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Canon EOS 7D Review

Jan 28, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

HDSLR provides striking images with good depth of field and little noise.

You can set the shutter speed and aperture manually, but there are no guides such as a waveform monitor or zebra stripes to assist your efforts. There is no gain setting, but there is an ISO setting—which, as you recall from your readings on photography, has much the same effect: brightening the image at higher speeds but adding noise to the signal. On the 7D, ISO settings range from 100 to 12,800.

Though there is no peaking guide for focus, you can set focus using the autofocus control before you start shooting. You can also zoom into the frame using the magnification button before shooting to set focus. For white balance, you can use auto white balance; choose from a range of presets such as daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent; dial in a color temperature; or white balance manually. You can connect a monitor using composite or HDMI connections to assist with setting all of your camera controls.

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Audio is picked up by a small onboard microphone with a 1/8in. microphone input, but there is no manual gain control or a meter—it's all automatic. This actually worked reasonably well during some of my real-world shoots, though the camera did tend to boost gain to find some sound to capture during quiet periods. For most serious uses, the lack of an XLR input is a problem, though you'll have no trouble getting good reference audio from the 7D for syncing purposes.

One potentially serious limitation is that the camera will stop recording a file after 29 minutes and 59 seconds, or when the file reaches 4GB, whichever occurs first. If you're shooting in either 720p60 or 1080i30, this means about 12 minutes of recording before you have to stop and restart. If you're shooting takes in a movie or documentary, this probably isn't a big deal. On the other hand, for longer interviews or many performance events, this could be a problem.

This limitation relates to the FAT32 storage format that the 7D uses. It's also why files written to P2 cards max out at 4GB. Of course, P2 files seamlessly spill over to another file for longer recordings. I asked Canon reps if they planned to work around this limitation, and they indicated that nothing was planned in the short term.

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
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