Firmware update for Sony a7R II improves stability, adds support for radio controlled flashes

A valid opinion and perfectly appropriate.
This isn't a Sony Fan site.

Thematic
that's about the stupidest thing I have read on dpreview: " unpleasant aesthetics for a whipped cream topping"

Dont troll. If you don't like Sony move on.

im sorry but your attempt to paint me a troll carries the weight of a desperate sony fanboy me thinks , if you had an ounce of intellectual honesty , you would concede my points are accurate and valid , so perhaps it you who should move on .... i call it like i see it ..... and you seem to be here to defend sonys honor???? or something ....lol

a matter of taste, so no point to argue - the marketshare will decide between Sony and Fuji ;-) ...

Troll bait set - and now the wait...

How is this a troll just because you dont agree with someone else? The Sony system does indeed have a frustrating menu system and can be grearly improved.

He is a troll because this thread is about a firmware for a Sony camera.

Saying the camera has "unpleasant aesthetics for a whipped cream topping" is what 12 year old kids type.

Pathetic.

The menu problems again... The A7 series are very costumizable, you can assign lots of funcions to almost every buttons, you just have to spend some time on the first time to fine tune it to your taste!

You only have to dive in the menus to do specific stuff, like formatting a card, etc... But how often do you do that? Sony menus are also more extensive than other brands cause their cameras have more features

And the look... Well, the Fuji are better looking, that's for sure, but the Sony beats any SLR any day

That they tell you? Do not believe it. It's easy and 100% configurable.
I only use manual focus lenses on my A7R II, for that I bought. One touch near the shutter and have extended the zone to be focused x5, another touch and turn to x12. A touch another button and agree to the focal adjustment for better stabilization. I never remember the ISO, I configured from 100 to 6400 with the minimum shutter speed ... I live in glory!

I do agree the menus are not Canon or Nikon or Fuji menus... They are Sony menus and cover everything you can set on the camera, which is a LOT. All the buttons, wheels, toggles are customizable; go for it!

Having come from a Canon and Pentax platform to now a Sony A7S, A7 II and A7R II, I find the Sony A7 line menus quite adequate.

Of course, if you too lazy to learn a new system you will never be happy with it...

my dislike of sony is personal, im drawn to intelligent elegant designs of variable weight to controls based on importance & frequency for need for access. no menu is perfect , certainly ricohs menus and controls strike me as a high water mark . for the gxr gx 200 and gr .. as for fuji i consider the return of the shutter dial with A & aperture dial with A the most important advance in digital camera controls in the last decade , again my personal opinion negating the need of the despicable PSAM dial , a control layer that made unmarked wheels and numerous buttons necessary in the first place..

i have mixed feeling about sony FF,sensors r great, i dont like a pseudo slr body , i really dont like the unintuitive anti human menu system, in the way i hate itunes, the crappiest least intuitive ,bloated music software that burdens an otherwise fine apple product. i also dont like sony lenses , whereas i love fujis ... just my feeling .....your mileage may vary and i respect that

That didn't make any sense either.

So lame.

cosinaphile: Everyone to their own. I probably wouldn't like all of your menu priorities. I would be nice if one could totally customize the menu to your perferences but I don't think anyone is quite there yet? Until then I'm quite happy with what I have.

Personally, I would like to see manual aperture rings on ALL lens! I do a lot of nightscape /astrophotography and it would really be handy.

are you challenged?
elegant means simple ,look it up..its what devices & menus for their controls should strive to be. still not making sense?
controls that need to be used frequently or figure prominently in exp. change like SS, iso, fstop, WB, , format, exp.comp. etc need easy access, focus ring direction? not so much .... does THAT not make sense to you?
some makers do menus logically & well like RICOH, other are like like a confusing coffee maker, like SONY...IMO. does that confuse you or not make sense?

the PSAM dial in cameras today only became necessary when SS & aperture dials were consigned to the techno trash heap of history , it`s why cameras need multiple unmarked dials & buttons today, has that " not made sense". either ?

sony sensors are great- their pseudo slrs design isnt.
sony menus are among the WORST.
itunes sucks, apple hardware doesn't
i like fuji lenses, dislike sony, & respect your right to disagree
calling what you fail to grasp "lame" is whats lame

oh? do you disagree with my list? how so..?.yes ive shot w sonys, a7s,a7..you may think sony menus are ok.but fyi the 1st iterations of these sony had menus so bad, dpreview winced ,& was widely shared @many a camera review site. hated olympus menus too since my 1st ep1 in 2009 but ive grown used to its crappiness.. same w my penF,
Control wise, fuji stands alone w a SS dial w A & aperture dials {also with A] it is so intuitive that after using them all day everything else is a simply a drag .
its great if you enjoy sony ... but i dont

as for logical ? menus that are logical have inportant stuff front and center and fiddily nonsense buried ... whereas . crappy menus are a messy mixture of what important and frequently used with stuff that deserved to be buried deep in a menu press sequence ... stuff that seems designed by a programmer , rather than an experenced photographer
can it be tat youve never been troubled by sonys menu design ? ever ??? if so more power to you

You only have to push one button to change to APS-c mode, just program it in the mode dial (mode 1 or 2), you just have to learn to use the camera, has i told you before, Sony cameras are highly costumizable

They actually moved it with the second generation.

@cosinaphile, are you lost? chill out and you will reply to the right thread next time ok.

Reviewers seems to pass off bad Sony menus as fact.
Menu design/layout is as subjective as bokeh, because it's difficult to quantify.

I have more options at less button presses and I take my eye away from the viewfinder less often as a result with my A7RII as I do with my D8xx bodies, hence my opinion that the whole Sony menu system being wrong is incorrect.

Most of the reviewers I see bagging the menu's are fans of other cameras and seem to use the Sony very little, usually just enough time for a 'review'.

The same reviewers seem to bag Sony for not having a dedicated button to shift around focus points, which I thought was odd and for a few months I attempted to simulate it, but when I learnt I could have better AF practices understanding & using the camera to it's strengths, I hated using the antiquated Canikon systems.

Reviewers often aren't seasoned Sony shooters and comment on products they don't understand properly and as such their opinions aren't credible (to me).

To be honest, the entire Sony menu needs a complete redesign from scratch in order to be more intuitive for photographers.

I kind of got used to the menu - but yes, I would love to have the APS-C mode assignable to a custom button. Same goes for Eye-AF - it can't be assigned to just any button, there are some limitations.

Re: menu system, yeah - it could be better - just not sure how much better, because Canon one is quite similar - it is just that Sony has way way more options to configure...

What do you think it could be like if improved?

Well, you could - for instance - allow a really customisable user menu page for things you personally use to get to hand easily in one place.

It would if all the menu items could be assigned to it.

Are you blaming Canon for having good QC?

Sony because they read comments posted on the largest photography website in the world. If they don't then they're foolish not to.

have fun with that.

Given Sony's goofiness on how far a lens stops down relative to shooting aperture, AF assist lamps would definitely be helpful and certainly a priority for event shooters, who they are courting with their latest f/2.8 zooms!

For the love Sony! PLEASE change this back to way behavior before FW 3.0. DP staff, have you guys reached out to Sony on this issue? Any feedback at all? I'm starting to get concerned Sony can't (or won't) change the stopping down. This is especially painful for us G master owners.

Yes, I've reached out repeatedly about this, so I'm certain they're aware of the associated disadvantages. I've suggested some better alternatives (focus shift look-up tables?), but I'm not sure how realizable they are in practice. At the very least, an option to focus wide open should be offered - perhaps a sort of 'performance AF' mode that also bypasses the CDAF confirmation step in AF-S that makes a whole lot of people think the a7R II is slower to focus than it actually is capable of.

Also, Sony lens irises seem to smoothly (not instantly) stop down when you half-press the shutter. They only speed up the closing iris when you fully depress the shutter. This adds even more delay - the iris closes down slower during the first half-press of the shutter, speeding up only between the half-press and full-depress of the shutter. That needs to be addressed as well if they're to offer wide-open focusing, to ensure irises always close down as fast as possible.

No update as of yet.

Thanks for the reply Rishi. How's this suggestion for simplicity? How about they simply return to focus behavior pre FW 3.0. Problem solved, no? I just can't image focus shift is that bad on the zooms. Can't be worse than stopping down!

Does this issue affect all focusing modes? I haven't tried them all yet. Just the most important mode ;-)

Do you think it would be helpful to have people call/email Sony directly and offer their feedback?

Edit:

My original post was erroneous. It's in fact firmware 1.1 that introduced the stop-down focusing. Updating my A7RII from 3.0 to 3.30 I see no difference in the focusing behavior.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/58214420

Interesting.

oh god .. even in a Sony firmware announcement .. pentaxians have to chime in?

Pentax firmware for K1 is coming soon, will add more focus points and bring AF performance to D5 level.

Many times, inefficiencies in a software algorithm can create excessive heat. A simple loop adding two numbers together will peg your CPU at 100% and generate massive heat if run indefinitely. Putting a Thread.Sleep(1) in that loop can drastically reduce the cpu load and heat generated. There was probably some inefficient loop whose code was reduced or made to run less often, etc.

A very simple made-up example is maybe there is a timer checking if a lens is attached before allowing other functionality to continue. They could remove the constant check for the lens and instead add a flag that is flipped when a lens connection/disconnection event is received. This change could make the loop unnecessary or reduce its complexity by one less call to some hardware API that might be slow.

i know what you are talking abt on inefficient loops.

A7 series in themselves are an inefficient loop.

And to think their customers had to bring the overheating to their attention as if they didn't know about it when they developed their products?

What were all those engineers doing?

Trying to figure out how to make the menus more complicated?

Hmmmm.

:-)

techj:

Right, I wasn't excluding the possibility that firmware can fix heat issues, Samsung got better higher ISO performance in raw out of the NX100 with a firmware update, when I saw that result, I thought it had to be some heat reduction trick. Panasonic did the same with the LX5. (Both cameras I owned.)

However Sony has a reputation of making the A7 bodies smaller than the need to be, and they have noise control issues that seem to be related to heat blooms in the middle of the sensor. (The same sensors in Fujis, Nikons, Pentaxes don't have this issue at the same ISOs). A bigger heat sink is likely the best fix for that, that means a bigger body.

And there's the video overheating reputation of the A7RII when shooting 4K.

Heat shouldn't be causing the computers running the cameras to fault.

I tried the new 50mm f/1.4 on the A7RII, and the lens is huge; Sony needs to remember that not everyone is going to use these bodies with tiny lenses.