Technology and Feature Overview
Photographs as image-capture technologies have been around for more than a century and a half. More than a hundred years ago, cameras became available to everyone, thanks to the development of George Eastman . But the technological breakthrough that cameras have made over the past two decades is comparable in scale to the entire previous hundred-year history of development. The capabilities of modern cameras did not dream of photographers of the XX century. Nevertheless, modern amateur photographers still sometimes have complaints about cameras: either the noise level is high, then the autofocus is not fast enough, then the speed is low.
Get price Canon EOS 7D Mark II
Today in our magazine a big test of the camera starts, the characteristics of which will be very difficult to find fault with. This is the Canon EOS 7D Mark II - the most advanced camera with an APS-C format matrix to date, which in its capabilities is very close to the top -end reporting SLRs of the highest price range.
We will test this camera in the “Week with an Expert” format, publishing new parts of the big test day after day and revealing in them various features of the EOS 7D Mark II. Stay in touch and stay tuned! Today I propose to get acquainted with the main features of this new product.
Canon EOS 7D Mark II / Canon EF 16-35mm f / 2.8L II Installations: ISO 1600, F4, 1/200 s
Five years - this is how much the previous model, the first version of Canon EOS 7D, lived on the market without an update . Moreover, it cannot be called obsolete even now. This is a huge period by modern standards, which once again proves the success of the concept of creating a camera with the highest characteristics on an APS-C format matrix. This solution allows you not to raise the price tag of the camera to heights unthinkable for the average photographer, but at the same time give the camera almost unlimited shooting possibilities.
Canon EOS 7D Mark II uses a 20-megapixel APS-C sensor
The sensor is made using technology Dual-Pixel AF CMOS
The Canon EOS 7D Mark II was created exactly in the same concept. At the heart of the camera is also a full-frame sensor with a crop factor of 1.6 (physical dimensions 22.4 x 15.0 mm). This image sensor is powered by Dual-Pixel AF CMOS technology, first introduced on the Canon EOS 70D . Let me remind you that this technology allows you to realize fast phase-detection autofocus directly on the camera’s matrix in Live View mode or during video recording. The resolution of the matrix is ??20.2 million pixels, which, according to the developers, provides a balance between high resolution and low noise. We will pay attention to the noise level at high ISO more than once in our test. The standard range of sensitivity is from 100 to 16,000 ISO units, expandable to 25,600 and 51,200 units.
Canon EOS 7D Mark II Shutter
A shutter is installed in front of the matrix, which can cut shutter speeds up to 1/8000 s, as a professional camera should. Guaranteed shutter life declared at the level of 200,000 operations. However, this figure does not look so huge, if you look at the rate of fire of the camera. The Canon EOS 7D Mark II delivers burst speeds of up to 10 frames / s while maintaining tracking autofocus and automatic inter-frame metering. In this parameter, the new seven surpasses all competitors. By the way, the manufacturer claims that special attention during the development of the camera was paid to reducing the vibrations of the mirror during serial shooting in order to ensure the most stable position of the mirrors - the primary and secondary, necessary for the phase sensor to work.
Canon EOS 7D Mark II has two Digic 6 processors
To ensure the processing of a huge data stream, two DIGIC 6 processors are used in the camera. Perhaps due to the use of two powerful processors, the camera was able to implement a sophisticated exposure metering system consisting of 150,000 elements and having, in addition to the already familiar RGB elements, infrared sensitive cells . All this is used to recognize scenes, as well as to determine the faces in the frame when sighting through the viewfinder.
And now we got to the most interesting part - the autofocus system. If the Canon EOS 7D used an autofocus sensor with a modest number of points - 19 by modern standards, then in the EOS 7D Mark II the number of autofocus points was increased to 65! All 65 points are of the cross type (they can “cling” to both vertical and horizontal lines in the frame), the central sensor is a double cross. The sensitivity of the center point is -3EV. This is enough for shooting in the moonlight. We will spend the whole day of our big test working with autofocus and its settings.
Of interest is the camera viewfinder. It has 100% coverage of the frame area with an increase of x1.0. This is one of the largest viewfinders among the “cropped” cameras. It uses a translucent LCD screen that allows you to directly overlay information on the basic camera settings, electronic level readings, and framing grid directly on the image. Naturally, the display of these parameters is configured in the menu.
Sealing locations for the EOS 7D Mark II
The developers of EOS 7D Mark II did not ignore the interests of travel photographers. In addition to the traditional dust and moisture protection of a durable magnesium housing, they implemented a built-in GPS receiver in the camera, which allows you to save in the file properties information about the coordinates of the shooting location: latitude, longitude, height above sea level, direction, universal coordinated time.
Automatically snap snapshots to a map in Adobe Lightroom
The camera works with two types of memory cards: SD and CF. It's nice that Canon does not refuse fast professional CompactFlash cards. For example, during the test we used a Toshiba Exceria 1000x flash drive with a write speed of up to 120 MB / s, which allowed us to shoot series of unlimited length at a speed of 10 frames / s. Naturally, the logic of the two memory cards is configured in the menu.
Finally, the video. Not a single camera can do without the video function today. Canon EOS 7D Mark II records video in Full HD format (yes, no 4K), but it does it in high quality. Video recording is carried out with a frequency of up to 60 frames / s and the choice of compression method: All-I or IPB. There is an input for an external microphone and headphone output. From the Canon EOS 7D Mark II's HDMI output, you can shoot a clean, uncompressed 4: 2: 2 8-bit signal to record on the recorder. We also recall once again the ability to shoot videos with smooth and accurate autofocus, thanks to the Dual Pixel CMOS AF technology.
November 28, 2014 EOS 7D Mark II will go on sale in stores of official partners of the company:
Media Markt (Moscow), M. Video (Moscow), Svyaznoy (Moscow), PhotoPlus (Moscow), DNS (Moscow), Photosale (Moscow), Copy-Moscow (Moscow), PhotoClass (Moscow), daStore (Moscow), LigaFoto (Moscow), Bright Photo Market (St. Petersburg), Intellect (Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk), SHX.RU Photo Store (Perm, Izhevsk), SKD-Canon (Samara), Photographer (Ufa), Technosity (Novosibirsk).
Canon encourages customers to purchase products only in authorized stores to be sure of the quality of the equipment and to receive full service support.
