7D has noise at high ISO's, but can be easily improved with Noise Suppression
 

I've been playing with my 7D and must say that at low light, especially with fast glass, the 7D is much better than my XHA1, I'm able to get "useable" images at very low light, but still with more noise than is excellent. Below I took some screen grabs from some extremely tough lighting situations. The interior shot is a 15' x 24' room very dimly illuminated and the scene is outside illuminated only by a street light. In both cases I either had ISO cranked to 6400 or 12,800, so these scenes are severely lighted challenged.

These are rather boring Vegas 9.0b screen grabs at 1920 x 1080, with and without Neat noise suppression that show how the camera performs and how the image at such extremes can be enhanced further with good noise suppression:

* Note, I'm not on Neat's payroll, nor can I claim how their noise suppression software compares to other programs. All I know is it has saved my bacon many times with the XHA1 and it appears to benefit the 7D as well in these extreme situations.

Thanks for sharing. These are individual screen grabs. Does Neat Image work when processing an entire video file?

I have Adobe Premiere Pro. What are the options for reducing noise in video work?

Jeff,

To be clear, these shots were extracted from a video file shot 1080-24P. I have rendered these and several video segments with noise suppression without issue, understanding Neat slows renders down about 5x. I chose screen grabs since it is easier to share on the forum. So far the noise on the 7D doesn't seem to present much of a problem until I start to exceed ISO 1200 - 1600; then it starts to increasingly rear its head. In many cases I can keep well below that with fast glass and/or lighting. Sometimes you can't and that's where noise suppression becomes your friend. The shots you see presented here would most likely have been very bad with the A1, with or without noise suppression.

I did see some side to side low light comparisons between a 7d and a hv30 which was impressive but haven't found any direct comparisons between a xh-a1 and the 7d.
Do you have any framegrabs of side by side shots of both cameras? Would love to see that.

Not yet, but I may attempt it when I get my A1 back from a loan.