Canon users don’t expect an APS-C-style camera to be the best the company can offer, but the EOS R7 takes everything from the company’s flagship cameras and offers it at an attractive price point that makes it a must-have. into an attractive product.
Construction quality and design
The Canon EOS R7 weighs 1 pound, 5.5 ounces (612 grams) with the battery and a memory card inserted. It measures 5.2 inches (132 mm) wide x 3.6 inches (90.4 mm) high by 3.6 inches at the grip (91.7 mm). Overall, it strikes a fine balance by trying to be compact while not ignoring the fact that it’s made to fit comfortably in the hand.
With some full-frame RF lenses, such as the 14-35mm f/4L, I felt the back of my finger rub against the lens because there wasn’t enough clearance for the grip. This is not something I usually report on and can’t remember a camera other than the R10 where this was a problem for the size of my hand.
One solution to this is to add a vertical handle, which changes the way my finger can angle the handle with the added height. However, it is clear that Canon has no intention of releasing one as the battery door is not easily removable, there is no alignment hole in the bottom, and there is no obvious way that the grip controls will communicate. electronics with body.
This new body design is a bit more complex than the EOS R10 it was announced with, but not quite as beautiful as the EOS 90D in terms of composition. There’s no display above and I find it a bit lacking when it comes to buttons and direct access dials. As the higher end of Canon’s two mirrorless APS-C cameras, I’d expect a better color palette to perform better than this.
With this camera, Canon is testing a new multi-controller joystick housed inside a flat circular dial. It is aligned with the user’s thumb tip, and the purpose is to have these two controls in the same place for quick switching and interaction. My thumb can only be in one place at a time, so I get the charm of stacked controls like this.
In practice, I don’t see an advantage over a traditional unpaired setup. We’ll all have varying degrees of interaction with these controls, but for my photography I know it doesn’t matter that they’re paired like this.
One drawback of this camera is that there are only two control dials while three ways to control exposure exist: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. I manipulate shutter speed and ISO much more often than I do when touching aperture, so I want to change the rear wheel to do ISO. It was technically possible, but Canon stopped its efforts there. There are no buttons on the camera that can be programmed to control aperture in the same way that many buttons can be set up to press and change ISO. This may sound like a niche issue, but it’s really part of something bigger.
Every time I come up with an acceptable solution to something I don’t like about a Canon camera, it hits a dead end because the company doesn’t offer a full menu of options. correction. Canon arbitrarily limits which buttons can be customized and what customizations can be made to that particular button. But hey, most buttons can be programmed to “create folder,” which 100% absolutely requires access with a single tap in the middle of the action (which is ironic, of course).
While the stacked controls and dials are fine – meaning neither good nor bad – I have to say the on/off/recording switch has to be one of the most questionable interface choices I’ve seen. . cameras, camcorders. It is provided with the most convenient and relaxing positions for the thumb to rest on the camera; you know, a lot of times you’ll find the dial exposed because of how perfectly positioned. However, on the R7, it was completely wasted on a function that we never dealt with in the act of taking pictures. Any other place would be a better option than the current one.
The R7 has a three-inch flip-out display (also known as vari-angle) with a resolution of 1.62 million pixels. The electronic viewfinder has 2.36 million dots. This is a better LCD monitor than the R10 and 90D, but worse for both the LCD and the viewfinder when compared to the EOS R. DSLRs are simply about how the world looks. The screen also has plenty of room for improvement, but I’m really impressed with the viewing angles and brightness it offers that can surpass the sun when monitoring outside.
On the right side of the camera is a slide that houses two UHS-II SD card slots, similar to the EOS R6. The R7 uses an LP-E6NH battery, the same one found in R6 and R5, and larger than the one used in the R10. After taking about 900 photos over the course of a day, the battery still has about a third of its life left.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the EOS R7 is dust and moisture resistant to the same extent as the 90D. This is better than the R10 where obvious points of entry, like the battery door at the bottom, don’t have any sealing protection. Another path of dust being blocked is in the sensor: the camera actually has a mechanically closed shutter that blocks the sensor when the camera is powered off.
Image quality
The Canon EOS R7 uses a newly developed 32.5-megapixel APS-C sensor and a DIGIC X image processor. Canon is clearly not the same sensor as in the 90D, despite having the same megapixel resolution. The results are quite amazing and I love the images obtained with this camera. There’s a dynamic range complication that enables classic Canon-style color and scene rendering. That said, the product from the camera never meant much to me, and with the R7’s RAW files, I found plenty of data to push and pull even further without messing things up. .
Looking at the noise level of this APS-C sensor, it’s quite competent considering the size and price of the camera. ISO 800 is where my troubles started with the 7D Mark II I used to own – Canon’s previous APS-C flagship – but here it’s still good in its range. All in all, it seems ISO 3,200 is where the details start to wash out. That’s not bad at all, considering that a few clicks from there is where good full-frame cameras will also start showing similar results.
One of the big features of the R7 is in-body image stabilization that can compensate for camera shake by up to seven stops when paired with a lens with optical image stabilization. Many of my photos with the camera were taken with RF 100-500mm and EF 100-400mm lenses, and after adding a 1.6x crop factor, I just appreciated how stable the frame was even in low light. weak and slower shutter speed.
The R7 can shoot continuously at up to 15 fps with the mechanical shutter or up to 30 fps with the electronic shutter. This is not a back-illuminated stacked sensor, and the camera tends to show a rolling shutter effect with fast-moving subjects in electronic shutter mode. This limits how useful it is to hit 30fps, and you’re better off using full mechanics to capture the action.
In all the time that I have photographed mainly birds with this camera, I have never naturally reached the buffer limit. This is when the camera takes a lot of pictures and writes them as fast as it can to the SD card, it pauses shooting so it can keep up with the data stream. Worst case, shooting at 30 fps, the camera can shoot up to 61 JPEG + RAW frames provided I’m using a 299 MB/s fast write speed card. To delete all these frames from the cache, it takes 8.5 seconds.
The autofocus on the EOS R7 creates a fair amount of shake while mimicking the intelligence of today’s best camera, the $6,000 EOS R3. Functionally, it’s the same great experience. With subject tracking enabled, any position in the frame is good enough for the camera to find the subject. We no longer need to select an appropriate focus area and place it on the subject to start tracking the subject’s eyes or head or body. The R7, like the R3, can also intelligently track vehicles.
That said, the difference is in reliability. Even if I see the subject being tracked in the viewfinder, the resulting sequence will still have some out-of-focus images. Since the camera seems to understand the scene, this could be something dependent on the lens, or it could be that the combination isn’t fast enough.
One of Canon’s best cameras
Calling the Canon EOS R7 one of Canon’s best cameras is a noble statement, but I think it’s still worthy. We’re talking about a $1,500 camera that can help you create pretty much anything at a high level. It feels nice in the hand, is weather resistant, plus packs many of the company’s latest software features inside. The 32.5-megapixel APS-C sensor with in-body image stabilization is capable of capturing some beautifully rendered images, and there’s room for cropping and composing in post. The speed is amazingly fast at both fps and autofocus, making it a lot easier to reach the camera holder.
While not covered in this review, even video capture is ready to go with the 4K 60p 10-bit footage it can capture, oversampled from 7K, indeed. amazing and the ability to capture as much dynamic range as possible with Canon Diary 3 is also possible.
Some of the downsides are that the layout of the camera’s buttons and dials could be a lot better, and Canon continues to give users headaches with faulty button customization. Thirty frames per second sounds great for marketing, but it’s usually 15 frames per second that you really want to use.
Are there any alternatives?
The Canon EOS R7 was announced alongside the EOS R10, another APS-C camera that costs $500 less. The R10 has a slightly smaller chassis, isn’t weather-sealed, uses a smaller battery, and only has room for one UHS-II card slot instead of two. It lacks in-body image stabilization and has fewer megapixels. Additionally, it has a slower maximum shutter speed, poorer low-light autofocus, and a lower resolution viewfinder and rear LCD.
There’s a lot to gain from that additional $500 if the budget allows.
If not, you might end up looking at the Fujifilm X-T4, X-H2S, or Sony APS-C like the ZV-E10.
Should you buy it?
Right. Overall, the Canon EOS R7 succeeds in almost everything it is trying to be. There may be some features left out of the wish list, but it’s still a great camera.
