If you have been following news about the 7D recently, it is impossible that you missed all the 7D reviews and comparison with the 5DMrkII. I wont even link to them, there are too many! The two most popular comparison points being the rolling shutter and the noise.

As shown in the Neutral Day post, the 7D is noisier than the 5dMrkII. Of course, everyone expected that. Still, it performed quite well as long as it stayed away from the top ISO levels. At least, that is what I thought after reading the post (and looking at pictures taken with my friend 7D).

Now, Karel Donk posted an inflammatory post against the 7D on his blog. Calling the 7D noisier than the 40D (we all know why he skipped the 50D!) and flaming Canon for its quality control. The read is interesting and offers a counter point to all the positive reviews we usually read.

While I disagree with some of the content (like why we need more megapixel), I think it is a must read for anyone thinking about buying a 7D.

That being said, should you still buy a 7D? Of course! It might not be perfect, but no camera offers so much value in the HDSLR world.

Patrick, from the NeutralDay blog did a nice test between the 7D and the 5DMrkII regarding noise in normal and low light.

What I like about these two tests is how rigorous he was and how he removed every noise reduction factor from the equation to only keep the bare performance of the sensor and how he tried to get both camera at the same effective focal length. Something too many people neglect.

I have been thinking about doing such a test for a while and never spent the time so I am happy someone else did!

The results? What you could expect: the 5DMrkII is a little better in every low ISO setting and much better above ISO 1600. The article is well illustrated and it is easy to spot the differences between the two.

I just wish Patrick would have taken the extra time to take the same subject but this time with the noise reduction features on. It would have been a better test of the overall noise management performance of the camera.

Some people might disagree with the selected lenses. Saying that it is not fair to compare a prime to a kit lens. While this is true for image quality test, I doubt the quality of the glass has a lot of impact on the overall noise. Also, at the given f stop setting, both lenses are past their sharpest point and should perform about the same.

Finally, dont forget that while the 7D is not as good as the 5DMrkII, it is still performing very well!