So I seem to hear conflicting reports about the HDMI output on the 7D. I hear that it is a 1080i output and the LCD info dissapears on its output upon record. Can someone confirm this?

Or if anyone is in New York City that has one, I have an AJA IoHD that we can use to record to/check and monitor to see what this output really does.

Anyone?

I just did a test with the rca cable and the hdmi cable.

With hdmi, I connected to a 720p tv and a 1080i monitor. On both there was a picture of about 4:3 aspect ratio. With the info screen on, the info sat at the edges of that picture with the video squeezed into a square box in the middle. Things looked a bit thin, but the resolution was exellent. Really good for focus checking. When the info was turned off the video expanded to fill the 4:3 picture size, leaving two black bars on the left/right of the screen. The top and bottom of the 4:3 picture showed the semi transparent masks with the info both on and off.
When playing back footage, in movie mode but not recording, and when recording, use of the hdmi cable turned off the lcd display on the back of the camera.

With the rca monitoring, we get the same 4:3 aspect picture covering most of the monitor, but I guess that was because my tv was scaling it up. The resolution was horrible though. I would say that it was bad enough to put me off from wasting my money on a cheap 800x640 8" monitor, which I was planning to get until I can afford a HD portable monitor. info screen, playback, recording and not recording was all exactly the same as the hdmi (lcd screen switches off).

Hmm,
So no 1080P output via HDMI playback or recording?

It would be nice to bypass the codec and see what that might offer for image improvement.

Barlow Elton ran that test. Basic conclusion is that it isn't worth it.