7D - A brief landscape test...

The 7D is obviously known for sports and nature photography with it's 8fps and decent AF system, but I also own a 5D2 and I wanted to check out the quality of the 7D with it's packed 18MP APS-C sensor for landscape work.

This is very, very brief test, but in summary I'm pretty impressed with the results.  I think they are better than I expected, and actually give the 5D2 a run for it's money.

Here's one of the shots I took - Orion over Wimborne Minster (click for a bigger view):

This was a 30 second exposure at f11, focussed with Live View so I could get a nice sharp shot.  Below are a couple of 100% crops:

 

Note that unlike a lot of other tests, these crops are from a post-processed image (the one above).  In the real world, you're going to PP an image to get the best from it.  If you get a camera which has blurry RAW images due to a very strong AA filter, but give a superb dynamic range and  sharpen up beautifully when downscaled by 20% (for example), then who cares what the RAW image is like?  If the PP result is a super sharp 15MP image, then the fact that we're coming from a potentially unsharp and noisy 18MP then that's a decent camera to my mind.

So, the 100% images above are after some post processing.  I'm not claiming that it's the best PP'ing, but it is at least an approximation to real life use of the final image.  And I'm impressed with the detail you get from a 30s night shot - you can see all the brick details, not too much noise in the shadows...

Again, here's another one of a roundabout in Wimborne, and more importantly, a pub :-) (click for a bigger view):

 Here are the PP'd 100% crops of a couple of signs:

Again, I'm impressed with the results.  18MP is really stretching an APS-C sensor, and the results are coming close to those I'd get with the 5D2.  I will do a similar post to this comparing the 5D2 and the 7D as I need to justify owning both of them, but that's for another time...