It seems to be a little less quick to acquire focus and a little less consistent in maintaining focus compared to the R3. The 100-500 seemed to engage image stabilization a bit more slowly than I recall with other bodies. I didn't do any back to back shooting today. I think these differences are probably as expected with a camera 1/4 the price of the R3.
The files really seem to be pretty nice so far. I've only shot up to about ISO1600 at this point. I did a few test shots up to 6400 but really haven't had any chance to look through anything.
On electronic shutter bursts, if you look at several photos in a row, there is notable distortion where some parts of the image seem stretched and/or others seem compressed. It's not enough that you would think any single photo looked abnormal, but if you looked at several back to back you might notice the variance. It was most notable when I was looking in Lightroom and rapidly scrolling through photos by holding one of the arrow keys down.
I shot about 4,000 photos today over about 6 hours. I had 3/4 bars left on the battery. Many were bursts. bobbytan wrote:
What are your initial impressions of the R7?
KINGOFKNGS wrote:
Here are two shots from the Cincinnati Zoo today. Both shot with the RF 100-500. The Gibbon was shot at ISO1600, 1/500, f/7.1, and the Inca Tern at ISO 1600, 1/125, f/7.1. Both went through some minor adjustments in Lightroom, Topaz noise reduction (the Tern came out with a funky background, will need to redo it), and then minor sharpening again back in Lightroom. The tern was indoors in poor light. The Gibbon was in the shade in very late morning sun.
Only two impressive shots I have seen so far. Others may be result of no PP or poor PP.
Well this is funny, although not so much for those on the backorders list - I just happened to be walking past a TED's Camera store (here in Melbourne Australia) and thought I would walk in and see what the R7 situation was. Cut a long story short I walked out with an R7 body and a RF100-400.
It was just sitting there waiting to be purchased. Lol!
It seems they got a total of 3 R7's (and this is in a big shopping mall). 2 were kits and were pre-ordered and one was a body only and not was not pre-ordered and had been there for a couple of days.
The R7 is nicely built and quite large compared to the a6400, as is the 100-400 compared to the 70-350. Ergonomics much better obviously.
I'll give it 110% for build quality and ergonomics but the a6400/70-350 fits in my coat pocket and the R7/100-400 is not going to do that.
Bird eye af is there but whether it is any better than the a6400 with no bird eye af remains to be seen. It seems to lose the eye for no reason and jump onto the background. Rather annoying to try and get it back then.
Burst mode is nice and pre-captures images - unfortunately the images were blurry because I had to use a slow shutter speed in the low light.
It is also a bit weird as the RAW files are all together in one file and individual files can’t easily be accessed it seems. 1st world problem.
EVF may be better than the a6400 though, less blackout and lag perhaps. Hard to tell at the moment.
Image quality - hmm nothing to write home about at this point - just another aps-c sensor.
Samples below. A6400 processed with DxO PL5 and R7 with DPP + Topaz DN AI
Nice detail in this last one - just holds up when cropped 16x9 and displayed on a 5K monitor. Obviously the light is poor so nothing was going to look particularly good except with a f/2.8 lens perhaps.
Still holds up well enough agains the a6400 at first glance - which was not what my initial impression was.
Detail is better - noise maybe not so much - at least that is my impression.
Animal Eye AF
Hit and miss with a lot of misses it seems, still it seems to pick up the birds eyes quite well but I am not convinced the a6400 does not still beat it easily in the focus accuracy on final images. More testing so don’t quote me.
Can anyone explain how I can program two separate back autofocus buttons - one with Wide Area and the other with a small square with with tracking.
It is unclear to me how to assign a AF-ON + Wide Area to one button and AF-ON + Flexible Zone to a different button, if this is indeed even possible.
And what is RAW Burst Mode - how is this different from H+. Seems that pre-shooting is only available in this mode.
BTW I just managed to test the EVF with some longer tracking of birds and there seems to be little or no blackout or lag - seems to be how I recall the R5 was.
I did set the view finder display to smooth with suppress lower frame rate on. Probably chew up the battery now.
Unfortunately it was very dark so images will be unusable and I couldn't shoot the a6400 back to back but I am pretty sure it blows the a6400 away in this regard.
And here is some severe rolling shutter but on a positive not it grabbed focus pretty quickly on this bird in shocking light - I only saw the bird at the last second and didn’t think it had acquired focus but it had. In that light I wouldn’t expect anything to be usable so this is just an example of rolling shutter.
I don't expect a zoom to outperform a $3600 prime even when the prime is attached to a 20MP cropped sensor DSLR. What I hope is that I can acquire images that focus on the eye more quickly and the images would be almost as good.
The rolling shutter examples are disheartening but I rarely shoot at low shutter speed when I would use 30 f/s.
FYI, my other consideration is an OM Systems OM-1 with a 100-400 and it does have a stacked sensor BUT, given the lens I have chosen, I will only shoot at 20 f/s. Unfortunately, it is a 20MP tiny sensor. That is the trade off.
I don't expect a zoom to outperform a $3600 prime even when the prime is attached to a 20MP cropped sensor DSLR. What I hope is that I can acquire images that focus on the eye more quickly and the images would be almost as good.
The rolling shutter examples are disheartening but I rarely shoot at low shutter speed when I would use 30 f/s.
FYI, my other consideration is an OM Systems OM-1 with a 100-400 and it does have a stacked sensor BUT, given the lens I have chosen, I will only shoot at 20 f/s. Unfortunately, it is a 20MP tiny sensor. That is the trade off.
The zoom is super sharp - no problem there - f/8 in low light is the problem. APS-C in low light is the real problem I guess.
Now if I could figure out how to program two back focus buttons - one with Wide Area and the other with single point or something smaller for picking one subject out of many that would be perfect.
Sadly it seems it is not possible to combine the AF ON + Focus Area 1 to a one button and AF ON + Focus Area 2 to another button.
So how do Canonites instantly select a different Focus Area on the R3 or R5/6 ?
duncang wrote:
The zoom is super sharp - no problem there - f/8 in low light is the problem. APS-C in low light is the real problem I guess.
Now if I could figure out how to program two back focus buttons - one with Wide Area and the other with single point or something smaller for picking one subject out of many that would be perfect.
Sadly it seems it is not possible to combine the AF ON + Focus Area 1 to a one button and AF ON + Focus Area 2 to another button.
So how do Canonites instantly select a different Focus Area on the R3 or R5/6 ?
I believe it is possible to set up the two buttons the way you suggest on R5/6. If its not possible on the R7, a potential work around is to go in and only enable those two focus modes, and set one of the rear buttons to toggle through them. So you'd have your AF on button, then the button near it to cycle through AF modes, but with only two AF modes enabled you'd just bet switching between them.
jedibrain wrote:
I believe it is possible to set up the two buttons the way you suggest on R5/6. If its not possible on the R7, a potential work around is to go in and only enable those two focus modes, and set one of the rear buttons to toggle through them. So you'd have your AF on button, then the button near it to cycle through AF modes, but with only two AF modes enabled you'd just bet switching between them.
I figured out how to configure two back focus buttons - one with Wide Area and the other with Spot and both with Start Tracking. So apart from zebras missing with still pretty much the same configuration as my A1, A9 and a6400.
Surprising the Canon manual seems to skip over explaining how to customise the AF mode for each button. When assigning AF ON to a button click the Details Set button and configure each of the parameters. These are more flexible than Sony's I think.
