7d or 50d twice the money, worth it?

Gary Kinghorn

Gary Kinghorn

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No doubt this has been done 100 times before so I apologise in advance.

The time has come to put another body in my bag and retire the 40d to second camera use. I love the 40d and as such was drawn to the 50d at around £600.

However, you know what it's like, once you start looking other things come into your head. 7d hmmmm. So the question is what will the 7d give me that the 50d won't other than a few more meg and clearer pics in a tight crop.

My head says 50d a nice prime l glass in a month or so. My heart says 7d now and wait another 6 months for more glass.

I do mostly portrait type stuff, plus a bit of motorsport now and then.

What would you do???
 
I bought a 50D to run alongside the 40D and apart from the better screen and about a stop better iso performance, there is little to choose between the two. I bought a 7D and relegated 40D to wifecam, 50D to my backup and the difference is quite high, but I do mostly motorsport.
 
I'm in a similar dilemma although I am still on the 40d (as I only bought it last July) I really like the appeal of the 7d for the higher ISO performance and extra megapixels as I do find I crop a lot of my pics.
I also feel I'd like to experiment with the remote flash trigger :-)
 
Both the 50D and 7D are great cameras I have two 50D and just got a 7D as both are like each other I was going to sale one 50D and keep the other but they are so near each other I am thinking of saleing both 50D, and getting a 5DMKII
You not go wrong with a 50D I love mine when I got it.
 
We shot with a 40D and a 50D used by side for a while, and the 50D completely blitzes the 40D when it comes to cropping and retaining image quality. That's hardly surprising though, as the 50D has 50% more pixels than the 40D. Unable to ignore the disadvantages of the 40D, we swapped it for a second 50D body. This was taking wildlife shots with fairly substantial cropping usually involved. If you don't need to crop you wont see the same advantage. The 40D is an excellent camera - it just cannot compete when cropping images with the 50D.

We've since changed one of the 50Ds for a 7D, which has an extra 3 million pixels again over the 50D. While this pixel increase is useful for further reach and cropping ability, it's not proportionally as big an increase as the one from the 40D to the 50D, but the 7D is obviously in a class of it's own when it comes to cropping and maximising the reach of tele lenses, which is why most people buy it.

The 7D is a completely new camera from the ground up - not just a reworked variation of an earlier XXD body. It's also weather sealed to a very high standard - mine has been completely soaked on several occasions and never faltered. I don't worry at all about it getting wet.

Both the 50D and the 7D are excellent cameras and I can't see you going wrong with either, but it's well worth stretching to the 7D if you can IMHO.
 
Thanks for the comments here people, it's much appreciated. I was swaying towards the 50d and saving some cash towards a nice prime but the weatherproof aspect of the 7d is appealing too.

Think I might just nip to jessops this afternoon handle a 7d and make my mind up from there.
 
I also want to thank the OP for putting up this thread, as I'm thinking of upgrading from a 40d and am also going out this afternoon to handle a 7D.
 
Just be aware that a full size raw file from the 50D outputted as a tiff is 43mb. The same thing from the 7D is 51.2mb. Double those file sizes if you output at 16 bit!

You can soon use up a lot of hard drive real estate, and a fast computer is pretty well essential working with these file sizes.
 
played with the 7d today.
Very nice, but it appears that you cannot use autofocus in the video mode, only manual. Is this correct?
 
If your lens is 24-70mm L you "must" get 5D, even if it is only mark I. The difference on FF is obvious. 50D/7D resolution would only benefit from ultra sharp telephoto primes, something that most serious birders -including posters in this thread- use.
 
Harmless` said:
played with the 7d today.
Very nice, but it appears that you cannot use autofocus in the video mode, only manual. Is this correct?
Click to expand...

Yep -I believe so - although video isn't really my thang. Apart from a quick play when I first got the camera, it's something I've not bothered with.
 
Just after the 7D came out I bought the 50D as the price had come down as a 2nd body to my 1Ds Mk11, & have been pleased with it. However I recently borrowed a 7D for a day & did some wild life photography, & wow what a difference. The AF was a lot faster, I could turn the ISO up to help with the shutter speed & reduce noise. Also tried it in a dark church, again with excellent results. If I wasnt saving for an IPad & a 300mm lens I would change the 50D
 
Will be interesting to see what the 60D offers, as canon are saying it will have a unique new feature whatever that might be!
The best time to buy the 7d might be when that announcement comes?
 
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