7D mark ii subjective impressions

It was time to drop some coin on a supplement to my 40D. I'm sticking with APS-C, so the 7D Mark ii was my choice after looking at the features of the other cameras. I did some comparisons this morning. This is not a scientific study -- more my impressions.

I was interested in low light performance. Although I did not take my test shots in a low light situation, the 7Dii appeared to perform as well at 1600 ISO as the 40D did at 400. Nice.

As for megapixels, I am no pixel-peeper, but I did some for this. My strongest observation is that the 7dii picked up subject movement in large raw and jpeg shots that I could not discern with my naked eye. So I have to be aware of this in macro shots in breezy conditions. Adobe Raw 5 is my go-to raw processor. I had to change my workflow because it does not support the 7Dii cr2 format. So I translated cr2 files into 16-byte tiffs with Canon Digital Professional. The large raw files created immense tiffs (>100mb), which I'm not too happy about. So I think I might be looking to acquire an application that will generate dng files.

As for the results, bear in mind that I was working on a computer monitor and not large prints. To my naked eye, I discerned little difference in resolution between raw, M-raw, and s-raw images (remember, on a computer monitor). Although it was clear that the large raw files would be more tolerant of cropping. Sized to 1000pixels on the long side, the images were indistinguishable. I did notice that Canon's choice of jpeg conversion (neutral) did not produce the level of contrast that I normally prefer. They did fill out the tonal histogram, which the raws did not. So I had room for tone mapping with the raws. That's a good thing.

I am quite pleased with the 10mp performance of my 40D. I've had large prints made from it and I honestly did not anticipate any advantage to 20mp files. While I haven't made a 3x5 foot print (which was done on one of my 20D files), from my early observations, I do not see an overriding reason to fill up my hard drive with 20mp files for the kind of product that I produce. I know that some gear heads will take exception to this. Be that as it may. The one possible exception is when I need to do a crop on a wildlife shot. However, the camera will not tempt me to get distant shots of wildlife because no technology deals with atmospheric perturbations at large distances. I live in an area with high humidity in the summers and that has more of an effect when there's more distance between you and your subject.

As for autofocus in the 7Dii, it has a long learning curve. But it is definitely a tour de force. There's no argument there.

I'm sure that laboratory tests will demonstrate a large advantage to the 7Dii. However, I have long maintained that technological improvements have exceeded the human eye's ability to appreciate them in all but the most demanding settings. Except for the better low light performance, I think that's the case here with me.