Big test
The back of the camera is also a little chaotic for my liking, but the important thing is I didn’t find it problematic in use. Once you’ve familiarised yourself with the location of everything, the A7R V soon becomes intuitive. I just yearn for less haphazard button placement. The rear LCD, on the other hand, is excellent. A frustration of vari- angle LCDs is that you can’t tilt the screen without folding it out to the side. Here, you can. The four-axis screen tilts up and down, can be pulled away from the camera body and also folds out, giving you a gamut of compositional options. The screen itself is bright, contrasty and – with 2.09m dots – detailed. The same applies to the EVF, boasting 9.44m dots. This is a big increase on the A7R IV’s 5.76m, putting it on par with the A1. The viewfinder is also huge – as a glasses wearer, I had no problems. functionality off. I’ve never got on with touch panels for image making, but understand their value for video. One neat touch is that you can select the touchscreen to only be active on playback. This suited me down to the ground, enabling me to quickly check sharpness of an image with a double- tap, smartphone style, on the screen. Although the rear LCD is a touchscreen, I switched this Sharpness is a key consideration when it comes to a camera of such high resolution. Camera shake will be amplified by the slightest movement, so a robust in-body image stabilisation system is a must. Here, the A7R V’s five-axis system delivers. Up to eight stops of compensation are claimed – and I have no reason to doubt that as I was easily able to THUMB TIED Button and dial layout isn’t the most intuitive to those not familiar with Sony models make handheld images at 0.5sec. Stabilisation is not quite so hot when recording video – the Active mode does reduce movement when walking and recording, but better systems are available. Lens choice is key for image sharpness, too. If you are going to invest in an A7R V, you should also consider the reality of needing to opt for Sony’s G series lenses to bring the best out of the sensor. A total of 61 megapixels will be very unforgiving on cheaper optics, so consider the costs of upgrading lenses if necessary. I used two G series lenses during the test – the 12-24mm and 24-70mm: both delivered outstanding results. Plus I tried Sigma’s new 60-600mm, which also gave great results – see a full test on this lens next month. There are plenty of options in terms of image quality, including HEIF, as a space-saving alternative to
DYNAMIC RANGE AI processing helps to achieve an accurate white-balance
JPEGs. HEIFs can be selected in 8- or 10-bit options, with both using less space than a JPEG. A modestly sized 16GB card, for example, will store 328 high-resolution JPEGs. Not bad. But switch to 8-bit HEIFs and you’ll get 667 frames on the same card, or 605 10-bit files. Raw and HEIF files can also be captured together, with modest gains. That same 16GB card will store 83 Raw and JPEG files, 96 Raw and 8-bit HEIF files and 94 Raw and 10-bit HEIFs. JPEGs and HEIFs also have four quality levels from Extra Fine to Light. There’s more choice with Raw files as well. Shoot compressed, uncompressed or three strengths of lossless compressed: either large, medium or small. Our 16GB card houses 112 uncompressed Raws, 206 compressed Raws and between 179 and 391 lossless compressed Raws, depending on file size. Any image quality conversation should be rounded off with the A7R V’s Pixel Shift Multi Shooting mode, which precisely moves the sensor to create a huge image file. You can choose between four and 16 frames, all of which are taken with a single press of the shutter release. Sony’s free Imaging Edge Desktop software is then required to knit the frames into a 240-megapixel file. The latest version of the software also has the ability to detect and correct for small pixel-level movements. Being honest, I was perfectly happy with the 61-megapixel images, especially after realising that the 16-image stitches initially create a 1.98GB file – requiring some serious processing power to generate the resulting 19,008x12,672-pixel images. One point to note is that the A7R V is susceptible to dust on the sensor. This applies to all cameras, of course, but the Sony does seem to get it worse than others. In an attempt to overcome this, the V can be set to close the shutter when the power is switched off. Despite this, I still managed to get a few specks on images that had to be removed in post. Not the end of the world, but frustrating all the same. As mentioned earlier, the Bionz XR processor offers performance
“LENS CHOICE IS KEY FOR IMAGE SHARPNESS, TOO. IF YOU ARE INVESTING IN AN A7R V, CONSIDER OPTING FOR SONY’S G SERIES LENSES TO BRING THE BEST OUT OF THE SENSOR”
ARTICULATE The touch-sensitive LCD screen has four-axis flexibility; it can be tilted up and down or folded out from the camera body and flipped around
Photography News | Issue 105
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