A7RV First Impressions

My A7RV arrived today along with the 24-70 GMII, so it's a bit like early Christmas here.

I preordered on launch day. My first impressions as an A7RIVa/A7IV/A7siii user?

Wow. Just wow. Honestly, I was prepared to be a little underwhelmed, but it's just the opposite.

The A7RV obviously bears some resemblance to the A7IV/A7siii with the new menus and form factor, so it's not stuff I haven't ever seen before.

Here are the biggest things that I have noticed within the first hour with the camera:

The menus and general operation are incredibly zippy. A massive step up from the A7RIV, obviously, but surprisingly even the A7IV. By a lot. No lag at all. Even doing things like in-camera preview mode zoom-in, which would take a quarter second on the A7RIV due to the massive 61MP files, are just instant. As a result, I had the camera set up in minutes.

During setup, it was interesting that it prompts you to enable high-temp power off mode, which I did.

Autofocus is just amazing. The new subject detection really works well. In human mode, shooting my daughter, it was flawless, the stickiest AF I have ever seen, it was predicting her eye location when she was in side profile, and it knew where her head was when it couldn't get her eye and framed it, and it also framed her torso in a rectangle when it could get neither head nor eye. And not just the green box on the screen either; on inspection of the JPEGs (no RAW support in LR yet), it didn't miss once.

I also tried Bird mode on our free flying house parakeet. Not in flight, but just standing and running around. That works flawlessly too. I have never seen Bird Eye AF work so well before. Sticky AF. I haven't tried flight, and that might be a challenge for the high MP slow reading sensor, but what I have seen works better than on the A7IV. Seeing it frame the bird's body in a rectangle that framed his body when his eye went out of view was cool as well. And on inspection of the JPEGs, again, no misses.

The 24-70 GMII is also a stunner. The perfect pairing with the A7V.

It is silent, light, and focuses as quick as lightning. I really second-guessed myself hard in upgrading from the excellent Sigma 24-70 (which I will now sell), but I am so glad I did.

The default color rendition is so much better for me than the warm tones of the Sigma, and although there's only 100 grams or so weight difference, it just feels so much better balanced and lighter on the camera. It falls just below that threshold for me where you say "man, this is heavy", as I did with the Sigma, which is fantastic.