I bought the 50D last year when it came out and loved using it, finding it to be surprisingly good to use and with very good image quality right up to 1000 ISO. I got my first 5D MkII a couple of months later and was blown away by how good it was right up to 3200 ISO and beyond. The 5D MkII was in a different league for low light shooting.

Canon's claims for the 7D were that it was every bit as good as the 5D MkII - which for a 1.6x crop camera was a bold claim. Ergonmically all three cameras are good with the 7D just shading it with it's slightly improved thumb grip. In fact, the 50D and 5D MkII are very closely related in terms of buttons, menus and screens. The 7D has quite a few different functions for its buttons and a better screen. If you are using two of these cameras together the 7D and the 5D MkII share the same batteries which could be a factor (and is a big one for me).

Image Quality

The ability to shoot in very low light without flash is something that I cherish. I love the idea that I can now decide whether or not use flash on creative grounds rather than out of necessity. The EOS7D is very good up to 1600 ISO if you look at the image as a whole and don't go around "pixel peeping". Viewed at 100% the files look good compared to most digital SLRs but nowhere near as good as cameras such as the 5D MkII or Nikon's D3 and D700. I would say that from the pictures I have shot so far, the 7D is about 1 - 1 1/2 stops noisier than the 5D MkII but about a stop better than the 50D. But of course it isn't that simple. The feel of the noise on the 7D is very different and I cannot think of another way of putting this - the noise is quite pleasant. I remember shooting some of the last generation cameras at 1600 ISO and feeling that the noise was a real distraction - unpleasant and distracting. This isn't the case with the 7D where the small amount of noise is quite film-like and not at all unpleasant.

At lower ISOs all three cameras have a wonderful feel and 7D files at 400 ISO have something classical about them.

Battery life

Something strange here. The EOS5D MkII uses the same batteries at the 7D yet gets much better life from them. I often go up to a week on a single battery in the 5D MkII whereas the 7D doesn't get beyond two days. I have tried using my older batteries that have been through several charge cycles rather than the new one that came with the camera and there is little or no improvement. Don't get me wrong, two days is fine - especially when you remember having to have three batteries per camera per day with the original EOS1D. The new batteries used in the 7D and 5D MkII are better than the old 10D, 20D and up to 50D ones and its a good job that Canon went with the LP-E6 in the 7D.

Auto focus

The 7D is streets ahead of either the 50D or the 5D MkII. It is faster to focus with all of my lenses and the instances of focus hunting are almost none. Assigning focusing points other than the centre one is easier and I have far more confidence in doing so thanks to the greater number of higher accuracy sensors.

Menus

The 7D has a few extra options in its menu system and it looks a little like a Mercedes dashboard when you start giving buttons different functions from the defaults. Anyone familiar with either the 50D or the 5D MkII will get the hang of the 7D in minutes.

Things I love about the 7D

• I love the inclinometer and spirit level functions in both the viewfinder and on the LCD screen. They are easy to use and I have even assigned the LCD screen version its own function button.
• The video functions are better than the 5D MkII with the stop/start function better placed and the option of shooting at 24 fps. The focusing in live view is also better than any previous Canon.
• On camera E-TTL metering is better than ever on a Canon DSLR - it may even be getting up to the Nikon level of accuracy.
• The sound of the shutter is so much better than the 5D MkII which still sounds like a slightly drunken Australian - how did Canon ever manage to make a shutter with an upward inflection?
• 1/250th of a second flash synch.
• The biggest surprise of them all is the ease of use of the built-in flash as a Speedlight controller when working with a couple of EX series flash units as slaves. The range is good and the accuracy seems better than when using an ST-E2 on a 5D MkII.

...And things that I don't love

One thing so far... and its the same complaint that we all have about the 5D, 5D MkII and the 50D amongst other Canons... the b****y mode dial! It needs to have a lock to stop it moving when you have a camera over your shoulder with a heavy lens. The lock could be a physical button (hard to retro-fit on so many cameras) or it could be a firmware upgrade to disable the mode dial as a custom function and have the mode changed in the menu system instead. Come on Canon... we know that it can be done so PLEASE make hundreds of working photographers very happy and make it happen. I have missed so many shots thanks to the mode dial deciding that I want to be working in Bulb mode rather than manual.

©Neil Turner December 2009