We have both. I couldn't afford the 5DII either, so upgraded to a used 5D from my 20D, and penny took over the 20D. Thenw e sold her Sony, and now she has a 7D, and the 20D's out backup.
For me, the choice is a total no-brainer: I covet that buttery smoothness and extreme detail rendering that the FF sensor brings to the party. The extremely good low-light performance is a lovely bonus.
On the other hand, Penny's 7D is a wonderful camera, and she's very happy with it. I'm also super-impressed with it; it feels really solid, it has a great viewfinder and a really big LCD screen, the imaging is way better than the 20D, the high-ISO performance is improved over the 20D, it's capable of shooting RAW in different sizes so you can actually do burst in RAW, it has a cool movie feature, they've made great improvements in menu accessibility and controls in general; it's a fine camera.
But the 5D makes better pictures, for the kind of stuff I do. So would the 5DII, and with most of those new features of the 7D as well, but that'll have to wait :-)
R.
ETA: I'd disagree with smurfguy, I don't think image quality's a close call at all. I think the 5D's significantly better. But int he end it all depends on how you're presenting the work, like what size of print etc... I've played around with cropping the 5D to match the 1.6x factor (because I wondered if I was significantly better off mounting the 200mm on the 7D rather than cropping in post from the 5D, when long reach was needed) and to my eyes there's very little difference in image quality when I crop to match. Still, that's a sloppy way to work, if you do a lot of long-reach shooting the 7D's certainly the more sensible choice, especially if it's action shooting, like sports.
Message edited by author 2010-05-06 00:11:21.
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