A couple of days ago I was able to borrow a Canon EOS 7D. What a camera!! The biggest surprise was the viewfinder. It's huge and it's very easy to read the information below the photo, even when wearing glasses. The autofocus was incredibly fast when using my Canon EF-S 17-55/2.8 IS USM lens. Even in low light there was no "hunting" and the focus was spot on.
I took some indoor phots without flash at ISO 6400. They became grainy but still usable. In my opinion better than the old 20D at ISO 3200. However, this is my subjective opinion and I have not done any direct comparisons.
The photos I took (JPEG only) seemed very good. Even at 100% pixel peeping the images was sharp. Exposure seemed very good and the camera handled combinations of shadow and sunny areas well. Lost of details in the shadows without burning out the sunny areas. How good it's really is is difficult to evaluate using JPEG, but I have no raw converter that handles the 7D raw format (yet).
The Canon EOS 7D can also make HD quality videos. I didn't test this because I'm not very interested in this feature, but I've seen som examples and it's impressing.
So what is bad? I couldn't really find anything bad about this camera, but not everything is perfect. I don't think it fits my hand the same way as the 20D. There is something "odd" about the grip. Another "problem" is the files it produces. A typical RAW file is 25MB. When taking thousands photos each year those require a lot of disk space. Fortunately disk space has become cheap. The 7D also has a 10.2 MP raw mode which should be sufficient for most applications.
I'm really impressed with this camera. It's expensive, but I think it's worth the money and I'm pretty sure I will end up buying one.
