Don’t get a Canon 7D
Natasha did something crazy on Christmas. She bought me something I wanted, something that’s really, really expensive that I wanted. Despite the title of this posting, I really like my new camera, a Canon 7D, but I wanted to make it clear that there are some reasons you might want to think twice before you get your new Canon SLR.
Let’s start from the same jumping off point we did last time: you want a nice SLR camera that shoots video and are trying to decide whether it’s worth it or not to upgrade from the Canon T1i to the Canon 7D for an extra $1000. I’ve already laid out what that extra grand gets you. Here’s why none of that matters.
From the outside the Canon 7D looks impressive, nice build quality (not plastic) and a new, slick interface. But, it’s not like the T1i is made from paper mache and its interface was designed by lemurs. You want to pay for some features that at the end of the day have no impact on the pictures you take?
Another, really important, feature of the 7D is the control it gives the videographer over how he/she/it shoots, most notably that you can shoot at 1080p. But, what are you using to edit your video? If you’re like me, you might be relying on Final Cut Express to edit. In that case, you’re gonna be really limited as to what you can do with that 1080p video. And where’s this stuff gonna wind up? Youtube? 720p is fine for Youtube.
(As a side note, I’m playing on shooting at 1080p and using the 1080i60fps Easy Setup option on Final Cut Express.
Another option the Canon 7D affords its operator is the ability to manually set the exposure when shooting video. But, you can’t adjust this on the fly and, anyways, you’ve got enough on your plate when shooting video that you don’t need to be thinking you can set the exposure better than the Digic 4 processor or whatever onboard component has been designed to do that way better than you ever could.
Now that we’ve established there’s nothing on the outside of the camera that is worth the extra moola, let’s look at the insdie. We’ll start with the hardware.
Biggest difference between the Canon 7D and its little brother, the T1i is the sensor. The 7D has more pixels and you can jack the ISO up higher. But, as a number of people have pointed out, the law of diminishing returns applies here. You can just keep packing more pixels on the same size sensor; they just won’t be effective. Anyways, fifteen megapixels is more than enough. Moreover, just cause you can jack the ISO up to 6400 (or even 12800), doesn’t mean you should.
And the software. The Canon 7D has new autofocus options (19 autofocus points) and a new metering system that is sensitive to color. Again, do you really need this stuff? At the end of the day, if you’re like me, you focus with the center focus point and recompose. All those extra options don’t mean squat if you don’t use them.
Okay, if you’ve gotten this far and still aren’t convinced, maybe the problem isn’t that the Canon 7D is too much camera. Maybe the problem is it’s too little camera. Maybe you need a full frame sensor and need to UPgrade. Why not take a look at the Canon 5D?