Reader Comments on Sony A7R V
Related: focus stacking, reader comment, Roy P, Sony, Sony A7R, Sony A7R II, Sony A7R III, Sony A7R IV, Sony A7R V, Sony mirrorless
re: What Does the Future Hold for a Sony A7R V?
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Stephen M writes:
I was in two minds as to whether I would upgrade from the Sony A7R IV given I’ve since bought a Fujifilm GFX100S and a few lenses. That was until I saw Mark Galer’s overview of the camera and more particularly, it’s AF capabilities. The AF is nuts. It tracked the area where the eye should be through a biker’s helmet. It locked onto the head of a gorilla sitting in vegetation and “waited” until the head turned enough to lock onto the eye. Albeit after initially finding the nostril before the head had turned sufficiently for it to identify the eye. Bird and insect AF were equally impressive.
A surprise was the bulb timer and the focus bracketing. The implementation of focus bracketing is infinitely more user-friendly than the Fujifilm, which IMO is a complete dog’s breakfast. And, the Sony will put the bracketed sequence into a separate folder.
My strategy was to purchase the Fuji for landscape and keep the rIV (and rIII) for longer telephoto work - surfing, birds etc. I may have to rethink that strategy as the benefits of owning only one system that I enjoyed for the last 9 years since buying the original A7R were lost when I added the Fuji. The new Sony’s AF and focus bracketing offerings alone may be enough to convince me to sell the Fuji. The improved colour accuracy and nominal improvements in noise and image quality will be most welcome as well.
DIGLLOYD: I look forward to seeing focus bracketing in action.
Roy P writes:
Preordered the Sony A7R V…. But I’m disappointed that they did not build a silicon solution to a pixel-shifted multi shot mode with motion detection and compensation that generates a single composite, high res raw file in the camera. So Sony did not catch up with the Panasonic S1R/S1 or Leica SL2/SL2S, after all.
But the autofocusing is something I could and will put to work immediately. However, it is built around a custom chip, so there will be no firmware upgrades for the new AF technology for any other Sony camera, including the A1. Meaning, there will be an A1 II at some point, possibly even by the end of the year, or almost certainly in early 2023. So a part of me says wait for the new A1, which I will be buying anyway, but I could use the A7R V now.
The 8K video is nice. Not that I’m a big videographer, but I might as well capture videos at a 7680 x 4320 resolution, and by recording video raw with an external recorder, I think I can get individual 33 MP raw files, which should be more than adequate for people photos. So in theory, I could just shoot video from a people event, then pick all the still photos I want. I’m not sure if that’s how it works, though!
I did a quick search on 8K monitors, and the Dell UltraSharp UP3218K monitor for $4K popped up. I don’t know if that’s the best display, resolution notwithstanding, when other factors like color gamut, color accuracy, color stability, and dynamic range are also considered.
The faster processor and improved IBIS should also be useful improvements. I’m glad they kept the resolution to 61K. I think that’s the pragmatic thing to do until they have a real breakthrough that lets them make 100MP+ sensors with the same dynamic range and noise characteristics (and have a family of lenses with matching resolving power).
What I don’t understand is, why Sony insists on two different designs for its 35mm full-frame cameras, one design for the A9-A1 class cameras, and another for the A7x cameras. Makes no sense, requiring users who have one of each category of cameras to use different muscle memories. This is frustrating, but maybe this is the input Sony is getting from hits customer base?!
DIGLLOYD: the pixel shift solution looks half-assed and little better than before (having to use Sony Imaging Edge is a workflow-disrupting bad joke). Maybe we can hope it at least uses lossless-compressed raw for the pixel shift frames, unlike the brain dead Sony A1.
