A few days ago, I bought a 7D.
Yeah, I know. I already have more camera bodies than I know what to do with. So why'd I do it?
I can summarize it in one sentence: this is the first camera body that Canon has ever produced that has no real weaknesses (except for the crop sensor versus full frame sensor thing).
Allow me to elaborate a bit.
I bought the 30D as my first body (my wife now shoots with it). Its image quality is good, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the autofocus system. The center point is good, but the surrounding points leave quite a lot to be desired. Because they're not "cross type", they couldn't lock onto certain subjects.
So I upgraded to the 40D, both for the better high-ISO performance and for the autofocus system. On paper, the 40D's autofocus system is good. In the real world, it's merely okay. At least, it was for me. I never really got the reliability I wanted from it, even when shooting still shots (don't get me wrong -- it's not bad -- it would get it right most of the time, but for still shots, my opinion is that the autofocus system should get it right every time, because the conditions aren't changing). At least live view could be used for those when it really counted. Servo tracking was also hit-or-miss, mainly because it behaved as if it had too much caffeine. Finally, I had an issue with it consistently misfocusing at distance with wide aperture lenses (f/1.4). It took two trips to Canon to get that last thing fixed, but the other two things never improved much.
While it was on its second trip to Canon, I rented a 50D. This yielded a noticeable improvement in terms of autofocus. Still shot autofocus was finally sufficiently reliable for my purposes. And despite claims to the contrary, its high ISO performance was noticeably better than that of the 40D. And, at last, I could adjust the camera to my lenses! Because of that, and because I wasn't convinced Canon would be able to fix the focus issues of my 40D, I bought one. Its high ISO shots yielded some banding, but I got software to deal with that (for the most part). The 50D isn't a perfect camera, but it's very good.
But not perfect. For instance, servo tracking is easily disturbed by objects passing in front of the subject being tracked. And the autofocus points are quite a bit larger than the size of the points in the viewfinder would suggest, so the camera can easily lock focus onto something other than what you intended. And then, of course, there's the high ISO banding which, as I said, isn't that much of an issue with the right postprocessing software. But you do have to go out of your way to fix it.
A few days ago I borrowed a 7D from a friend because I wanted to see just how good it was. In this case, I borrowed it with an extremely skeptical eye. I looked very hard for any significant weaknesses, anything that would give me reason to wait until the next generation.
And I didn't find any.
Needless to say, I was very surprised. Up until now, Canon has always left at least one significant weakness in their "prosumer" cameras.
You see, what I really want is to buy a camera that is so good that it leaves me wanting nothing. Except for the lack of a full-frame sensor (and the benefits to be had from that), the 7D is that camera.
This is the crop camera that Canon should have been producing to begin with!
Its high ISO is relatively clean. It's not actually all that much better than what the 50D gives you, but it doesn't have a banding issue. ISO 12800 is now quite usable, particularly if you shoot in mRAW, which gives you a very usable 10 megapixels -- exactly the same as what you'd get from the 40D.
Its autofocus system is reliable. It nails the focus for still shots pretty much every time, with any of the autofocus points. Its servo tracking is reliable and, finally, configurable for the circumstances. And it at last is capable of focusing on a precise spot in the frame if you want to configure it that way.
The viewfinder is magnificent. It's big and bright. A full frame viewfinder is bigger and brighter, but this is actually good enough that you can manually focus with it with some reliability. So for the first time, I'm not inclined to change the focusing screen (as it happens, though, changing it out apparently isn't all that hard, though it's obviously more involved than changing out the 50D's screen). And having 100% of the view in the viewfinder is the way it should have been from the very beginning.
I'd read complaints about low ISOs being noisy. My tests showed the 7D's ISO 100 to be at least as good as that of the 50D.
When I add everything up, the 7D leaves me wanting nothing except a full frame sensor. And perhaps not even that. I won't really know how much a full frame sensor will buy me until I borrow or rent a camera with such a sensor, and Canon doesn't yet make a reasonably priced camera that suits my full-frame needs (to wit, they don't make anything that competes head to head with the Nikon D700).
So I must congratulate Canon. Because at long last, they've managed to produce a camera that does everything well and leaves me wanting nothing more out of a crop camera body, and all for a non-stratospheric price.
It's about time.
