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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedfordalbatross" data-source="post: 1900760" data-attributes="member: 81385"><p>I'm a real fan of the 550D - with Nikon prime lenses, just to shake things up a little. I considered 7d, but I couldn't justify the difference in price. So I've just put that towards the most solid tripod I could afford - that to me will make the most difference to quality with HD video. I have used the movie crop mode and it's a neat function but, knowing for every benefit there is a cost, the 7x crop factor also magnifies any optical defects in the lenses. So my Nikkor 300 and doubler give me an equivalent mag of a lens approaching 7000mm when you include the crop factor of both the chip and movie crop mode. It's a neat feature that gets me some nice record shots, but I prefer to shoot at full HD and then crop that frame in movie editing software. With my two stacked doublers and a 300mm, I'm getting the equivalent of a 1920mm lens at full HD and, if I choose to crop to standard TV resolution, I can achieve the equivalent of a 3600mm lens. Keeping that steady is a huge challenge, hence the investment in the mother of all tripods. I kind of hope that Canon will introduce a firmware upgrade to allow a full HD 1080p crop mode - that would really be neat</p></blockquote><p></p>