Hotel Lonely
Leading Member
A Subjective Comparison Chart based on my own usage.
A7R V is the new Landscape/Still Life king of Sony's full frame camera line. There're many things that I want to talk about after some serious use of this camera, especially from the perspective of A7R IV owner.
0. TL;DR:
It's the next best thing other than A1 if you're not a landscape person. It would be the best thing if you're a landscape person, and it can generally cover all your other photography needs pretty well.
1. Image Quality:
It's basically the same with the A7RV and A7R IV. However Photons to Photos suggested a very minor 0.1~0.3EV improvement of dynamic range across all iso stops. In today's technology, it's pretty clear that our sensors are closing up to the ideal sensor in theory. It's so close that after certain ISO most sensors would look like the same on the DR charts. Every tiny improvement is very hard earned.
When compared to the A7IV, on the dynamic range side the A7IV would have a slight DR advantage from ISO 400 to ISO 1200, but A7RV is either better or not losing on other ISOs.
In general, on the IQ side:
- Theoretically slightly better than A7R IV, even though the resolution is the same
- Better than A7IV, both in resolution and low ISO DR.
- Better than A1, slightly in resolution, relatively big in low ISO DR.
2. AF Part:
Why we have to break down different points of AF:
The A7R V is extremely good at Subject Detection. It does a very good job on Tracking Accuracy too. However, it's not as good at Tracking Retention.
Subject Detection: simply means to find a subject from the preview that the camera is seeing.
Tracking Accuracy: the ability of making that tracking box sticked onto the target, and the ability of autofocusing onto it accurately.
Tracking Retention: the ability of tracking an object across multiple shutter releases.
A strong Subject Detection algorithm can mitigate a lot of AF Tracking problems. Even if you lose the focus or tracking for a little, it can still find the subject much easier than other Sony cameras. In general I believe that the A7R V is the second best AF camera that you can get besides A1, and it indeed outperforms A1 from time to time due to the strong Subject Detection abilities which can make it react faster when the object appears and recover faster from AF failures.
Yes we all know that the A1 has a 120Hz AF/AE calculation ability. Meanwhile other Sony cameras have a lower setup. 120Hz is good at preventing the loss of focus from happening even if the tracked object is moving fast and irregularly. The camera would be able to change the focus swiftly. For those users who don't have an A1 or A9, Sony also used a predictive method to track the movement of the object. Which means that the camera can predict where the object would roughly be moving to based on a lower AF/AE calculation frequency. This method is of course not as swift as what the stacked sensors are, however it's also very accurate, as the real world objects rarely change direction vastly while they're under a high speed. And it's a highly successful approach as we all know how good the other Sony cameras are doing with AF.
Due to the limitations of general object tracking, even the A1 would still lose track on objects from time to time. Cases like potential temporary blockage would also stop it from working. And then you would need to restart the AF tracking. On the A7R V it improved a lot when this kind of situation happens, as the Subject Detection based tracking is usually a lot more reliable and picks up the detectable subject much faster.
So the A7R V has outstanding detection abilities, very good tracking accuracy, but it also has its biggest weakness: Tracking Retention.
A7R V only bursts at 7fps when shooting with lossless compressed raw. This is of course limited by its slow read out speed. Which means that it would be very difficult for the camera to track a fast moving object (relative to camera), especially when you're doing some panning. In such situation, even the AI processor can only help to recover from subject lost a little bit faster. With an A1 or A9 there would be a significant difference. Even if switched to JPEG or Compressed Raw (Lossy), the camera still only has a 10fps burst rate, it is not bad, it's just not superb enough in today's standard now.
Overall, how good the camera's AF is performing is completely up to your shooting subject. If you're shooting something that is predictable or is included as a subject in the camera (e.g., flying plane, racing cars, flying birds in a distance, animals or people...), then you would find it often even beating the experience of A1. However if your subject is hard to predict (e.g., birds up in close, dancing people that are in a very short distance...) then it wouldn't perform as well as the A1 or A9.
3. Video Part:
It's not a video camera, but it seems that Sony wants to make the R series a high-end all-round camera that not only does the best landscape or studio shots, but also capable of shooting some really nice videos.
For me I either shoot something that is moving a lot, or something that is almost stationary.
In 8K 24/25P mode: You should avoid any kind of big movement with this mode. However it's perfect for stationary shots. Landscapes especially.
In 4K 60/50P mode: I heard that it's pixel binning in this mode instead of line skipping, with a similar 1.25x of cropping. Which is really not as bad as I thought it would be.
Here's a sample footage:
IMO, it's good enough for 95% of 4K video needs.
4. System Experience and Ease of Use
Okay so for the last part I would like to talk about the experience upgrade.
The responsiveness of the camera has been hugely improved. I often felt the A7R IV was too slow to do street photography (e.g., it takes almost 3 to 4 seconds for the camera to load up everything after a power cycle), but now the problems are gone. It turns on immediately when you need to, and you can shoot anything you want right after. This improvement alone contributed a large part to my decision of upgrading.
The UI of the camera has been hugely improved too. It's much more well designed with faster and easier to access menus. What I also love about is that it also tells you what's blocking a menu option. I know it's also available on a few of other alpha cameras too but it's still huge when compared with A7R IV and A7S III.
Addition of Full Time DMF is good. I just hope that they can add it to older models before A7 IV too. Basically everything good that A7 IV had also came to A7R V, and it feels so nice.
Focus Stacking is actually pretty smart. I see some people have difficulties with it in Macro mode, but it's because that the camera takes DOF into calculations and that prevents a reckless lens movement. In Macro photography the DOF is usually feather thin . According to Sony: "The [Step Width] value is a relative value, and the focus interval varies depending on shooting conditions such as the aperture of the lens and the initial focus position." So if it takes too many shots to reach the end of stacking, you need to add more DOF by either closing down the aperture, or step back a bit, or simply accept the 299*61mp super huge focus stacked macro photography
Did I mention that you can set how long a Bulb exposure should be now? In previous cameras you can only set a rough number like 25 or 30 seconds. But now you can set it anywhere from 2 to 900 seconds.
