n0b0 wrote:
Sorry but how do you shoot video with flash? o_0
By cutting off the rest of the sentence you changed my meaning. A bit like "Chelsea football club is the only football club in the world..." [of West London teams which are at the top of the Premier League]. Maybe next time you could just cut the word 'not' out when quoting me... ;-)
Yakim Peled wrote:
>>I know that is not an issue for most people here, so please don't jump in with the "I don't shoot video because I am FM stills elite", I just think it's an important distinction between the two formats for those who do use the video feature.
>I don't shoot video because it does not interest me. Does that makes me a FM stills elite?
No - it makes you one of the people who spreads knowledge and good will by saying "x isn't an issue because I don't use x". We are a big club ;-)
Tom_W wrote:
It may sound silly, but was the dioptor adjusted correctly? I've been fooled by that more than once. A seemingly "set and forget" adjustment, but I've managed on more than one occasion to bump my dioptor adjustment up or down a few clicks without realizing it.
Yes - it was adjusted correctly.
I think this kind of miscalibration is common in non-1-series bodies. Both of my 5D2's are very slightly miscalibrated. I don't know how Canon calibrates this, but it may be that it makes the focus path slightly short in order to compensate for wear during the camera's life. The stops which hold the mirror in place might well suffer miniscule compression after 30,000 shots or so. It's really a shame that Canon offers AF calibration but no MF calibration except shimming. My dealer told me I was a dying breed of manual focussers when I spoke to him about this. Looks like Canon takes the same attitude now. Manual SLR focus on EOS could be dying. If it does I will sell all my Canon kit and move to Nikon, Leica, Sony, or whichever manufacturer does bother provide suitable tools for focussing f1.4 lenses off-centre with a ground glass screen. It's a deal-breaker for me. Accurate manual focus is the essential function of a camera body.
brainiac wrote:
The 1.3 crop 16Mpixel 1D4 with 7D AF on steroids should be announced by the 27th October, so that will probably set a new bar for combined AF and video cameras, but if you never need to be able to focus an f2 or f1.4 lens manually, the 7D looks great.
My dealer told me that the mark4 would be February or so, I am on the fence about getting a 7D if the mark4 will be sooner, Do you have info on a 27th Oct. date or just a guess? If it is that early I may hold off on the 7D. Ron
kazman442 wrote:
My dealer told me that the mark4 would be February or so, I am on the fence about getting a 7D if the mark4 will be sooner, Do you have info on a 27th Oct. date or just a guess? If it is that early I may hold off on the 7D. Ron
It's a guess. My source may be no more reliable than flipping a coin. But Canon is likely to be planning something for the Islington/London event on the 27th. Maybe it's just a new photocopier.
brainiac wrote:
No - it makes you one of the people who spreads knowledge and good will by saying "x isn't an issue because I don't use x". We are a big club ;-)
...and by the way, I don't use mirror lock up, even when I have time. I hope you are all fascinated by my dirty little secret. ;-)
Braniac - I didn't quite understand what you were saying about not being able to use the 7d for manual focus with f/2 or faster lenses, what was the limiting factor? Would the camera not 'chirp'? Were you talking about not being able to add a split focus screen? You can still focus manually, but with a less accurate/desirable method?
corndog wrote:
Braniac - I didn't quite understand what you were saying about not being able to use the 7d for manual focus with f/2 or faster lenses, what was the limiting factor? Would the camera not 'chirp'? Were you talking about not being able to add a split focus screen? You can still focus manually, but with a less accurate/desirable method?
The screen shows a larger visible area of focus than what the photo will (I assume due to some CoC thing) so if your not using or dont trust or dotn have a focus point where you want and manual focus for that you have to guess or use live view.
brainiac wrote:
- the focus screen certainly doesn't allow accurate manual focussing of f2 and brighter lenses.
- the combined liveview/video button is a usability disaster
- another deal breaker for me is this: you can't shoot video with flash,
- focus screen, OK an issue for those who want to manual focus with accuracy f2.8 or faster lenses and who dont want to use live view.
- liveview/video - the switch, switch it to video, then press the button, video records. same for lvie view, if its sr tto live view press the button, once...
I am itching to go to Maine this weekend to chase some Moose. I can't seem to find the 7D available except for a grey market model locally. Would you consider buying a grey model?
I wouldn't, especially this early in production. If you need to send it in, where are you going to send it, back to Japan? It would seem to be a hassle to me.
so far it seems (and many types of conditions have not been shot under yet so it is far from my definitive opinion):
The 7D outer AF points in one shot mode can often be quicker than those on 5D2 and sometimes more precise and accurate as well. They are much less prone to hunt. The 7D AF system clearly beats that of the 5D2 when one is not using the center point.
The 7D center point generally seems similar to the that of the 5D2 although, in some trickier cases such as a very flatly lit tree trunk in the shady woods at say 135mm f/2, the 5D2 seems to do a bit better. In that case, about 65% of the time it was able to realize acceptable focus and 33% of the time totally nail the focus perfectly while the figures were maybe >25% and 10% for 7D. I am starting to forget exactly how the 50D did but I seem to recall I though the 5D2 center point did better in one shot mode, center point, on average.
I have not gotten to give the 7D a good AI Servo test yet so no real clue, but hopefully the specs and hype is true.
Viewing images from both at 100% at moderate to high ISOs the 5D2 certainly holds up and looks a lot better. I forgot how much better FF holds up than APS-C.
That said, when the subject matter is too far away to frame as desired, the 7D does bring in better detail AND overall image quality than the 5D2. The 20D and 40D do not.
The 7D VF is terrible for MF, even at f/4 it is pretty bad.
Unless the lighting is strong, above ISO800 it can be tricky to really fully realize 18MP type detail and by ISO3200 it often seems more like 10MP resolution cam? (If you re-size it to 20D and 40D image dimensions for a quick screen comparison, it doesn't look too bad and I think it probably brings in a tiny bit less noise and a little bit more crispness and certainly less banding in darker regions of the image especially compared to the 20D)
The vertical pattern banding is not likely to be an issue above ISO500 even on the bad cameras in any reasonable real-world scenario and ISO250 on the better bodies (and of course even then only with very challenging scenes), although at ISO 100 it can give you less effective DR, I think, than the 40D and even 50D and 5D2 (again not all scenes really have huge DR or important shadows).
At ISO1600 and up the nature of the noise and banding and all hold up better than the 20D/40D/50D, it's easier to deal with and you don't run into nasty artifacts under tricky circumstances nearly as much (but 5D2 looks lots better, even despite having more pattern banding noise, it simply collects so much more light).
The 7D build and feel are very solid. 5D2 feels a little flimsy and creaky in comparison.
For those that are into camera build.
AI Servo and One Shot AF definitely behave differently on the 7D, as already touched upon earlier in this thread.
If you try to do a test where you aim at one subject and then at a second subject that has a drab flat lighting indoors and only moderate contrast the AI Servo will pretty much refuse to ever switch focus to the second object even if you hold it over it for like 4 seconds, sometimes after lot of coaxing it will it will eventually grab it.
In one shot mode it grabs it though (although occasionally it might still pause for a second).
20D,40D,50D,5D2 don't act like that at all and lock onto the second subject in AI Servo no matter what (unless it is impossible to AF on of course).
Doing a test like that, going back and forth between the two objects in AI Servo, it took the 5D2/50D about 20 seconds and the 20D about 30 seconds to do it a given number of times and the 7D about infinity haha.
In many real world scenarios this might be good since the 7D will really avoid anything it maybe thinks is washed out drab background but maybe it explains those having trouble tracking brown deer against brown woods under drab lighting? Maybe it is awesome for sports, on average, but occasionally terrible for birds/nature while other times being great for that? I tried all sensitivities and custom functions and it didn't seem to ever make it grab focus on the second target.
Switching to a second subject with a bit sharper contrast and using a 135L to flip focus back and forth between each in AI servo as fast as possible (7D tracking to fast mode) with subjects only about 3' apart the 7D and 5D2 seemed to do it in pretty much the same amount of time, actually the 5D2 a tiny bit faster perhaps. So the 'slow' 5D2 didn't seem any slower than the 50D or 7D in this sort of test. However, part of it may be the 7D has much stronger logic trying to remain on target. OTOH at the ballpark i thought the 5D2 might've been a little slower to get first grab on a player than the 7D.
Anyway, this test wasn't really setup like most action photography,
but I think it definitely shows that there is some very different AI Servo logic between the two cameras and the 7D seem to try to avoid stuff it thinks is junk is think or shouldn't appear next in a sequence of tracking. It doesn't like jumping to targets at different distances with one outside the DOF of the first if the second one is kinda low contrast compared to the other even when sensitivity is set to high. This might be better in real world usage, although I'm sure there will be the rare time where it causes a real mess.
I am quite curious to see how it would do on the football or soccer field. I wonder if it will really lock onto a target and really nail the tracking with frame after crisp frame and still allow quick jumping, when needed, in realistic scenarios.
I predict that it will either do much worse, much better or about the same or somewhere in between those choices and be utterly fantastic.
(side note: I did some AI servo on a leaf on a branch that was blowing up and down about 4' and the 5D2 tracked right on the leaf, at f/2 and 135mm pretty well)
brainiac wrote:
I think this kind of miscalibration is common in non-1-series bodies. Both of my 5D2's are very slightly miscalibrated. I don't know how Canon calibrates this, but it may be that it makes the focus path slightly short in order to compensate for wear during the camera's life. The stops which hold the mirror in place might well suffer miniscule compression after 30,000 shots or so. It's really a shame that Canon offers AF calibration but no MF calibration except shimming. My dealer told me I was a dying breed of manual focussers when I spoke to him about this. Looks like Canon takes the same attitude now. Manual SLR focus on EOS could be dying. If it does I will sell all my Canon kit and move to Nikon, Leica, Sony, or whichever manufacturer does bother provide suitable tools for focussing f1.4 lenses off-centre with a ground glass screen. It's a deal-breaker for me. Accurate manual focus is the essential function of a camera body....Show more →
I think that with autofocus and USM lenses, manual focus (for better or worse) has taken a back seat. Only a small handful of lenses have a nice long focus scale with a smooth manual focus operation - the tilt-shifts (since they are MF) and the 85/1.2L come to mind.
I haven't done much manual focusing of late (my eyes aren't all that good) but I do think that it would be nice to have a decent focus screen like the microprism or split-image screens of the old days available if people want to use them. I know that using live view and 10X magnification works well, but it also requires that the camera be away from the face and that means a less steady mount unless a tripod is used.
This animated sequence is strictly for showing AF accuracy and burst speed perf/ limit using a 8gb Sandisk Extreme III (30 MB/s) card. This is not about image quality, I had to compress the images to a smaller size to create this animation.
If the animation does not load, shift + reload your browser window.
Setup:
7D, 400 f/5.6 handheld
Ai-Servo, High speed burst
AF-Expansion mode (center + 4)
Tracking speed: slow
Obtained 24 frames (RAW burst..yes 24, am sure a few more could be clicked butthe guy just came too close !!)
This camera can surely empty the RAW buffer to the right type of card at an amazing speed.
Granted this is not BIF, but none of the frames were oof, the AF locked on the rider and continued tracking him, even though there were pedestrians in the bg at one point of time. I have added a 0.5 sec delay to show each frame, the whole thing actually happened in under 3-4 seconds.
brainiac wrote:
By cutting off the rest of the sentence you changed my meaning. A bit like "Chelsea football club is the only football club in the world..." [of West London teams which are at the top of the Premier League]. Maybe next time you could just cut the word 'not' out when quoting me... ;-)
Ok...
- another deal breaker for me is this: you can't shoot video with flash, so that means you want bright glass, especially for that nice cinematic narrow d.o.f.
It's not my fault you didn't structure your sentence properly. Even by reading the whole sentence, I still get the impression that you don't like the 7D because you can't use the flash for video, but anyway... this isn't WRIT101 so carry on.
