Sony Pushes the Envelope with the A7RIV
Sony once again demonstrated its technological chops this week releasing a new version of its A7R series. The new model, the A7RIV brings the sensor to an impressive 61megapixels, and the new model also ads improved speed, autofocus and ergonomics. The fact that Sony can fit all this into a pretty small body is even more impressive.
For a certain segment of the market, this will be a significant camera. For some landscape shooters, commercial photographers and so on, the extra megapixels will be welcome. and if 61 megapixels wasn’t enough it can do a sensor shift capture to combine multiple photos into a crazy 240megapixels.
What's even more impressive about the A7R4 is that it manages 10fps with a mechanical shutter, and it also has the equally impressive autofocus from the A6400 series. Sony really are showing Canon and Nikon how it’s done. To be fair to the other manufacturers, Sony has a considerable head start and technological advantage, but it really throws down the gauntlet.
The only disappointment was that they didn’t improve the video quality, but this is primarily a stills camera. Not that the video is bad. It still does proper oversampled 4K (which from a 61mp sensor is impressive) and up to 120fps in 1080p. Some were complaining that it doesn’t do 4K 60p but to be honest, I’m not sure that’s a big deal for most of the people who would buy this camera. For people who want a big resolution capture and also want to do good video on occasion, then this is an almost perfect camera. I will be really curious to see the real world reviews when this comes out, and I would love to try one myself.
DP Review already has a sample gallery up. Only Jpegs at the moment, but still. Some are a little noisy at 1:1 but that’s not surprising given the pixel count. See my previous post about this and why it’s important to be careful when making noise judgements at 1:1. It’s also hard to judge until we can see RAW files. Low ISO images are stunning.
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