Canon EOS 7D Review: Digital Photography Review

Compared to...

Studio scene comparison (RAW)

For a (more) level playing field for comparison we also shot our studio scene in RAW mode with each camera and converted it using Adobe Camera RAW (in this case a Beta version of ACR 5.6). Because Adobe Camera RAW applies different levels of sharpening to different cameras (this confirmed) we had to use the following workflow for these conversions:

Load RAW file into Adobe Camera RAW (Auto mode disabled)
Set Sharpness to 0 (all other settings default)
Open file to Photoshop
Apply a Unsharp mask: 80%, Radius 1.0, Threshold 0
Save as a TIFF (for cropping) and as a JPEG quality 11 for download

This is our standard studio scene comparison shot taken from exactly the same tripod position. Lighting: daylight simulation, >98% CRI. Crops are 100%. Ambient temperature was approximately 22°C (~72°F). Camera settings as per previous pages.

Please note that our version of Adobe ACR (5.6 Beta) had according to Adobe not been fully optimized for the EOS 7D yet. Once a full version becomes available we will reprocess these samples and replace them where necessary. Thanks to Eric at Adobe for making this 'pre-beta' version of ACR available in time for this review.

Canon EOS 7D vs. Canon EOS 50D

Canon EOS 7D	Canon EOS 50D

6.1MB JPEG (5184 x 3456)	5.2MB JPEG (4752 x 3168)

Shooting in RAW format and processing with Adobe ACR 5.6 Beta squeezes some extra detail out of both cameras' output compared to the JPEG output, but the difference is only really noticeable at a pixel-level. This means that both cameras' JPEG engines are already doing a fairly decent job in transferring the captured detail into the final JPEG image. Again, the difference in detail is mainly due to the 7D's slightly higher sensor resolution, and only of any importance if you use stopped-down prime lenses.