As announced by Canon earlier this year the new firmware for your Canon EOS 7D is here.

The Canon 7D was released in fall 2009. Canon told us they are very proud about this camera and the technical internals which is also why its technology has been reused in so many of their later HDSLR’s and why it now gets its dedicated update.

The firmware 2.0.X is a substantial firmware update that also affects movie recording. It gives us manual audio controls.

Aside from several improvements to the photo side of the DSLR the firmware 2.0.X gives you manual audio controls (not during recording).

For the ultimate in custom audio when recording motion images, this firmware upgrade enables manual control of sound recording levels. The recording level can be manually adjusted to one of 64 levels, for precise, optimized audio. And to prevent mistakes in sound recording, an icon indicating manual sound recording is displayed on the info screen during video shooting. (Wasn’t able to find that icon!)

Additional Features on the HDSLR side:
- Customization of File Names
- Time Zone Settings (for travelers)

Just tested the firmware and what they forgot to implement:
- no adjustable audio levels during recording
- the 5D mark III codecs aren’t there
- the file length limitations are still there

On the photo side we have these nice new features:
- Maximum burst rate now 130 as jpg 25 as RAW (before 126 and 15)
- GPS compatible (for GPE2 receiver)
- In camera RAW and jpeg editing (resize)
- rating system
- maximum ISO now 64000 (was 32000)
- scrolling of magnified images

Together with Mosaic Engineering’s great moiré and aliasing filter (LINK) this makes the Canon 7D a (more) competitive HDSLR once again.

The Canon 7D is currently $1449 at B&H: LINK
It’s also being sold a lot on ebay: LINK

DOWNLOAD:
You can shortly get the Canon EOS 7D firmware 2.0.X here: LINK

It is already available for download on the European Canon site: (press button at bottom of page)
for Mac OSX: LINK
for Windows: LINK