Sony a7RV Review 90-Days Later

This is my review of the Sony A7RV, a fantastic camera. It’s gotten a lot of hype over the last several months since it came out, and I’ve spent the last month with it using it as my primary shooter. And I’ve got some things to say about this camera that I think is great and maybe some opinions that are just average.

Links:

Sony a7RV Body Pricing: https://dlylrn.com/sonya7rvbody

Whether or not you are in the market for a new camera. I hope that this video helps you in making your decision. If you’re interested in learning more about how to shoot with Sony cameras, you can check out my courses that are linked down in the description below over on Daily Learn dot com. So the Sony A7RV has a fantastic camera line.

I was initially attracted to these devices because of their high resolution, not because of their video features, but because this camera definitely handles both of those things we’ll talk a little bit about that and my experiences shooting photos and videos with this device. This video is not going to be all about the specs because the specs don’t really matter.

It matters as to whether or not this camera can handle the different shooting environments that you find yourself in. That is what makes a camera great, not how many megapixels it is or how fast something is or isn’t, or how many of whatever it has or doesn’t have. It’s Does this camera stand up to the test when you go out and shoot and what do you need to capture?

Can you capture it? First of all, let’s walk around the camera. I’ll talk a little bit about the features that I really like about it. The camera body itself is very familiar. If you’ve been shooting on Sony over the last couple of years, the camera bodies have gotten just a little bit bigger in the last couple of years and nothing has really changed as far as the size goes on the camera body.

But it’s a great camera, body size, maintaining somewhat of a compact in the mirrorless realm of things, average size, it’s still a little bit smaller than what you would find with some of the other cameras that are out there from different manufacturers, which is great because I like the smaller form factor, but I don’t like how small they used to be.

So as we look around the camera, the grip is really nice. It feels good, it’s solid, just like the Sony A7 for I like that camera. The design of it, everything about it is great. The only thing sometimes for me is the camera body is a little bit short. So when I put my hand over the camera, I wish that I had a little bit more to hold on to.

But that’s what you can buy external grips for, which they do make for this camera. I just don’t happen to have one. But I do really like the way that the camera body feels now, over on the flip side of the camera, we’ve got all of the different available ports. And so we’ll take a look at those. One change that Sony made last year is the change to full-size HDMI ports.

And so we’ve got a full-size HDMI port. We have a flash trigger here as well. So if you’re going to be utilizing this camera in a studio environment, you can go wired with your flash if you’re not going wireless. And it’s nice to have that feature because, with a mirrorless type of camera, it’s a little bit more challenging to shoot studio in the way that we used to shoot Studio a DSLR, where I can look through the camera and just see the ambient light through the camera and know when something’s in focus or not, whereas the mirrorless camera has to do some things in order to see everything.

And so sometimes going wired with your flash is a good option and then the full-size HDMI port means no more silly adapters that we have to deal with. We also have a headphone jack and a microphone jack. Here we’ve got USB type-c and then we have a multi-port out. So this door design that they’ve gone with over the last couple of years, I really like it very slim, everything close as well and snaps and I don’t have to worry about doors popping off and getting lost on me anymore.

One of the biggest changes with this camera is actually the flip and articulating screen. This is something that most of us have been wanting for a very long time and we saw it on a lumix camera. Now we’ve seen Sony do it in a less chunky way. That Lumix camera had a very large appendage hanging off the back of it, although I really liked it.

And Sony has come along and said, Hey, this has been a struggle in the camera community as to whether or not we have a tilting screen or a flip-out screen. So we’re going to go ahead and give you both. And I like the fact that we have both. I only personally use the flip-out screen if I’m going into some sort of a selfie scenario or if I’m setting up the camera where I’m going to be monitoring myself in front of the camera.

But if I’m going to be shooting photos, I want the flip screen, because that way I’m looking right down the center of the camera. When I’m framing up my shot, I’m looking down at the center of the camera as opposed to off to the side. I hate looking off to the side. It just it makes me think more when it comes to aligning my camera with my shot, making sure that my horizon line is good, and making sure that my angle is good.

When the monitor is hanging off to the side. So the fact that we have both articulating and tilting means that we have the best of both worlds and now we don’t have to argue about which is better anymore because we all can have both on the back side of the camera. We’ve got all the standard buttons that we would have on our A74 Nothing is really different on this camera from Sony 74.

We have the addition of a switch here that allows us to go from photo to video to S and Q mode. And I really like this because now we’re not rotating our mode dial all the way around just to get to another setting. There is a lock on the mode dial as well, so you can push down and rotate that around.

But I love the fact that we have a locking toggle here to go from photo to video mode. We first saw this I believe on the A7 for. So let’s talk about this camera’s performance. One of the biggest things that were talked about was this air autofocus. And so one would assume that the autofocus on this camera is going to be miles and miles better than what we would see on the A7.

For now, I have a couple of A7IVs so I’m going to talk a little bit about my experiences utilizing AutoFocus on this camera between the A7 four and also the A1, because there are differences there. So first of all, there are differences beyond the eye between the autofocus on these different cameras.

It’s not just the fact that there’s a better processor or a different processor in the A7 five, there are different internals as well that are working to make the autofocus fast and effective. And we see a little bit of differences there between the A7 four in the A1 when comparing the autofocus on the A7 R five to the A7 four, I see a little bit better.

AutoFocus on the A7 five it latches on faster and it’s a little better at maintaining AutoFocus on moving subjects. Primarily, this is important when shooting video, when shooting photo and I press down the shutter and it achieves autofocus. I didn’t really notice any difference between the two cameras, the A7 four and the A7 five. Both are really fast.

They achieve autofocus quickly, especially if I’m using G.M. lenses, which is what I mostly use. So AutoFocus, I didn’t notice much of a difference there when shooting video, I did notice a bit of a difference. I noticed that the A7 r five seemed to follow subjects a little bit better, especially as that subject became obscured and maybe went behind another subject or behind something else and popped out the other side.

It would pick up on that subject. It’s almost like the A.I. built in. Remember who it was following without me having to actually register a face. Now, registering faces for autofocus is something we’ve been able to do for a little while now, and I could definitely do that. But if I don’t want to go through all of that trouble, the A7 R five definitely does a better job at staying locked on to who I intentionally wanted to be locked on in the first place.

So that’s a great feature and I think something that’s just going to continue to get better as we see AI improve throughout the different camera models as we move forward in the future, we’ll probably see that on the A7 five. We’ll probably see that if they go with a second generation for the A1. Now in comparing AutoFocus from the A7 R five to the A1, that’s where I didn’t see quite as much of a difference when shooting photos.

The A1 is still faster at achieving autofocus, and that’s mainly due to the internals that camera is built to be faster, so it doesn’t necessarily matter if the processing is faster because the internals are faster and they make up for the fact that there isn’t that latest generation chip With the AI, the A1 is still faster when achieving autofocus and the same goes for video as well.

The A1 would achieve autofocus faster, however, the AI on the A7 r five still seemed to do a little bit better at maintaining autofocus on those subjects that may become obscured or may you may lose face tracking. For a moment it seemed to remember and pick up on that a lot better than the A1 did. But I don’t find myself in that many scenarios where that is as big of an issue as it sounds.

It’s nice that the A7 R five does that and and can remember the face without me having to register it. But I didn’t find myself losing or missing out on any shots because of that situation. The A7 R five. It’s great, but the A1 has faster autofocus and initially achieving autofocus. And of course if you’re switching between different subjects or areas of your photo with autofocus, the A1 seems to be a little bit faster at achieving that and a little bit smoother.

So let’s talk about photo quality now. That’s something that you really can’t tell the difference between the A7 R five and either of the devices. If you’re using the same lens across all three cameras, I didn’t notice any photo difference at all. As far as quality goes. Obviously there’s a higher resolution and there’s a resolution difference between the three cameras that I talked about so far in this video with the A7 R five being the highest resolution, but the A1 is not too far behind.

And for me, I don’t really need anything larger than a 50 megapixel, and the A1 achieves that 50 megapixel. For me, maybe the only difference when it comes to picture quality is not that big of a deal to me when shooting video. There’s obviously a little bit of a difference between these cameras and it really comes down to what it does in the different formats that you’re shooting at.

When you’re shooting in this camera at 4K 60, it does punch in a bit, just like the A7 for Does. Shooting and punching in is not a big deal to me that there’s that crop. It frustrates other people, but it doesn’t frustrate me that much because these cameras are very versatile and they shoot a lot of different things.

And if I wanted something that did not crop in at 4K 60, I would get a camera that specifically was designed for that and perhaps even went to 4K 120 like the camera I’m looking into right now. Now, of course, this camera shoots an eight K just like the A1 does, but I never really have a need to go into eight K played around with it, obviously, because it’s there and why not?

But there isn’t a need for me to shoot an eight K, so I’m primarily shooting at 4K on all of my cameras. So when it comes to shooting video for me, there isn’t much of a difference between the A7 R five and the A7 four. Both of them are great at shooting video. They are very capable, so there isn’t much there to compare.

As far as video goes. It’s nit picking with little settings and stuff from there and comparing it to the A1. There’s also not a whole lot of a difference there either. There’s a lot of great features on the A1. They’ve been around for a while and they’re on this camera, which is fantastic. I would say that the benefits of shooting with this camera is the articulating screen that also flips out.

So with the flip out screen with articulation, it allows you to get at different angles that you might have to have an external monitor for on the A1 because the A1 only has the flip screen, it doesn’t articulate all the way out. And so there are some limitations there depending on what you’re shooting, and you’ll find similar limitations on monitoring when it comes to the A7 four, which only has a flip out screen that doesn’t articulate up.

So the differences there in regards to video are minimal. You can’t really make a decision on either three of these cameras based on the fact that you’re shooting video. If you’re primarily a video shooter, then you’re probably going to want to go with an A7 SX line of camera or perhaps jump up to something like the three. Those cameras are primarily for video and have video-centric features, whereas these are photography cameras that have some videos and features included.

So which camera would I choose if I had to choose only one? Well, that’s a tough one because I’d have to decide what is most important to me. If photography is most important to me, I would go with the A1, But that’s a pretty expensive camera and it’s getting a little old, so I probably would consider the A7 r five because it has fantastic features for photographers.

It’s high resolution and it has an articulating flip-out screen that is just so nice. The A7 four is definitely a more budget-friendly version of all the cameras, so I wouldn’t break the bank to go with something like the A7 R five. I always tell people that it’s most important to buy Fantastic lenses than it is to spend a ton of money on a camera.

If you don’t have great lenses like G.M. lenses or higher-end sigma lenses or something like that, then I recommend spending less on your camera body so that you can get a better lens. Putting your old lens on a new camera like this is going to choke its ability to have fast autofocus and also to capture amazingly sharp images as well.

So putting good lenses on a good camera is better than putting average lenses on a great camera. So consider that before deciding what you’re going to buy. Overall, I love the A7 r five. I think there’s a lot of value that it brings and incremental boosts over the A7 R four, which is a fantastic camera that I also had the A7 R five definitely geared more towards photographers that want to be able to shoot good video.

This camera does that. It has new state-of-the-art features for AutoFocus, which are great for photographers who are trying to capture fast moving subjects and things that are elusive at times. This camera is definitely going to have the edge on a lot of other cameras that are currently available because of its AI technology, and it’s probably only going to get better as Sony continues to improve and adds firmware updates to this camera will probably see advancements in that technology because this is the first time that they’ve done this in one of their cameras.

So it’s going to only get better from here moving forward. So I’ve got some links down in the description below for the A7. R five also include the A7 four because I think it’s a fantastic camera. And if you’re taking my advice and purchasing some good lenses instead of spending all of your money on a camera, I’ve got some options down there for you as well.

Hey, if this video helped you out, make sure to give it a thumbs up. Check out the courses that I have linked down below. Some of them are free and these courses are going to help you better get the most out of your camera so that you can shoot the photos that you know you can utilizing these amazing devices that Sony has created.

Hope you enjoyed the review.

This article is a transcript of Jerad’s Sony a7RV Review YouTube Video.