Canon 7D

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 31. August 2009 - 23:00

Last week, Canon announced the release of the Canon 7D. Everybody is praising Canon for daring to release an 18 Megapixels on an APS-C sensor. An unheard resolution for an APS-C camera!

Pentax and Samsung have had a 14.7 Megapixels for a year and half. Canon had a 15.1 Megapixels with the 50d. But 18 Megapixels? Add video capture, a brand new auto focus, 2 CPUs, weather proofing and many other gimmicks features. And all that at 8 frames per second! That's a lot. It's 300 megabytes of processing per second plus the processing of the auto-focus, the exposure and the white balance.

There are 2 major unknowns:

  1. How good is the auto-focus? This is Nikon's magic bullet. All the rest like exposure, white balance... can be fixed by firmware updates, but not the auto-focus. Will it work? It was a disaster when Canon introduced the 1DMk3. Photographers had to return their camera for upgrade repair.
  2. At 18 megapixels, the photosites, the actual photo cells that make up the pixel, are around 4.7µm. That's small, very small, less than half of the size of a Nikon D700 or Nikon D3. There are implication for both the ISO and more importantly the optical consequences: diffraction. Canon is aware of that, they had to come out with new lenses for the Canon 7D, the EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM and the EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS.

Everybody is praising the Canon 7D, just by reading the press release. Has Canon regained it's mojo? Everybody says yes, Canon has regained it's mojo.

  • I have not touched a Canon 7D.
  • I have not been given any inside information.
  • Not fact has been harmed or even verified in this rant.

Like I mentioned a few months ago in Nikon D3x, I'm in the market for a camera in the 20 megapixels range.

I have looked at the Nikon D3x, great camera but too expensive. No, it's not the price of the camera, but I will have to buy a whole bunch of new glass to support that type of resolution. The camera plus the lenses would be around $18 000.

I have looked at the Canon 5DMk2, the price is much more reasonable, but it's a no go for me. The focus system is the same as old Canon 5D. Not good and fast enough for me.

The new Sony α850 which is an α900 repackaged to 3 frames per second and cheaper at $2000, start to look good if I can stay within the lens range of what's available. The Zeiss lenses do look good and are the same price as their equivalent Nikon or Canon. By the way, the new Sony α850 is the same price as the Canon 7D.