ESFotoClix Blog

Today DPR published its Canon 7D review. As I usually do, since I’m a bottom-line-first kind of guy, I jumped to the conclusion, which glows quite favorably for Canon. Just look at the number of items under “Cons” — it almost looks like DPR reviewers were straining to find something negative to say.

Since the Canon 7D has 50% more megapixels than its toughest competitor, the Nikon D300s (18mp vs. 12mp), I jumped over to the Noise section. Low and behold, more megapixels doesn’t mean more noise. The answer(s) to the question, Why all the noise about noise we saw here a while ago may have something to do with it. Canon won’t tell us what they did, but suffice it to say, very clever engineers have figured out how to pile on a log of megapixels and keep noise to acceptable levels. The shame in this, however, is that one wonders what these same clever engineers could have done with noise performance if they put their know-how and innovation to work on a 12mp sensor. Maybe Nikon will show us that, but don’t hold your breath.

Returning to the review, we should note that the first chroma graph shown on page 15 does show the D300s besting the 7D from around ISO640 all the way out to ISO3200, though for most of that trip, the difference isn’t all that great. Note that this first graph includes in-camera noise reduction (NR) applied to the RAW capture post-capture. The second noise graph, for RAW data without NR, shows the D300s besting the 7D all the way from low ISO out to around ISO2500 in chroma noise, where the 7D takes over and actually bests the D300s at high ISO! Chroma noise, incidentally is the nastiest part of sensor-produced noise that shows up as a “fireworks show,” or as I like to call it, a green/cyan/magenta mess, which unlike Luminance noise, is much more distracting and disruptive in a photo.

Next, having read various reports that the 7D lags the D300s in Auto-focus (AF) performance, I jumped to page 13 of the review. There I see that “[t]he EOS 7D’s Auto Focus performs very well under any condition. The camera locked the focus very quickly with with Canon’s standard and Ultrasonic lenses alike…” More glow. Unfortunately, DPR doesn’t compare one camera’s performance to its competitors (admittedly a difficult test to perform), so the closest thing to an objective performance measurement is DPR’s statement that “we have used the EOS 7D at a sports/action event and even with our limited sports photography skills got a decent proportion of usable shots.” It appears we will have to sort this out at the OK corrale. Let the best forum arguer win.

All in all, it appears that Canon have done a very nice job with the 7D. They even get “per-pixel sharpness kudos” from DPR, something the Canon 50D failed to garner — even though I think I’ll understand Quantum physics before I understand what “per-pixel sharpness” means. For those of us who have cast our lot with Nikon, we should hope — with some confidence based on Nikon’s track record — that Canon’s latest offering will be a clarion call to Nikon that they must respond, and soon. No doubt, Nikon has been working on their counter-punch since before the 7D’s unveiling.