Sony A7VI First Impressions
I took the Sony A7VI with the 100-400 F5.6 up to Norwegian Point in Hansville for a first shoot, setting myself down in a chair for an hour just to experiment with it and see what happens. The camera started out at the settings that came with it — with the exception of shifting it into shooting RAW instead of JPEG. Over an hour, I started experimenting with buttons and menus and trying things. I ended up with about 500 images shot, and the beginnings of an idea how the camera and I can work together.
What is my initial impression?
I really like it.
Initial thoughts
I really like the Fuji setup I’ve been using. It’s light, easy to carry, seems solidly built so I never felt it needed to be babied or handled gently, and I got really nice results out of it for a pretty good price for the kind of setup you need for bird photography.
In comparison, the Sony feels built like a tank, and while I don’t plan on it, it makes me think I could throw it off a building and it’d be fine. It’s also much heftier and weighs more, and I feel that extra weight carrying it around. It also cost a lot more, the A7IV body alone cost more than my Fuji rig did.
That said, there is a definite feeling of this being a “pro” device in terms of build quality, heft and general feel and how the controls operate.
It feels balanced in my hands and I can hand hold it well; it does take a bit of thinking to set myself and make myself stable when moving it around, but that’s true of any hand held 400mm lens.
I would say the EVF on the Sony is noticably better than on the Fuji X-s10.
Right now, I’m still at the “none of the buttons are where my muscle memory tells me they should be” stage, but I’m starting to figure it out. I’ve turned off AF on the shutter button and gone back to back button focus like I used on the Canon’s back in the days, where on the fuji, my AF button was on top next to the shutter.
It took me maybe ten minutes to start figuring out how to make a good image pretty reliably with it; the Sony seemed happy to work with me rather than force me into it’s view of how things should be done. Shooting 500+ shots over an hour or so ate about 30% of the battery, so there’s nothing to complain about there.
So overall, it’s a nice improvement and a really good camera.
What is better
As I noted, I see through the EVF better, it’s clearer and brighter and refreshes faster to my eye.
A feature I didn’t expect to love: Auto-ISO, which I’d experimented with on the Fuji but never became comfortable with. It was set by default and it’s really easy to give it a needed shutter speed, so if I want a minimum of 1/500 or 1/1000, that’s simple and easy to change. It’s already my default setup, which is nice, since I do a lot of shooting around my feeder at times when the light is pretty poor and the auto-ISO can correct me to ISO 12000 without my having to remember to tweak settings. And even at that ISO, the noise issue is at worst minimal and easily fixable.
I’m still wrapping my head around how the AF works and how I want it set up, but once I found how to get it into tracking mode, I was pretty happy. If I can set focus on a target I can keep focus locked on that as it moved; it’s a big improvement over Fuji AF. And just for fun, I went into spot focus and tried to lock onto a bird that was behind and between two bushes, and it never once wavered and tried to lock onto the bushes instead. Very nice.
The Sony also has a huge buffer while burst shooting, which is both nice (I’ll get the shots as long as I want the burst to continue without delays) and not (in editing, there are way more images to cull through). I’m currently shooting at 10FPS, and I think I’ll slow that down once I figure out how.
I really like the quality of images out of camera, and the increase in sensor size to 33 megapixels (7008x4672 pixels for an image) adds nice detail. On the left is the image, on the right, I’ve zoomed in in Lightroom to 200% (not 100%):
An interesting side effect of that is that I get more detail on really tiny things far away than I did with the Fuji, leading to a better opportunity to ID distant birds. (FWIW, a glaucous-winged gull and two marbled murrelets).
What isn’t better?
Most of the things that have me grumbling are “different” rather than bad, and will fade in time. The AEL button is in an awkward place, but I’ve set up the AF ON button to be my AF activator and my thumb hits it well while my hand is set up to press the shutter. The “four buttons and a ring” control/joystick isn’t an improvement over the Fuji, and above that is another finger pad I should be able to use to adjust focus points, but I haven’t figured out how to make it work yet.
Other than that, it’s heavier — noticably — and cost me a lot more than the Fuji setup. But it’s also a clear upgrade from that.
It’s a small data set, but I basically never got sensor dust on the Fuji. And if you look at some of the images above, you can see I already have some; I have no idea if that’s going to be more of a problem with the Sony, but I have to be more aware of it and clean the sensor more reliably, I guess.
First thoughts on processing in Lightroom
I have spent a bit of time starting to figure out how to process an image in Lightroom. I’ve already decided my standard profile will be Adobe Landscape, and I really like the color of images I add that to. One thing I’m noticing is that the Fuji sensor and processor worked really hard to create a RAW image that gave me a lot of ability to tweak the whites and blacks without blowing out of crusing anything; the Sony blacks seem more crushable. This has impacted a couple of standard processing things I’ve done, including using dehaze as my contrast adjuster — that isn’t working for me as well as it did on the Fuji.
That’s not a flaw, it simply means I need to figure out the best way to get the best out of an image; I’m not at all surprised that’s different on the different cameras.
I’m really loving how well I can bring out the sky, even when (like this outing) it’s pretty bright, somewhat glary and hard light with no clouds. I like the blue and how well I can bring it out, and do so quickly and easily. Auto white balance is working pretty well, although I normally for a shoot like this shift the images to Daylight, but they were in all cases very close to each other.
Overall, these images will for the most part be quick and easy to process, and I don’t have any worries about adapting my workflow to handle them.
Final thoughts
I had to ponder a while whether I really wanted to spend the money to shift from Fuji to Sony, and now that I have, I’m really happy that I did. I’m still carrying one of my X-S10 units for its wide angle lenses and as a secondary video system, but I’m already seriously wondering what I might want to effectively finish the job and retire the rest of my fuji gear. For those curious, I always sell my surplus gear to keh.com, as I find they’re fair judges and they make reasonable offers without the joys and challenges of trying to do that via Craigslist or eBay. Laurie got my 70-300/1.4x lens setup and my now spare X-s10, plus my 70-200 F2.8 lens, and she got to retire her kit 70-200 and her venerable X-E1, so she’s now carrying two X-S10’s. Both of us are retiring to sell our 100-400 glass and there are a couple of other smaller pieces to go off to new homes as well.
I’ve long been a “carry a second body” person, but for now, I’m going to stick with the single A7IV. I’ve rarely been in a situation where I’ve really used them at the same time, and so I’m going to see if I really want/need one before I start thinking about what it might be. My excuse has always been “bird lens on one and wide angle on the other”, but in recent years, I’ve rarely actually done that. I tend to focus my photography one way or the other now. And, of course, I can always change out lenses, right?
Hmm. Maybe the Sigma 14-28 F 2.8…..
