Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Our Sony a7R arrived five days ago and we, my wife and I, have had a chance to put the camera through its paces. Although, it does not have a kit lens, we also have a Sony a7 that comes with a 28-70 mm lens. Our experience with the a7R reflects using that lens. As we expected the camera works great, delivering consistent exposure in dim or bright light. We have found autofocus speed to be good under daylight conditions. We have used it indoors and have been satisfied with its automatic focusing speed, although in dim light it takes a tad longer. We have used the Sony NEX-6 and NEX-7 and found the a7R's focusing speed comparable to those two cameras. For most subjects, the focusing speed is fast enough and we found it satisfactory. We rely heavily on manual focusing, especially for our scientific photography work. This camera makes manual focusing a pleasure. The camera has two modes for facilitating focus. One is the traditional increase in viewfinder magnification: the center of which is magnified for close inspection of fine detail. The increased magnification sacrifices the field of view. The other is peaking. This provides a pseudo colored fringe around in-focus edges and provides us the advantage of seeing the whole field of view. We have used both and find them to be powerful working tools when focusing lenses manually. The electronic viewfinder works very well with a diopter control for focusing ones eye to the screen and various aids for evaluating exposure. Not only does the viewing screen vary in brightness as one departs from the recommended exposure, but there is a histogram displayed in the viewfinder. In addition, there is a "zebra" mode. This causes over exposed highlights to display stripes and is a good indicator of when and where you will lose your highlight detail. We have taken some great shots in dim lighting conditions. For us, we took advantage of Sony's Image Data Converter software v. 4.0 and opened the images into this program; however, we note that this program immediately applies an aggressive noise reduction filter so that in regions with fine detail the image appears "smudged". We found it preferable to turn off the noise reduction in that program and save the image as a 16-bit tiff. This picture can then be processed in Photoshop where we used Noise Ninja to reduce the effects of noise without losing fine detail. We were happy with pictures taken at ISO 3200. The a7R's major weakness, in our opinion, is the paucity of full frame Sony autofocus lenses for this camera. While you can use the NEX series of lenses, this will use only the central part of the sensor. When you do so, the camera crops down and provides a 15-megapixel (4800x3200 pixels) image. If you are willing to sacrifice autoexposure, autofocus, and image stabilization you do have the option of using non-Sony lenses. We have used a 20 mm AIS Nikon and while we need more time to check the image files to evaluate edge sharpness and chromatic aberration, our initial results look promising. We used these lenses in Aperture-priority mode, letting the camera set the shutter speed while we set the lens diaphragm. With the camera operating in "stopped down" mode, it gave us a real time depth of field display. It should be noted that when using the camera in Aperture priority or Manual mode, the lens is always used in a stopped down mode. So autofocus speed of E mount lenses will be slower when you use smaller apertures. In dim lighting conditions, using these modes will also cause the lens to "hunt" for focus when the aperture is closed down or if you are using a slow lens. If focusing speed is an issue, try using P or S mode on the camera.. There is a lot more to describe about this camera, but in a nutshell it is a reliable photographic tool. We have noticed that it does consume batteries. We ordered a couple of spare batteries by the second day. We also prefer to use an independent battery charger rather than charging the batter through the camera body. Update 1 We have been working with the LEAE4 lens adapter for the a7R and we are very satisfied with the combination. As noted in our review, we felt a weakness of this series of cameras is the lack of full frame autofocus lenses that can be used with this camera. One solution is to buy the LAEA4 adapter that accepts Sony's A mount lenses and maintains full autofocus capability. This adapter is quite complex and as a result it is expensive. It contains a semi-transparent mirror that directs a fraction of the light to a set of focusing sensors. This unit takes over focusing and, essentially, converts the a7R to a SLT camera. In essence it replaces the contrast detection focusing system with a phase detection one. This has a couple of advantages. First, there is an increase in focusing speed over the contrast based system. Second, it appears that this unit has more sensitivity for working in lower light levels. Finally, this unit will work with the older, discontinued, Minolta AF and Konica-Minolta AF lenses. Many of these lenses rely on a focusing motor housed in the camera body and this adapter contains such a motor. So as a consequence, this adapter will autofocus with older discontinued Minolta products and it will autofocus all of Sony's A-series AF lenses. The adapter weighs only 4 ounces and does not adversely affect camera handling. Also, it is well designed. If you use a Sony A series lens which is designed for an APS-C sensor, the unit will "crop" down and use only the center of the a7R sensor to provide an image free of vignetting. With this adapter we have used a 500 m f8.0 Minolta AF Mirror lens, their 100-300 mm APO zoom telephoto lens, and a Tamron 90 mm f/2.8 macro lens. We also used the kit lens from our A77 to test the "auto crop" capability of the adapter and camera combo. With these lenses, the unit autofocuses the lens rapidly in dim lighting conditions. Although this adapter is more expensive than the LAEA3 adapter, we feel its expense is justified. The former adapter will only autofocus those lenses which have a focus motor built-in the lens barrel while the latter will focus all autofocus lenses in the A line. In addition, the latter unit focuses rapidly. These two features make the additional expense more acceptable. Update 2: Recently I decided to upload some Apps from Sony's online store. As you may know, Sony NEX cameras and the a7/a7R camera have wireless capability that enables them to transfer images to smartphones and tablets. In addition, this capability can be used to download apps to your camera to provide it additional features. For example, Sony does not have time lapse capability in its NEX-6 or a7R camera, but you can install an App to provide that capability. One of Sony's free Apps is their Smart Remote Control and this useful feature has undergone improvements since its been first released. For example, when I first used Smart Remote Control I was overjoyed that it would work on my iPAD mini. It was tremendously convenient to have a large screen for focusing and composing images. For macro work it was nice to put the camera low to the ground and position it without having to hunch down and get close to view the tilted LCD screen. However, when I found that the first release of that software could not save RAW files to the camera's memory card, I abandoned using it. Well, I revisited the Sony App store and found they updated and improved the program. Most importantly, they allow the saving of RAW files to the camera's memory card. You cannot just save RAW files however. You must save RAW + JPEG and I presume this is necessary so that the smaller size files could be uploaded, wirelessly, to either a tablet or a smart phone. I don't use this feature, but prefer using it as a replacement for a remote cable release. For what it is worth, while a smartphone can be used, I find the mini tablets and tablets to be preferable since their larger screen provides a larger preview of the subject. For those who manually focus their cameras, the enlarged image is detailed enough to accomplish this task with ease. Although I have the cable release for the a7R, I find that I hardly use it. The Smart Remote Control App will work with smartphones. It seems I always forget to take my cable release, but I never forget my smartphone. Considering that the Smart Remote Control is free, it is well worth getting. Another nice thing about the App store. They keep track of the Apps you have downloaded to your camera. So, if you have to do a total reset of the camera's settings and values (this wipes out the apps) you can download replacement Apps at no charge. One final note, you are not penalized if you buy a new Sony camera. In my case, I had downloaded the time lapse App for the NEX-6. For a time this was unavailable for the a7 series of cameras. Well, it recently became updated to work with these cameras and I was not charged when I upload it to my new Sony camera. Update 3: I loaded the new firmware on the a7R camera so now I am using version 1.02. The camera functions much as it did before and I did not see a dramatic increase in focusing speed or focusing accuracy in AF-S or AF-Continuous under outdoor lighting during the day. But, then I was reasonably satisfied with the original firmware. When using the CZ 24-70 mm f4.0 lens, I felt that the new firmware did improve the focusing accuracy under dim lighting. There was less "hunting". The most dramatic improvement I observed was the performance of the Object tracking function. The performance of that was much improved and the camera did a better job of following objects and maintaining focus on the targeted subject.