Update: 11/19/2009: Less than 24 hours after publishing this post, it is now obsolete with the release of Lightroom 2.6 and Adobe Camera RAW 5.6 for Photoshop each offering RAW support for the Canon 7D. Since this is a recent development I have not had a chance to try either yet.
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I'm fielding a lot of questions about the Canon 7D and image quality (or lack there of) which I am largely attributing it to the lack of a compatible 3rd party RAW converter from Adobe or one of the other similar image manipulation software companies.
Thought it may be useful to post two images side-by-side so you can see for yourself the differences between RAW run through Lightroom 2.5 and a high quality .jpg from the camera. At first glance the flaws in the RAW photo may not be too obvious but click on the photo to see the full resolution version (converted to .jpg to conserve file size) which you can inspect on your own hard drive. If you zoom in you'll see considerable noise and lack of sharpness.
First the Canon 7D RAW file from Lightroom:
