A7RV First Impressions

JayJee wrote:

JayJee wrote:

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.

A little update on IBIS.

Yeah, it's very good. I did a quick, very non-scientific test with the 24-70GM II on both the A7RV and the A7RIVa at 24mm @F22, handheld, with a close subject a couple of ft away.

Probably worth noting also I have a steady camera grip, with no shakes or anything like that, and I am reasonably young. I am also a pixel peeper, so when I say it's tack sharp, you can take it to the bank.

On the A7V doing the human tripod, elbows braced, holding my breath and looking ridiculous, I could very reliably get down to 1/3", tack sharp, motion blur-free. When completely braced against a wall 0.5".

On the A7IVa, same settings and subject, I could get down to around 1/5", maybe 1/4", but starting to see misses. So yeah definitely a noticeable improvement.

Tested some 4K videos too. Active stabe is improved, but let's just say that gimbal manufacturers will still be sleeping easily.

I have also seen people on YouTube throwing around handheld figures of 1.6" and even 3.2", but I would take that with a big grain of salt. I, for one won't be leaving my tripod at home when doing astro just yet

Have you considered using ES when handholding (photos)? It does give me an extra stop or two in those scenarios...and that pays off on the  A7R V with SS I didn't experienced before with Sony.