Sony Alpha 7S Review

"The NX1 is a much better movie making tool"
highly debateable.

Totally agree with you.

This camera uselessly allows me to shoot at f4 or smaller in terrible low light conditions. Hate having that autofocus in low light as well. who needs it?

Having a higher dynamic range above iso 400 over every other camera ever manufactured is an absolute useless feature.

Even terrible, I could shoot milky way time lapses under sub zero degrees in less than 20 minutes. Damn! All the struggle and the enjoyment of getting ourself frozen by staying beside the camera for 4-5 hrs.. everything gone!

Hate that this camera churns out usable picture even at 12800.

HDR is such an art and I hate that this camera can gives all those details in a single image.

Most importantly the file sizes. Bigger the better. isn't it

Hate everything about this camera. Why Sony? why did you make this camera in the first place.

"Pretty much useless as a stills camera with only 12 MP"

There you go! Another dpreview pro that needs 38475838493 megapixels to print 4x6 and post on Facebook

I only use this camera for stills photography and I t would take me to long to list all the reasons why. a superlative picture making tool

12mp are not much, I agree. I often crop my pictures, since I don't always have a zoom lens with me. Besides I use to print in 60x40 cm size.

But if you don't crop and print smaller (or never print) then 12mp are enough.

60X40 ? Lol... From my D3 I've just printed from an 8 mp file a 100X100 cm fine art, absolutely perfect. 12 mp are absolutely good for every kind of work.

Wanderingeye, absolutely not. I shot most of my images on a 3 week trip to Myamar using the A7s.

aliveinhere.tumblr.com

The A7s is a fantastic stills camera and I prefer it to the A7 II, Leica M 240 and Leica M Monochrom which I also own...

I like IBIS better than OIS b/c lenses are small and cheaper.

The BAD part is that A7-2 does NOT have popular FL none OIS zoom lenses for example. not even in the lenses road map.

As an old Olympus user and still fan I've always thought IBIS was the smart move. Hopefully Zeiss and Sony are working on this message. It took Olympus more than a couple years to get into lens development after the E-1.

If Sony is going to get serious towards E mount, they'll have to and recent developments suggest they are moving in that direction. Not soon enough is the catch phrase for now.

As a system camera that weather sealed Olympus OMD line is much better b/c its F2.8 Pro weather sealed zooms, it has 3 in total including the 7-14mm UWA will be soon released.

No other brands' mirror-less have these weather sealed faster zooms, UWA, WA and TELE.

Problem with your argument being you are dealing with a 4/3 sensor vs. a full frame sensor. Yes 2.8 is faster, but you'll get even less DOF with f4 on a FF. And the better Sony's are weather sealed.

Not with the A7S! The full sensor readout and low pixel density are some of the great features that prevent those problems. The A7S is a landmark, having "raised the bar" quite higher than ever for video with this type of camera.

Think I am going to wait.

Gary, those Facebook snaps you post require at last 14 bit raw

But be warned - you'll miss your point-and-shoot. You'll go through a period of saying, "I would have made a better shot with my old camera." You'll either get through it or trade it all in on an FZ200.

Grab an A6000 with the 16-50 and 18-135 f4 lenses and you'll be in heaven for some time and won't miss your p&s. After that, there'll be no limits for you!

I agree there is a serious lack of lenses and if it were not for the third party adapters I could not recommend purchasing the a7S. Speaking from personal experience with the adapters and a good selection of manual and AF lenses, the lack of Sony lenses is not a issue. If I were in the market for additional lenses the high sensitivity of the a7s no longer forces me to buy fast lenses. Another reason I purchased the camera is for astrophotography. This is where the a7s really out performs all the other cameras I have, since it enables me to accurately focus on stars that I cannot see with my eyes in the sky with heavy light pollution. With a push of a programmed button I can magnify the field of view to such a degree that the slightest touch of the focusing knob makes the faintest stars appear, and another touch they disappear. The result of accurate focusing and a light sensitive camera is very rewarding to me.

Maybe there's a little confusion - the base ISO for the SLOG gamma when shooting video is 3200. That's not the case when shooting stills.

Photato: If anything, we concluded ISO 100 is base based on DR and it's a noise analysis that might make you conclude that ISO 400 is base (since the lower ISOs are producing so much signal that it essentially overwhelms the Raw file, leading to quantisation error and noise at lower ISO).

Our testing and real-world shooting both appear to concur with DxO's conclusion that ISO 100 offers considerably greater DR than ISO 400.

I think Rishi has been waiting over a month for someone to explain why they'd conclude that ISO 400 is base. I'm sure he'd be delighted to discuss it with you.

Yes, in fact I think this all comes down to a matter of semantics, and folks in the video world using 'base ISO' or 'native ISO' in a different sense than those in the stills imaging world.

So I ask, again,

1. What is your exact method for determining ISO 400, or 3200, as 'native ISO'? Method, math, equations, observations, whatever, anything.

2. What is 'baseline ISO'?

3. What do you mean by 'Native ISO'?

4. What do you mean by 'Base ISO'? (Btw: we define it as the ISO that uses the minimum amount of hardware level amplification. In other words, the ISO that has the highest conversion gain, expressed as electrons per digital number).

We need to get some basic definitions straight before we can discuss this any further. Thanks.

I've been using the Olympus OMD for a little over a year, switching from Nikon--and will not go back. There is a setting to turn off exposure preview so the EVF stays bright, even though the exposure is for the flash and the subject is lit with modeling lights or the room light many stops lower.

The first time is used the camera on assignment, I didn't know how to change this setting and the view finder was almost completely dark. I was guessing my compositions, but I pleased the client--and that's what really counts.

Sony A6000 has a setting for Liveview to just leave aperture wide open or not, I can't imagine the A7S doesn't have it.

Also Rishi I was wondering about effect of C-AF as well with 'simulated' liveview modes, but the behavior of the A6000 at least is not so simple...if you *want* a narrow aperture and the camera doesn't feel it has enough light it will open up the aperture further...the question then would obviously be in dynamic moving situations, having the camera take action to open up the aperture further will probably lose some keepers compared to just keeping it open all the time. In situations where there is enough light it probably doesn't matter, but in low light situations where you want a stopped down image, I imagine it would be to your advantage to not use simulated liveview (i forgot what they call it exactly).

Oh, actually, I think I misinterpreted your question. I thought you were interested in the aperture staying wide open, but you're more interested in a usable preview even when your exposure is set such that sans flash, you'd get a dark exposure.

In that case, yes, Sony does have a way of just keeping the preview at a reasonable brightness. You just set "Live View Display: Settings Effect OFF".

However, Timbukto - on Sony cameras, setting this to 'Off' does not actually mean the aperture stays wide open, since the aperture will close down if the camera 'thinks' the scene is bright. It'll then open/close the aperture to your selected aperture when acquiring focus, unless it thinks it needs to open it up b/c it's too dark, or close it down b/c it's too bright (to avoid saturation).

From there it gets really complicated really fast (as you say), as this behavior changes based on if the setting is 'on' or 'off'. I personally think the algorithms need some serious work.

Also, you say 'if the camera doesn't feel it has enough light it will open up the aperture further' - that's exactly where the problem lies, b/c the camera's algorithm for determining if it 'feels it has enough light' needs to be more conservative. Often it think it has enough light, but it doesn't - not enough to focus fast, anyway, so focus slows down. You then have to literally shut off like all the lights to get it to open up the aperture all the way. So at best, it's slowing itself down; at worst, it causes itself to fail.

Furthermore, not opening up the aperture means extended DOF, which means the camera has to search a wider range to detect focus. This becomes particularly egregious at smaller apertures. Say you want to ensure an erratically moving subject is absolutely in focus as it's running, and you're moving alongside it as well. You may wish to choose F8 for a higher hit rate. But the AF would be slowed due to DOF.

And no 'Live View Display' setting gets around this.

Other cameras have been heavily penalized in the past for being specialized. I have not problem with giving full marks to a well designed specialized camera, I do have a problem when this is applied inconsistently. In this specific case it is even most obvious as this is more a video dedicated camera than a still camera, so again, it is even more of a problem in my eyes. For as still photographer it is really hard to justify to shell out this kind of money on a very limited still camera with limited lens selection. Even for a videographer I think it is hard to justify, because good 4K options will be readily available very soon, this camera will lose its marked value so fast. Poor investment unless somebody needs good 4K now and cannot wait.

For Armandino, A7s isn't only a very good video camera, is THE BEST camera for low light. Check the dxomark to convince your self. Also no shutter noisy, it makes it ideal for concerts shots.

"Best" is a qualitative expression. If the "Best" low light camera marginally edges other excellent cameras in the usable iso range holding you back in pixel count and AF performance it is a niche application, sorry. Especially when the system also suffers from limited lens choice. Electronic shutter is a nice touch indeed. Excellent iso performance and quite shutter do not make a gold and 86% to my taste if the rest is mediocre from a still point of view (we are talking of still cameras here right?)

We debated for a long time whether to score this as a video or stills camera, or both. And what the award refers to. It wasn't easy, and as always, there were compromises to both approaches.

Sorry you disagree with our final decision, but we were going to make some people unhappy, one way or the other.

I guess it would be strange to judge the 7DII as only a portrait and landscape camera.
Tools should be (re)viewed for their intended purpose.

If you want to check DXO, do it right. Look at the 18% SNR curve, it is virtually identical to the 6D from Canon. Look at the DR curve, you notice a huge and tell tale bump at ISO 6400. At ISO 3200 the curve would have dived under the 6D curve, but Sony starts to apply noise reduction above ISO 3200.
It is not the low light wonder Sony wants to make us believe or its 12mp low res. would suggest. Rather underwhelmed, to be frank.
http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Sony-A7S-versus-Nikon-Df-versus-Canon-EOS-6D___949_925_836
Also check the dpreview comparison tool.

It does seem inconsistent. Great still cameras are often marked down for poor video, which is fair enough but the reverse should also apply

The lower the noise floor, the higher the DR. Sony Exmor sensors have higher DR due to lower read noise (because they have ADC on the sensor itself). Look at ISO 100, the 6D has lower DR caused by more read noise. The DR is "measured" by looking for a certain signal to noise ratio.

18% SNR is measuring signal to noise ratio on a midtone. Extended DR is in the dark blacks. As you will notice, the 6D/DF/A7s are all almost the same with the 18% SNR graph.

You're not going to get more DR out of the camera than what the Raw file provides at base ISO, which has been measured to be ~13EV by DXO. Unless the video signal pathway or output has something that bypasses the Raw signal pathway and the Raw signal pathway is somehow throwing away dynamic range.

Which I seriously doubt.

I wonder if Cinema 5D's results are from video that's had some level of noise reduction applied to it? If you apply NR to lower tones, you'd measure a deeper lower tone as having an acceptable SNR cutoff, thereby measuring a higher DR.

If that were the case, you wouldn't actually more DR than the 13 EV the Raw file provides, just more DR after NR - which is a non-standard way of measuring DR.

Either way, it still falls behind the Raw DR of the A7R, D810, D750, etc., b/c of increased downstream read noise compared to those cameras, which I personally think is due to quantization error b/c of the high FWC combined with the limited bit-depth of the ADC.

Where did you get that notion? Both cameras were shot at ISO 100.

Why do you think A7s has a base ISO of 3200?

If it had, the A7s would clip the image seriously at ISO 100.

The A7s has a native ISO of 3200, just as he says. It is published information. And that IS where it gets its full dynamic range. Not at ISO 100. Horses for courses. At IS3200, DR of this camera will beat the A7r's, at least in Video, others have tested this.

It turns out to be rather tricky to actually get the full DR this camera has on offer.

@Rishi. "Both cameras were shot at ISO 100 "

That is exactly my point. They shouldn't have been. Not if the goal was to find the true dynamic range potential. Base ISO is not always 100. It is for most cameras but not all. You seem to be making the wrong assumption that base ISO=100. Base ISO is the point for any given sensor where maximum dynamic range is possible. That is its' "native" ISO or where it is most happy. Anything outside of that up or down and image quality suffers. The A7s at 100ISO is outside of its' happy zone. Your review needs updated in that one section lest the credibility of the whole review be questioned. There is a reason Sony restricts the ISO in the higher dynamic range video settings S-log2 to 3200. That is because outside of this sweet spot the camera will not be able to capture enough dynamic range.

"conclusions moot" surely, or were the conclusions unable to speak?

The A7s has its maximum DR at ISO 80 according to DXOMark. There is also where it has its maximum TR and its maximum SNR. Where have you read that the native ISO is 3200? Sounds like nonsense to me.

@FineArtPhotographer - sure - let us take images at ISO 100 for A7r and at ISO 3200 for A7s and compare. That sounds more reasonable and fair - or?

We think we've worked out how you'd conclude that ISO 3200 is the native ISO (though we don't believe this to be the case). Could someone provide a source for this statement, so we can confirm or disprove our suspicions?

Agree, I also want to have some reference of the claim.

NOTE that exactly what native ISO is can be disputed, as e.g. the ISO definition do not talk of such a thing.

To the best of my knowledge native (or base) ISO of a sensor is the ISO you get when you measure clipping of the sensor.

No, that's incorrect. The base ISO of the camera is 100, not 3200, as clearly demonstrated by DXO. That's where the camera has maximum dynamic range, as also demonstrated by DXO.

Perhaps you'd like to define the term 'native ISO'... preferably without the word 'happy' in the definition?

wogg: "At IS3200, DR of this camera will beat the A7r's, at least in Video, others have tested this."

And at ISO 100, DR of this camera will beat DR of itself at ISO 3200... which is why we tested at ISO 100, where the camera DR is maximal.

If you have a high DR scene, you don't shoot at ISO 3200. On either camera. Not if there's anything you can do about it.

Big mistake for dpreview. It seems you guys were a little bit too anxious.

DP did it correct. A7r has better DR than A7s @ 100-400 ISO . A7s is better than A7r @ 3200 , but it's still nothing compared to what both cameras achieve @ 100.

Googled a bit.. seems that ISO 3200 is the native (lowest?) ISO if shooting video in S-log2 mode. Just a video thing. Nothing to do with still images.

@Steen Bay - absolutely right, ISO 3200 is the lowest available ISO when using the SLog2 mode (which appears to equate to the same sensor amplification as ISO 640 mode does with a standard tone curve, confusingly). But at the sensor level, 'ISO 100' appears to be base in the sense of offering maximum DR.

Big mistake for people who think it was a big mistake for DPReview.

Max DR is at base ISO, which is 100. SLog2 does raise the minimum ISO to 3200, as we pointed out here. On that same page, we also pointed out that hardware level ISO amplification appear to go up 4x (to be more precise, between ISO 400 & 640 levels), so dynamic range actually drops w/ SLog2 compared to ISO 100. In fact, it was b/c of this that we specifically asked Sony engineers why they raised the minimum hardware-level ISO amp as opposed to simply applying a more aggressive tone curve in SLog2 w/ ISO 100 levels of amp, as the latter would preserve the maximum DR the camera can record. You could use higher ISOs if needed b/c of exposure limitations, but the option for ISO 100 levels of DR would've been nice w/ SLog2.

As it is, though, you're always paying a DR cost by enabling SLog2, which we feel is unfortunate, & goes directly against OP's notion.

What'd be really nice would be if people actually read our reviews before making comments or making big assumptions that end up being completely wrong. A more appropriate way to address a topic you're clearly confused about is to merely ask us 'hey, as I understand it, it's like so-and-so... thoughts?'

I realize that's it's entirely unreasonable for me to expect civil behavior on the internet, but, still, it'd be nice.

Hope this clears up all the confusion.

So the SLOG base ISO of 3200 was chosen why? I get that its for video but there has to be a reason Sony chose it for this particular sensor.

Not the end of the world however and it doesn't change Dpreviews excellent findings - especially since Sony will have a mega-megapixel FF camera coming soon for landscape photographers.

The a7s isn't for those customers anyway.

Peace.

"So the SLOG base ISO of 3200 was chosen why? I get that its for video but there has to be a reason Sony chose it for this particular sensor."

Yes exactly, that's what we were wondering. And we never got an answer to it from any Sony rep, unfortunately.

I did make it clear though that in their next implementation, it'd be nice if they offered lower levels of hardware ISO amp.

In fact, we're confused about where the stated 'ISO 3200' even comes from- we measured ISO 640 levels of hardware amplification (by comparing clipping levels in Raw files for ISO 3200 SLog2 shots vs all other ISOs, finding that clipping occurred for the same tones in the scene at ISO 640 vs. a SLog2 ISO 3200 file).

I.e. SLog2 does affect the Raw- at ISO 3200, it's like a ISO 640 Raw in terms of actual Raw signal. But then the ISO 3200 SLog2 JPEG has a drastically non-standard tone curve applied. We figure it's called ISO 3200 b/c midtones are brightened to 3200-ish levels (but even, they're more like 1250).

I appreciate the insight. I know it can be tiresome to see all the critics in these forums but your answering questions is helpful.

Cheers

Thanks for the positive remarks!

Base ISO is still 100 on the a7S.

Why does it jump to 3200 in S-Log2? I don't know.

Why not call it whatever hardware-level of amplification the camera is using (400 or 640 or whatever it actually is)? Probably b/c they're basing the rating off of the midtones, which are boosted more digitally after hardware amplification (so might be somewhere around what you'd expect ISO 3200 hardware level amplification to get you - for midtones only).

Either way, yeah, it's pretty confusing. Don't think it has anything to do with marketing though. Suddenly jumping to ISO 3200 when enabling S-Log2 actually looks bad, IMHO. But it does ensure you really underexpose for the highlights. The real question is - why are they raising hardware amplification so much, b/c that in itself throws away dynamic range.

Lassoni makes a good point and another positive of the A7s is how much color information is held onto by the camera as the ISOs rise - dynamic range charts are only part of the battle when showcasing what a camera can do. Nikon and Sony are so incredible these days that photographers are truly spoiled.

I never shot film above ASA 800. Yes 800....and now even Micro4/3rds can do that clean without issue.

Wonderful time to take pictures and have fun!

Rishi, you know as well as the rest of us that it's not "free". If you're not the customer, you're the product - as is the case here:

"With respect to comments or other text-based content you submit or make available for inclusion, you grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable right to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform, translate, create derivative works from and publicly display such content throughout the world in any medium."

"We reserve the right to make changes to the Web Site, policies, and these Conditions of Use at any time."

There is no opt-out specified, i.e. dpreview owns all content and can do whatever they want with it, including reproducing it in any form.

So I don't think you should be especially exempt from criticism - quite the opposite. You are on a payroll, not working for a charity.

@rishi:

In a market that moves very quickly. New products coming out every 9 months. Would you not agree that if a review is to be used as a benchmark for a purchase, then a review needs to surface relatively quickly?

I don’t think many are waiting for 12 months before a purchase... just to see what score DP has given a camera.

And if a review is not to be used as a benchmark for a purchase - what should it then be used for? Cosy Reading?

Today I use other sites then DP. DP is simple just too slow with new reviews. And personally I cannot wait 12 months before I make a purchase… and I’m just a private guy with a love for photography. Think about professionals.

DP you have to stop up – and release your reviews faster than today. I believe that most people would rather have a review come out fast and with fewer details – then wait a year and get a review with a lot of details. As said earlier… it’s a very fast moving marked.

Think about it.

We understand what you're saying, and we agree.

Any full frame lens on the planet will work on the A7, it's amazing how DSLR fan boys are such BS artists.