Introduction

Canon has pretty much dominated the full format DSLR arena for several years but they suffered a couple of hefty blows from Nikon in the APS-C segment during the last few years. Canon was able to respond in the low end market but they didn't really offer any direct competitor to Nikon D200/D300(s) or in other words - they were basically not present in the high margin "prosumer" APS-C segment probably assuming that the full format EOS 5D series was sufficient to compete here. It seems as if this itch became too annoying lately resulting in the release of the EOS 7D. Looking at the sheer specs it's fairly obvious that they want to "show who's da boss in da house". The most striking feature is naturally the new 18 mega-pixel sensor. We'll elaborate on this one in detail later on but from a marketing perspective it is obviously a significant differentiator compared to the fairly "low resolution" (12mp) sensor used in Nikon APS-C DSLRs. Even the 14mp sensor used in the Pentax K-7 is fairly "far behind" on paper. Other than that Canon put lots of further goodness into the EOS 7D like a 100% (1x magnification) viewfinder, 8 fps, a sealed metal body and full HD video just to mention the highlights. They even "copied" a rather typical Nikon feature - the super-imposable grid lines in the viewfinder. So all the right ingredients are there so let's have a look whether they were cooked up to the desired standards ...

... and if you want to play around with a virtual shadow of the camera ... here we go ...