rscheffler
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Somewhere on the Lensrentals site is (to paraphrase) Roger's law of reality vs internet hype/expectations...
I used it Sunday at an NFL football game. General impression was it was nowhere near 1DXI/II level performance, which of course wasn't a surprise. It's been a couple years since I tried the 7DII, also at a couple football games, so can't really give a direct comparison, but the 90D seemed closer to my experience with the 7DII.
Unfortunately the environment of the game presented some suboptimal conditions. Namely, it was warmer than expected for this time of year, sunny, and the playing surface was artificial 'Field Turf' which in these conditions became a huge heat sink and caused immense problems with atmospheric distortion when wanting/hoping to shoot long - a primary interest of mine for this camera, as a form of 'digital' teleconverter thanks to the APS-C crop and high pixel density (vs. the FF 1DXII).
I turned off as many settings as I could find that might potentially throttle frame rate, such as any and all in-camera image processing for distortion, CA, NR, DLO, diffraction, etc., etc. AF parameters were tuned to be more responsive to quick changes, though I did leave the frame rate/focus priority in the middle, rather than favoring frame rate (since it wouldn't do me much good to potentially have a lot of sub-optimally focused images.
The camera still wouldn't hit 10fps. I'd guess it was somewhere more around 7-8 and sometimes dropped lower, which when shooting 14 with the 1DXII, felt glacial. AF consistency also wasn't impressive. This was partly due to the heat coming off the field, which also negatively affected the 1DXII, but was amplified at ~30MP, where many image lacked critical focus/sharpness. It's not to say the camera couldn't nail focus, because from casual shooting of non-action situations on other days, it certainly could. I quickly gave up trying to use it for primary action and used it instead as the second camera for near-action situations, such as long-bomb passes that land near me (didn't happen in this game), as well as end zone action. In this use case, I frequently end up raising the camera to shoot with only a split second to spare while roughly lining up the composition. I decided to use one of the zone AF options (where it splits the AF area into three zones) so perfect AF point placement on the subject wouldn't be critical. But even here I was sometimes stymied because the AF zone would also include the field in the foreground and the camera sometimes instead focused there. After noticing this I also tried the 9-point AF box that can be moved around. In one instance, with the subject well framed and the AF zone covering the intended subject, it jumped to the background for a number of frames. I also didn't have any UHS-II cards available and buffer limitations were definitely a problem.
So, after only one game with it, it hasn't exactly impressed me for action photography applications. I likely need to use it a bit more, but doubt it will really fill the role I was hoping it might.
That said, for less hectic use, I've enjoyed it. It feels good in the hand, is fun to use, sufficiently responsive and being able to crop in on ~30MP has already come in handy for a specific shoot. BTW, that one was shot at ISO 2000 and some of the CR3s had to be pushed a bit, and still looked good, IMO. So maybe high ISO performance isn't quite up there with FF, but it's not that far off either. If I didn't want to use it for sports, I'd generally be happy with it, though as I mentioned before, I think I'd instead get the M6II, which I might, depending on how good the Black Friday/Boxing Day sales are...
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