Sony a7C II & a7CR Initial Review: Lightweight Bodies with HEAVYWEIGHT Features!

hey welcome back it is Chris Nichols here with petapixel Jordan and I are on vacation together with our families we're in beautiful British Columbia coming to you from Lake shushwap and that's because we have an exciting early look at brand new pre-production Sony a7cr and a7c II [Music] hey Jordan I want you to imagine that you own the original Sony a7c how do you feel I don't like it I don't like the tunnel vision viewfinder and the twin dials both on my I thought might be sad okay so we do throw in a pit you donate your fire fire yeah you don't have to do that you're forgetting about kh.com of course yes there are preferred pre-owned trade and partner I mean they do a great job so first off you would take it there you know their experts are going to evaluate it properly they're going to give you a fair price you're going to get paid quickly but also do you know what KH is an authorized Sony dealer what yeah they sell New Gear you could get the Sony a7c2 which we're just about to learn about 10 trading bonus if you do that on anything that's new or new to you so where do they need to go kah.com that's where I'm going now we're going to be combining these two cameras together into one review because again remember it's an early look there's only so much we can talk about but also the Sony a7cr and the Sony a7c2 are basically identical body designs they share a lot of similarities so we'll be talking about that together and then we'll talk about the differences between the two models how we're going to do this is this I'm going to have the Sony A7 see R right now to start the video which means Jordan as you can see is shooting on the Sony a7c2 and then we're going to swap halfway through so you'll be able to see video samples on both cameras and we'll talk about the features on both so these two cameras are very interesting development because now we've got a full line of Sony a7c series cameras right I mean the original Sony a7c was always intended to be just a very compact full-frame entry-level package it was pretty basic terrible evf but otherwise it was nice it was easy to carry around it did have good image quality decent Auto focusing but now we've got a very different dynamic because we got the a7c2 which actually borrows heavily from the A7 4 and then we have the Sony a7cr which is a silly name which borrows heavily from the Sony A7 R5 I think I did it so these cameras really now represent this interesting amalgamation of a still very entry-level compact easy to travel with body with some very entry level features we're gonna talk talk about that but also with some very Advanced features Way Beyond what the Sony a7c original had so the first thing I'm going to point out is both of these cameras have the new bions XR processing unit and this is the same thing that you're going to find in cameras like the Sony a7r5 a very Advanced Camera so that means first off to the auto focusing algorithms here are going to be very similar to the Sony a7r5 it's got that same kind of powerful processor the same kind of AI Control unit to help with subject detection that's a big step up in terms of autofocus for what is supposed to be a more approachable entry-level camera system so before we get into specifics let's talk about how this has improved over the a7c original as far as handling goes these are still very compact bodies and I love this design so basically a little bit larger than a Sony a6700 aps-c series camera that's pretty great they do have a big change though over the original a7c it's got a bigger grip and it feels really nice there as well if I want it I have this option for an accessory grip on the bottom now if you buy the a7cr you get this if you get the a7c2 you'll have to buy this in addition but it's really nice it's really not that big it's not a vertical grip in any way it just gives you a place for your pinky to rest at the same time when it's locked in place you still have a quarter inch screw thread on the bottom for tripod work and you can still access the battery look you can flick this open that opens up flick that open and there's our Z-Type battery I really do love how compact these things are and they're very lightweight 513 grams basically a quarter of a knock that's so lightweight to carry around we've got really nice changes the control structure huge one now a front control dial this is really big because before you just had the rear control die on the back control dial you basically have to do double duty with your thumb and it really slows things way down this now handles a lot more like an a74 or a7r5 kind of camera I like that on the back we still don't have an auto focusing joystick but with real-time tracking on these cameras I don don't find that it's as critical it's still really easy to implement focus and get Focus lock of course I can use the touchscreen to do that as well we still just have one single SD card slot it is now a UHS two card slot which is nice but we just have the one that's what we expected and we do have the same kind of weather ceiling so you've got nice ports everything is sealed up nice now as usual we have our on off toggle switch under the shutter button but what we now have different from the original a7c is a dedicated lever here like we've seen another Sony cameras which goes between photo mode video mode and slow and quick mode so I want to talk about displays next but I gotta be honest when I saw that these new cameras had 2.36 million evfs I was like oh me I I don't want to deal with the original a7c viewfinder because frankly it was absolute garbage it was just the worst so luckily we do have brand new evfs here yes it's still only 2.36 million dots more importantly the magnification is much higher so it doesn't look like you're looking down a horror movie hallway to your composition in there so that's a huge Improvement sadly what hasn't really improved that much is the back panel so this is just over a million dots doesn't have a lot of detail at least you can boost the brightness in sunny weather so it's fairly viewable it's a fully articulating touch screen but still Sony hasn't decided to implement the a7r5s very Advanced fully articulating screen with a tilt function I'd really like to see that another camera I guess we're gonna have to keep waiting okay so I want to talk about the Ibis unit on these bodies they do have the exact same Ibis unit it's nice that it's still so compact for this body design but it now gives you seven stops of in-body image stabilization however it's important to mention though that that's sync is that's if you've got lenses that also have image stabilizers in them Sony hasn't yet given us numbers we're gonna have to test this on full reviews of what that will be with lenses in our image stabilize which is what we happen to be using today regardless this is in some ways will definitely improve it over the original a7c but also an improvement over the a74 so in the case of the a7c2 you're getting a substantial upgrade however in the case of the a7cr it's not quite as stable as the Sony a7r5 that it's copying you did it I did do it wow it's tough Okay so we've talked a lot about the changes with the new body now let's talk about how this is similar to the Sony a7r5 because really what the a7cr is doing why do they name it that why didn't they call it the a7c2r it's so stupid it's so stupid anyways okay so what it borrows from the a7r5 is the same excellent 60 megapixel sensor which we love I mean it's got lots of detail great dynamic range low light performance it takes fantastic high resolution photos it does have almost the same burst rate eight frame per second mechanical it's actually a little bit slower than the 10 frame per second you'd find on the a7r5 but it does get the new multi-shot pixel shift mode so you can get those 240 megapixel files compile them all in Sony's image Edge software so so that's nice that we have that as well okay I should also mention that neither of these cameras actually have fully mechanical shutters even though they say mechanical shutter in the menu because what these actually have is electronic first curtain shutters now this is okay I mean it's not the end of the world first off you don't get any rolling shutter which is a good thing because on the a7c r you actually don't get very good readout speeds on the sensor so you want to avoid electronic shutter so EFC no rolling shutter also very stable to shoot with there's no mechanical shutter slap so that's really nice too but if you're shooting wide aperture lenses you're getting lots of specular highlights low light situations that kind of stuff you'll actually sometimes see that your bouquet looks a little bit different it looks truncated it's not the end of the world it doesn't happen very often but just keep in mind neither of these cameras have fully mechanical shutters okay Jordan that's enough with this a7cr give me the a7c2 and all you can use no no come on we have to switch over come on you didn't pre-loosen the quick release plate for me come on yeah no I got it no I know how to do it okay so now I've got the Sony a7c2 in my hands and the first thing I noticed is what I also loved about the a7c it's just beautiful with this gunmetal top and black I just think it's one of the sexier Sony bodies most of their cameras look very utilitarian so it's nice to see something with a little bit of flash I wish we saw that on the a7c r as well okay but as I mentioned earlier this borrows a lot from the a74 so we've got the same 33 megapixel sensor I love it you know it's nice balance between resolution and file size and cost frankly this also does have a similar burst rate 10 frame per second in mechanical shutter mode so again it's capable for some quick action in sports this does though have some big improvements over the a74 and this is a different Dynamic than what we see with the a7cr this actually improves on the a74 as far as Auto focusing goes it is more capable also in terms of the Ibis being upgraded so it's a little bit more entry level feeling but in a lot of ways it's actually more capable camera there are still some benefits to the A7 IV though I mean as much as this has improved the grip and the control structure you might still prefer the a74s even deeper grip the fact that it's got an autofocus joystick controller on the back it's really nice the a74 does give you a better 3.69 million.evf and a better back panel as well and it does give you that fully mechanical shutter whereas this only has electronic first curtain hey it's Jordan here standing in front of a movie theater to talk about the video capabilities starting with the a7c2 and honestly this is almost exactly what we've seen before on the a74 which is a fairly competent camera for video recording but it still has some of the same limitations one thing I do want to point out though is that AI processor that they're using does bring big benefits for video autofocus it's just much more sticky than what we saw before with the a74 however those same limitations that we've seen are still there because this uses the same sensors so that means if you want to record 4K 60 you are going to have to go to a super 35 crop and roll rolling shutter is quite bad at your 4K oversampled record modes you can mitigate that by going to Super 35 but then you're sacrificing some low light performance now because because these are pre-production cameras I'm not doing a full evaluation on auto Focus performance and especially overheating that's something I'm going to do once we get production cameras now the a74 controlled that quite well but this is a much smaller body so time will tell so now Chris has switched over to the a7cr and looking at the specs this looks like a really powerful video camera but this sensor is just not that well optimized for it it's the same issue that we had with the sigma FPL which was a video centered camera using this sensor and this thing's almost as small so there's no reason to ever look at that camera again anyways the limitations to this is the sensor reads out quite slowly so it gives them a couple of options if we're using the 4K 24 and 30 frames per second there it is binning to create the image and even if you don't select Super 35 shooting and jump over to 4K 60 it does require you to have a crop with this bin footage as well this is missing the 8K recording that we saw on the a7r5 although that did have a crop and the rolling shutter was really bad so I didn't recommend using it that much so if you're looking for really good over-sampled footage I really recommend shooting in the super 35 mode that we've switched over to now there you're going to get very detailed image quality but unfortunately rolling shutter is still pretty extreme on this even though it is a crop so there's real downsides to this in all of its modes and again we haven't been able to test overheating with this yet if you're looking for a real hybrid photo video camera I'd still probably lean towards the a7c2 seeing the Sony a7c line of cameras has gotten far more interesting now with these two new cameras because the original a7c was really like a Bare Bones affordable compact camera system for full frame and it really did feel like it was very entry level with very basic equipment and poor controls terrible evf so these two new cameras now really are quite interesting because they bring a lot to the table even versus the cameras that they're you know kind of building off of I mean let's talk about the a7c II first so compared to the a74 to me this is actually really compelling because it has some substantial benefits and Technology with the autofocus and the Ibis you know and I do really like the more compact camera system and I don't feel that the control structure is really lacking that much compared to the a74 I'm also going to save some money so I think this becomes a really compelling piece I would probably get this over the e74. now we do have a different Dynamic when it comes to the Sony a7cr which I can't hold right now because Jordan is still shooting on it you know where the a7c2 basically gave you more capabilities than these seven four the a7cr doesn't probably almost said two there doesn't really bring anything new to the table against the Sony a7r5 in fact it has a slightly less effective Ibis unit and it does actually shoot a little bit slower so there might still be absolute reason to go for the a7r5 even though it's more expensive because you want maximum capabilities in that platform but this is still a very oh I don't even have it Jordan can I have the camera this is still a very compelling product if you're looking for some something that's more compact still has a lot of the same controls has the same great image quality and autofocus and is substantially less money I could actually see this as being like a backup camera to your a7r5 or if you just prefer a smaller body you're not giving up that much to go with the a7cr I just wish I had a better name all right well thank you for joining us on our little preview here of the brand new a7c series cameras also remember that the new 1635 G Master Video has just been released at the same time as well so definitely check that out too we really appreciate that check out the socials do listen to our podcast as well you can get that on all your favorite podcasting apps just search for the petapixel podcast or watch it right here on our YouTube channel subscribe leave comments below let us know what you think about these new products click the notification Bell do all that fun stuff and that way you won't miss us when we see you next time for new episodes on Better Business thank you [Music]

Channel: PetaPixel

Views: 177,300

Keywords: PetaPixel, Jordan Drake, Chris Niccolls, Chris Nichols, Jordon Drake, sony a7c ii review, sony a7cr review, sony a7c vs a7c ii, sony a7c II vs a7CR, sony a7CR vs a7R V, sony a7 IV vs a7C II, best sony camera for travel, best sony camera for landscape, best sony cameras for vlogging, best sony camera for YouTube, sony a74 vs a7C2, best small sony camera, dpreview, dpreview tv, sony a7C II stabilization, sony a7CR stabilization, salmon arm

Id: 1p8SI2aksIg

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 29 2023