Sony a7 pros and cons so far.

[enerlevel]

Hello all,
After going back and forth with many camera brands,I decided to give the a7 another chance and I brought the sony a7, sony 24-70f4 and the sony hvl-60 flash. unfortunately the features I like about the camera are the features I don't like...

1) face detection is one feature which I love... when I hand over the camera to someone to take my pic, I know that the face detect will always have me in focus... but that's not always the case.. out of 10 pics, 3 of them always seems to be soft or blurry.

2) auto focus hunts or sometimes locks up without actually being in focus..

3) the rear lcd doesn't seem to have the bite!! Colours look to washed out and is not sharp ...

4) high iso files are not too clean when shooting RAW. Using 5d mkIII, d600 etc in the past... the a7 sensor is noisy.

5) ideally I would like the EVF to display and the screen to only come on to preview pics.. but there is no option of such kind..

6) the pic preview zoom button just zooms 100% directly. There should be an option which could help users to choose between different zoom percent...

all in all it's a good travel camera. But there is still something confusing about The setup. Results are not consistent and I am not sure of its the lens or the camera itself..

 

[Solarflare]

1) Well, thats normal. Why do you think pros never use face detection. Its not reliable and how could it be.

2) That even happends with DSLRs. At least my D600 does that sometimes.

3) Thats sad. I remember reports that the D800 had the same problem (Ming Thein for example complained) ... Nikon only fixed that with the D810.

4) I strongly doubt that. The D600 uses a Sony sensor, maybe exactly the same, but more likely the previous generation. You're used to good noise reduction algorithms. Especially Canon is a master in that respect.

Fighting with the interface is pretty normal ... no camera is ever perfect in that respect. Unless we talk about old mechanical film cameras like the Leica M3 ... cant get more intuitive than that, really.

 

[Derrel]

4) high iso files are not too clean when shooting RAW. Using 5d mkIII, d600 etc in the past... the a7 sensor is noisy.

Sony A7 and A7R use 11-bit "cooked" RAW files, not the 14-bit RAW files Nikon premiered with the D3x in 2009, and has since carried forward...and they do not use 12-bit RAW either...the 11-bit RAW is one of the more notable drawbacks Hogan highlighted in his review of those two Sony cameras. I do not understand why Sony has done this.

 

[Solarflare]

Oooh ok thats the issue.

Yeah Ming Thein also complained about that. Dont remember reading a Sony A7 review from Thom Hogan.

Sony really should fix that, especially since its very simple to fix (and silly that its there in the first place).

 

[gsgary]

You are wrong about high iso it rivals any camera on the market, you must be doing something wrong

 

[enerlevel]

1) Well, thats normal. Why do you think pros never use face detection. Its not reliable and how could it be.

2) That even happends with DSLRs. At least my D600 does that sometimes.

3) Thats sad. I remember reports that the D800 had the same problem (Ming Thein for example complained) ... Nikon only fixed that with the D810.

4) I strongly doubt that. The D600 uses a Sony sensor, maybe exactly the same, but more likely the previous generation. You're used to good noise reduction algorithms. Especially Canon is a master in that respect.

Fighting with the interface is pretty normal ... no camera is ever perfect in that respect. Unless we talk about old mechanical film cameras like the Leica M3 ... cant get more intuitive than that, really.

1) I have used this function on the xt1 and for sure it doesn't miss as much as the sony a7 does

2) with the d600 or any other dslr, miss af happens mostly when you have very low light situations.. but the a7 even misses af sometimes in good light.

4) I am using raw files and when I compare it with other cameras like d600 or 6d, sony a7 files have much more noise.. but it's better than D7100