Canon 7d Road Test
 

Have been lucky enough to get one for a few weeks so stand by for a blitz of footage and tests!!!

Philip Bloom Blog Archive Pimp my Canon 7d: Road testing the latest Video DSLR

P.S. The UK price currently out there £1699 is too steep. List should be cheaper!

Be sure to tell us all about manual focussing (how good is the push button focus, how much do you recommend a follow focus ring, how good is the lcd screen for focussing etc.), and how good the screen is when viewed off axis.

Things that I would really like to see tested:

* HDMI resolution while recording. Does it still drop to 480p from 1080i when you hit the record button?
* Bit rate in 24p mode. Is it still 48 mbps? That would be great, since it would mean that each frame now has 25% more bandwidth.
* AGC? Still there?
* Audio monitoring on A/V jack?

Feel free to send me the camera when you're done with it for further analysis!

Sounds Great.

Yes, a test on the HDMI output, recording and not recording (live view) is top on my mind.

Clean, full 16x9 frame output, 1080p etc...

Thanks

Tramm,

Phil has already tweeted that there HDMI resolution still drops from 1080 to 480p and I've had this confirmed by Canon.

There is still AGC

Not sure about the other 2.

Dan

I want to know why the rear screen doesn't flip, flop, twist and turn. I want to use this baby high above my head and down there on the ground.

Wow, you've got that pimped out like a Red on a Soderberg shoot. I'd like to see real world stuff, cars and trucks going by, high contrast things, people interacting in normal lighting conditions, wide angle shots interior and exterior, low and high angles, etc. And, what lenses you are using for those shots.

People all over the world is waiting for your results Philipp. Good luck.

HDMI live out still 480p
AGC still there
Not tried headphone jack yet but Canon say no. Not looked at bitrate yet.

Lets see, its about 10 there now, so Phil should have his first rough shots on the time line and be color correcting. Phil... stay out of the pubs tonight... and we could see something about 5 p.m PDT. :)

Dear Phil,

I am assuming that you mean that the HDMI Out, in Live mode, is 480p, when the camera is recording.

I am assuming that it is 1080p in Live mode when you are not recording.

I am also assuming that there is a white square on the HDMI out in Live mode when you are not recording.

Please let me know if you can get a clean image out of the HDMI port, no icons.

Personally, I am interested if the Live Out (while not recording) is 1080p, full screen, no pillarbox, and is clean.

To state the obvious, I am interested in recording the HDMI output and the camera does not need to be in record mode.

Sorry, no joy for you there. Same as 5d exactly.

Dear Phill,

Thanks for your quick reply.

So, it is pillarboxed, and has icons, so it is not a clean output.

Does the output look good, looking past the above problems. In other words, if we magicly got ride of the icons, would it be worthwhile to record the image.

The 5D Mark II is HDMI output is 1080i, not p, when not recording and Magic Lantern can clean all of the extra displays off the screen.

However... while the output signal is 1080, the image region is 3:2 in the best case (no Canon info displayed, after calling lv_output_device( "1080full" )). This means there are side-pillars on both sides of the 16:9 1080i signal, and then soft-mattes to show what portion of the 3:2 is the 16:9 recorded image.

So the effective resolution is even less than the 1080i signal might suggest. I haven't measured it exactly, but my estimate is that we lose about 150 pixels per side-pillar, leaving us with a 1620x911 useful image on the HDMI. I'm still investigating to see if it is possible to get different ratios and to fill the entire screen.

Dear Trammell,

Thanks, I did not know it was 1080i.

I just assumed that since the frame rate on the 5D Mark II was true 30 frames a second, that it was 1080p30 (true 30, and not 1080p29.97).

1080i30 is very strange, in my opinion.

Since the 7D has more frame rates, with 29.97, 23,76, and 25, I thought that they would all be progressive modes and not interlaced.

Trammell, do you know if the output is PSF?