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Important Settings for Sony A7R II
This page covers discusses recommended settings and customization approaches for the Sony A7R II. A few of these are critical and many are important for some uses.
- (of course).
- (for most uses).
- (for precision work use the smallest spot).
- (when shooting raw, this gives consistent histograms by fixing the white balance).
- Loses a stop of dynamic range, which is often just the reality for long exposures anyway, due to noise. It might be best to set to Off for shorter exposures, say up to 8 seconds, but this will depend on ISO, exposure time and temperature.
- (unless shooting people).
- (failure to set the focal length can make SteadyShot behave erratically and badly blur the image when shot, e.g., set to 300mm and mount a 28mm lens and it’s all over the place).
- turn off for tripod use). (
- (for histogram purposes showing wider gamut).
- (for manual focus operation, particularly with adapted or manual-focus-only lenses)
- program a custom button to hide/show the grid) (or your choice of grid, useful for architecture, etc,
- (controls whether exposure as set is used for Live View, vs auto brightness, some users may prefer Off)
- (very annoying lens focusing at random which destroys any pre-set focus, intolerable and unusable when shooting multiple exposures which require the same focus, e.g., any kind of bracketing on a tripod, a group portrait, etc)
- (essentially when shooting with some lens adapters)
- (nothing worse than not recording images!)
- (best to have the picture in focus)
- (your call, but best to have the picture in focus)
- set in order to use the rear button to initiate AF. This is often desirable for static shooting, though generally not for ad-hoc handheld shooting) (many users may prefer this be on, but
- (whether exposure is locked while half-pressing the shutter, depends)
- (!!! loses a stop of dynamic range)
- (essential for vibration-free images)
- (your author disables all except is worthwhile)
- (makes the front dial control the aperture in both M and A modes, for consistency).
- (annoying to record a movie by accident)
- (sucks power, disable networking for many if not most uses)
- (vertical images are just too small if shown vertically)
- (unclear what this does exactly and may take more power)
- (battery life is poor, choose 10 sec perhaps, but this can be annoyingly short before the display goes blank)
- (this actually shakes the sensor using the IBIS mechanism).
- (saves power, disable if not using the remote control).
- (records author and copyright in EXIF data).
- (format a card regularly in the camera to avoid weird issues with computer interaction)
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