same issue.

I don't think its faulty though I do need to test with some different lenses to see if it's consistent

 

[East Wind Photography]

Have you checked what settings you have for the Ai Servo 1st Image parameters..setting it to Release Priority will get your first frame in a burst off quickly, alternately, having it set for Focus priority will cause it to take longer before the shutter will release and can delay shooting. The same settings can be applied to the rest of the images in the burst, in the menu Ai Servo 2nd Image Priority.

These two settings are under the Pink AF menu tab, and the second menu screen, tab 2. Perhaps set both options to Release and Speed and see if it feels the same.

So this issue is before the shutter fires when you do a half press of the shutter. Doesn't have anything to do with the priority settings.

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi East Wind Photography.
If you are using Ai Servo, not stated in original post, the camera doesn't know you are not going to complete the shutter push to capture the focused image, won't it ensure focus before allowing you to continue even if you don't continue? This of course does 'assume' that it is set to focus priority not release priority.

I hope you are able to get to the bottom of this, I already kind of covet this camera!

Cheers, Graham.

So this issue is before the shutter fires when you do a half press of the shutter. Doesn't have anything to do with the priority settings.

 

[takesome1]

Thought I would start a thread today for issues noticed with the 7D Mark II.

I will start with one issue I discovered today shooting a Soccer game. First of all my setup:

7D MKII with 300mm F2.8L IS II [ AFMA +8 ] Ok got that taken care of. The one issue I noticed is a lag from the time the shutter button is pressed to when the AF locks on. No hunting just a noticeable lag in acquiring initial focus. Most may not notice but in sports it can make the difference between getting the shot and not. This condition does not exist on my 5DIII so it's something specific to the 7DII.

I was using center AF point only (though the condition exists on all of the AF area settings I tried).

Hopefully this is something that can be resolved in a firmware update. Hopefully someone here may have discovered a setting which minimizes this issue.

You didn't say AI Servo or single shot.
I have been comparing mine to my 1D IV.
Single Shot single point on the big white lenses take longer to confirm. The 1D IV is half again as fast.
It confirms focus similar to the old 7D, it makes focus and for a brief instance reconfirms.
There is no noticeable difference on other lenses.

AI Servo mode I am still working on, I have yet to have a decent lock on a BIF. I have only had a few opportunities to check and I still attribute my failures to lack of proper settings.

At this time I am leaning toward believing the 1D IV is the better AF system.

 

[Don Haines]

Thought I would start a thread today for issues noticed with the 7D Mark II.

I will start with one issue I discovered today shooting a Soccer game. First of all my setup:

7D MKII with 300mm F2.8L IS II [ AFMA +8 ] Ok got that taken care of. The one issue I noticed is a lag from the time the shutter button is pressed to when the AF locks on. No hunting just a noticeable lag in acquiring initial focus. Most may not notice but in sports it can make the difference between getting the shot and not. This condition does not exist on my 5DIII so it's something specific to the 7DII.

I was using center AF point only (though the condition exists on all of the AF area settings I tried).

Hopefully this is something that can be resolved in a firmware update. Hopefully someone here may have discovered a setting which minimizes this issue.

You didn't say AI Servo or single shot.
I have been comparing mine to my 1D IV.
Single Shot single point on the big white lenses take longer to confirm. The 1D IV is half again as fast.
It confirms focus similar to the old 7D, it makes focus and for a brief instance reconfirms.
There is no noticeable difference on other lenses.

AI Servo mode I am still working on, I have yet to have a decent lock on a BIF. I have only had a few opportunities to check and I still attribute my failures to lack of proper settings.

At this time I am leaning toward believing the 1D IV is the better AF system.

The 1D V has an 11.1V battery and will use that higher voltage to drive the AF motors on some of the big whites faster than you can drive them with an LP-E6 battery... so yes, a 1 series body does focus some lenses faster than the 7D2.

 

[East Wind Photography]

Thought I would start a thread today for issues noticed with the 7D Mark II.

I will start with one issue I discovered today shooting a Soccer game. First of all my setup:

7D MKII with 300mm F2.8L IS II [ AFMA +8 ] Ok got that taken care of. The one issue I noticed is a lag from the time the shutter button is pressed to when the AF locks on. No hunting just a noticeable lag in acquiring initial focus. Most may not notice but in sports it can make the difference between getting the shot and not. This condition does not exist on my 5DIII so it's something specific to the 7DII.

I was using center AF point only (though the condition exists on all of the AF area settings I tried).

Hopefully this is something that can be resolved in a firmware update. Hopefully someone here may have discovered a setting which minimizes this issue.

You didn't say AI Servo or single shot.
I have been comparing mine to my 1D IV.
Single Shot single point on the big white lenses take longer to confirm. The 1D IV is half again as fast.
It confirms focus similar to the old 7D, it makes focus and for a brief instance reconfirms.
There is no noticeable difference on other lenses.

AI Servo mode I am still working on, I have yet to have a decent lock on a BIF. I have only had a few opportunities to check and I still attribute my failures to lack of proper settings.

At this time I am leaning toward believing the 1D IV is the better AF system.

That does pose an interesting question. I was using AI Servo during the game. The AF once it locked was very fast to adapt I rarely had any that were out of focus the entire day that wasnt due to me obviously drifting off target. The AF is fast but I only have a 5D3 to compare to and so far I would say it's about the same.

The issue is the fraction of a second from when the shutter is half pressed and the lens snaps to focus. IS and metering kick in instantly but the AF lock lags a fraction of a second. After it's locked it tracks and performs flawlessly.

I will compare with some other big whites I have and see if it's the same.

 

[weixing]

Hi,
Did you on the GPS?? When the GPS is on, sometime there will be lag on the AF.

Have a nice day.

 

[Canon1]

Did you try powering down the camera, remove the lens, then re-install.

Conceivably, if you put the lens on and it wasn't perfectly locked in place, or you put the lens on while the body was active you could end up with a communication issue such as this.

 

[takesome1]

Thought I would start a thread today for issues noticed with the 7D Mark II.

I will start with one issue I discovered today shooting a Soccer game. First of all my setup:

7D MKII with 300mm F2.8L IS II [ AFMA +8 ] Ok got that taken care of. The one issue I noticed is a lag from the time the shutter button is pressed to when the AF locks on. No hunting just a noticeable lag in acquiring initial focus. Most may not notice but in sports it can make the difference between getting the shot and not. This condition does not exist on my 5DIII so it's something specific to the 7DII.

I was using center AF point only (though the condition exists on all of the AF area settings I tried).

Hopefully this is something that can be resolved in a firmware update. Hopefully someone here may have discovered a setting which minimizes this issue.

You didn't say AI Servo or single shot.
I have been comparing mine to my 1D IV.
Single Shot single point on the big white lenses take longer to confirm. The 1D IV is half again as fast.
It confirms focus similar to the old 7D, it makes focus and for a brief instance reconfirms.
There is no noticeable difference on other lenses.

AI Servo mode I am still working on, I have yet to have a decent lock on a BIF. I have only had a few opportunities to check and I still attribute my failures to lack of proper settings.

At this time I am leaning toward believing the 1D IV is the better AF system.

That does pose an interesting question. I was using AI Servo during the game. The AF once it locked was very fast to adapt I rarely had any that were out of focus the entire day that wasnt due to me obviously drifting off target. The AF is fast but I only have a 5D3 to compare to and so far I would say it's about the same.

The issue is the fraction of a second from when the shutter is half pressed and the lens snaps to focus. IS and metering kick in instantly but the AF lock lags a fraction of a second. After it's locked it tracks and performs flawlessly.

I will compare with some other big whites I have and see if it's the same.

For what I noticed I leaned toward the answer Don Haines gave, battery power.
Unless you are using a battery pack the 5D III I would think it would be comparable in AF speed to the 7D II.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Another issue that can slow down AF is the use of Spot AF. Canon used to warn about that.

 

[Aglet]

..I noticed is a lag from the time the shutter button is pressed to when the AF locks on. No hunting just a noticeable lag in acquiring initial focus. Most may not notice but in sports it can make the difference between getting the shot and not. This condition does not exist on my 5DIII so it's something specific to the 7DII.

I was using center AF point only (though the condition exists on all of the AF area settings I tried).

I noticed exactly this issue as well with a couple different lenses that I tried, the 100-400 L, the 24-70 f/4 L.
The initial AF acquisition was slower than my other Canon bodies with the same lenses, even at EV~10 for lighting. It was no better at 0 - 3 EV lighting.
With the long lens, it was also no better at guessing which direction to drive the lens to focus.
It's even dismally slower than my mirrorless bodies with same focal lengths in dim light! That was very disappointing.

I posted about it here just the other night.
http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php?topic=23602.0

I did get a minor improvement in AF performance when I reset the camera to all factory defaults but it still provides me with no more AF magic than my older Canon crop bodies. i was hoping for better than my current bodies and definitely for faster initial focus acquisition than a cheap mirrorless - but it wasn't to be.
This should be a firmware fix at some point soon... hopefully.

 

[East Wind Photography]

Hi,
Did you on the GPS?? When the GPS is on, sometime there will be lag on the AF.

Have a nice day.

No I leave GPS off as that is generally a useless feature to me that sucks battery power even when the camera is turned off. Not sure why Canon did that. Maybe have GPS go into sleep mode where it polls every hour instead of on the regular schedule. Could be something they could fix in firmware.

 

[East Wind Photography]

Another issue that can slow down AF is the use of Spot AF. Canon used to warn about that.

Yes I considered that but found the lag in all AF modes. I was performing a AFMA on my 24 1.2 II last night and I did not see the lag as I did on the 300. I will try my 70-200 today and my 600 tomorrow (Need to find a vacant football field)

 

[Canon1]

"Try turning on the function on that says keep searching when AF impossible. If the scene is very out of focus apparently the phase difference is larger than the AF sensors can see, so the camera does not know what to do."

I just saw this on another forum...

 

[RumorMill]

If we are talking issues this happened to me this weekend while shooting high school football... I set up my back AF-ON button in the custom config to be AF-OFF instead. So I "half press" shutter button to acquire focus, lock focus with back button while maintaining half press. I noticed that if I shoot a sequence of frames and pause but still maintain half press, then try to press again there is no response from the 7DII - no pictures taken. This resulted in missed shots! I had to physically lift up the shutter button completely in order to take more shots(with the back button completely pressed the whole time). Now I was also using a 300mm L IS at the time and tried using the dedicated defaulted AF-OFF buttons on the lens (instead of back button on the camera) to do the same situation described, and it worked as expected... So has anyone else experienced this issue? I would think this has to be a bug and hopefully fixed in the next firmware update? Or is there something I am doing wrong or a hidden setting to allow what I want. I know the first generation 7d did not have this problem... I used this technique quite often.

 

[East Wind Photography]

It's important to note here that if you find what you think is a bug, it's nice to get confirmation here that others noticed the same issue. However you should still report it to Canon with a clear description of how to reproduce it.

They are usually more receptive to fixing things on the first and second firmware update. After that unless it's a major issue it may not make it in for a while.

 

[East Wind Photography]

If we are talking issues this happened to me this weekend while shooting high school football... I set up my back AF-ON button in the custom config to be AF-OFF instead. So I "half press" shutter button to acquire focus, lock focus with back button while maintaining half press. I noticed that if I shoot a sequence of frames and pause but still maintain half press, then try to press again there is no response from the 7DII - no pictures taken. This resulted in missed shots! I had to physically lift up the shutter button completely in order to take more shots(with the back button completely pressed the whole time). Now I was also using a 300mm L IS at the time and tried using the dedicated defaulted AF-OFF buttons on the lens (instead of back button on the camera) to do the same situation described, and it worked as expected... So has anyone else experienced this issue? I would think this has to be a bug and hopefully fixed in the next firmware update? Or is there something I am doing wrong or a hidden setting to allow what I want. I know the first generation 7d did not have this problem... I used this technique quite often.

I will check this tonight and see if I can reproduce that. I wonder if it's specific to the big whites or does the same thing with other lenses?