The Canon 7D Mk II DSLR may well be the best, fastest, most feature-rich crop sensor camera ever. It shoots 10 frames per second, focuses faster, works with half as much light, and continuously autofocuses videos. GPS comes built-in. The camera body costs $1,800 and ships in mid-November. The 7D Mk II is being shown off by Canon at the Photokina 2014 conference in Cologne today.
This much excellence you’d expect when Canon had five years to develop the 7D Mk II. But for every two new features, there’s one missing. Some of the missing features are on your smartphone or $300 point-and-shoot camera. There is, for instance, no integrated WiFi to wirelessly upload your photos but you can add one for $850. Canon added automatic HDR images but apparently not automatic panoramas.
The 7D Mk II’s best new still camera features
Physically, the new Canon 7D Mk II looks very much like the outgoing 7D with some minor changes to controls to make it similar to the layout of the full-frame Canon 5D Mk III, $3,400 street for the camera body. Resolution is up in a minor way from 18.0 to 20.2 megapixels. Autofocusing should be improved with 65 AF points vs. 19, tracking based on color (the red jersey vs. white), and face detection. This is an enhanced version of the EOS iTR (intelligent tracking and recognition) feature of the Canon EOS-1D X uber-camera, $6,800. If you’ve ever aimed a telephoto lens at bird flapping across the sky, it will find and focus on the bird even if it’s not centered in the bouncing viewfinder.
For low light shooting, the ISO range extends to ISO 16000 (was 6400) and 25600 in expanded mode, where higher is better. Recall that film cameras worked in the range of 25-1000 ISO. You’ll be able to shoot more school plays, weddings, and night soccer without flash and you’ll benefit from quiet shooting modes that reduce mirror slap. You may be able to get by with smaller, lighter, cheaper f/4 to f/5.6 maximum-aperture lenses.
The 7D Mk II has integrated GPS, something every iPhone and Android device has. It also supports both CF cards and SD cards. With SD available in 512GB, CF is starting to look like a relic, except for the fact that CF cards are harder to lose. Canon claims the Mk II has four times better weather sealing of the original, which is nice, but it’s not an underwater camera and for serious field sports shooting you’ll need a rain hood. The shutter is rated at 200,000 cycles, a third more than the 7D. 
Movies that will be in focus
The dirty secret of DSLR video is that most DSLRs focus once, when you hit Record, then it’s up to you to manually focus after that. The 7D Mk II adopts an enhanced version of the dual-pixel, on-sensor phase detection system introduced with the Canon 70D.
The 7D Mk II adds sensitivity settings so you can tweak how aggressively the focus sticks with a moving subject. It’s also assisted by the exposure metering sensors. Max video resolution remains 1080p (1920×720 pixels) but now at up to 60 frames per second; it used to be 30. All this means: The standalone camcorder is even deader now unless you’re doing high-end broadcast video recording. 
Bells and whistles
The 7D Mk II matches the 5D Mk III in offering HDR imaging. Why HDR? Today’s best sensors still don’t match the range of light to dark that the human eye sees. So you used to shoot three images in quick succession, shooting plus and minus 1EV (half or twice the exposure), hoping the leaves didn’t rustle too much in between, and then stitched them together in Photoshop. It was an incredible hassle and many people carried a smartphone or cheap point-and-shoot to avoid this problem. But you wound up with great photos of the Grand Canyon with the sky, rocks, and shadows all showing incredible detail.
The rear LCD is now 3×2 ratio to match the sensor’s aspect ratio, 720×480 resolution. The USB port is finally USB 3.0, for faster transfers without a card reader.
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