[intro music] Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott, and I'm here today
to give you my definitive review of the new Sony A7RV full-frame mirrorless camera. The Sony A7RV is the latest version of Sony's very popular high-resolution or R series. It retains a 61-megapixel full-frame
BSI CMOS sensor that we found in the A7RIV with a few minor tweaks, along with the same 10 frames per second burst rate, and it doesn't look radically different from the outside, but almost everything under the hood
is upgraded on the V. And interestingly, it has the ability to have less resolution that makes the A7RV far more interesting
than what the A7RIV was. My conclusion is this is one of the most complete
cameras on the market and it is well worthy, but basically, 3,900 US dollar price tag. And I'm going to break down the reasons for it
in this detailed definitive review here today. First of all, let's talk about the build handling
and the features here. If you are familiar at all with the A7IV, then you are very familiar with the overall design. And that it's a slight evolution of what
we have seen on previous A7R bodies, but in this case, the button placement,
the wheel placement, the overall look of things is nearly identical. And so, we have the same positioning
for things like the record button, and the C1 and C2 buttons that have been tweaked
around a little bit from previous models. We have similar wheels at the front, at the back here. And then,
at the very back of the camera itself, we also have a dial here that could
be used for exposure compensation, that's typically where it's at, but now, it is not labeled and so it can be assigned
a different value if you so desire. And then, also, we have the dual layer
mode button here that allows you to select mode on top, but underneath, it allows you to have
a completely different setup for stills and video, along with S&Q or slow and quick for managing other things like that. And I really like that addition here that we saw
going back again to the A7RIV because it allows you to have a completely
different button and menu customization setup for both stills and video, which obviously is
going to be very useful, it makes this more of a hybrid camera. Where things depart, however, from the A7IV is that, a couple of things, but one of the most important things is that there's been a lot of debate about what is better. Whether it be a tilting screen, like Sony started off
having, or a fully articulating screen. Sony's answer to that is, "Why not have both?" And so, in the first time that I've ever seen
anything like this, we have a screen that is tilting, but is also
fully articulating as well. And so it allows you to choose whatever
your preference is, and you can get the best of both worlds, which is
a pretty fascinating approach to this. Along with that, we've also got improvements
to the LCD screen itself. For one thing, it's larger. Rather than 3 inches,
it's 3.2 inches. It's also higher resolution at 2.36 million dots
rather than 1.44 million dots. And unlike the A7RIV, we have a fully functional touch screen here
where you can do everything by touch, including navigating the main menu. And so
that is a huge improvement on that front. We have also got an improved viewfinder that goes from about 5.5 million dots,
all the way up to 9.44 million dots. And so, that is a very, very high resolution viewfinder that is essentially borrowed from
the top-of-the-line Sony Alpha 1. And of course, having a high-resolution viewfinder
like that makes a huge difference in your ability to magnify things and still see
things with great detail, and we're getting closer and closer to having more
of an optical viewfinder-type experience with all the advantages of an OLED EVF here,
which is what we've got here. Also, at the same time, we've got
an improved magnification level in the viewfinder from 0.78x to 0. 90x,
which is of course a significant improvement. On the side here, the overall layout is similar
in terms of the port position, though I will note that we, you know, have updated
specs to, you know, some of the most recent kind of standards for some of these various ports. And I also really appreciate like the A7IV, we have a small separate port up here
for having the ability to plug in a microphone, which is really useful because,
if you have a microphone plugged in and you have a fully articulating screen, it just means
that because it's such a small port, it doesn't get in the way, and it doesn't block you
from front monitoring with the LCD screen.
And so it's something I really like. In the front compartment here, one big advantage
improvement that we have is that we now have a full size HDMI, which is going to be obviously really useful
for those of you that are video-centric. Now, on the other side of the camera, we have what
looks like a very similar memory card door, but we have one significant advantage here, and that is that both of these slots are now
compatible with CFexpress Type A cards, along with SD cards in the UHS-II standard. So what that means is that you can now get cards
with a vastly faster read and write rate in the CFexpress Type A cards, which means that you're going to be able
to keep up with the bit rates, both of transferring lots of data for deeper buffers, which we'll talk about
in just a second, but also, of course, now we have a much higher
specifications when it comes to video capture, and so it allows you to keep up with all
of that transfer of information. The other kind of under-the-hood big
improvement that we have got here, is that we have a vastly improved
in-body image stabilization. Whereas on the A7RIV, we had an in-body image stabilization that
was rated at up to 5.5 stops. We now have a system that is rated up to 8 stops.
That's a pretty huge upgrade. And I did certainly notice an improvement. Mostly, I've always found that Sony's
in-body image stabilization, their IBIS works quite well with focal lengths,
let's say, under 100mm. As you get over 100mm, the effectiveness drops, and so that has been a real issue for some lenses. You know, for example, Tamron's 70-300mm. At 300mm, it doesn't have any kind
of built-in lens stabilization so you're relying on in-body image stabilization. And often, it just wasn't really all that great
at those longer focal lengths. But what I found here is that it has vastly improved, and while I don't have anything quite
as long as 300mm on hand, I was able to go up to 200mm in a lens without
any kind of lens stabilization. And I found that I was still able to get
really low shutter speeds, and thus, I could see an improvement there. I could also see a difference in handheld video
that I just was able to get more stable results. And we do now have the ability to have what
Sony calls their "Active Mode", that is, you know, to be used when you're
moving around with the camera. And while I still don't think it's as smooth
as having a gimbal, you can see in the difference between these
two sequences, that it certainly does make a difference, and that you're able to get smoother
movement while moving the camera around. And of course, having that, you know, very effective
in-body image stabilization just helps because it applies to every lens.
And so it's something that is extremely useful. We have a similar battery here, and overall,
the various buttons and switches, they feel very familiar at this point,
but that's not a bad thing. Sony has tweaked these things along the way,
including the joystick, to where everything really works quite well. And so, I am quite pleased with the overall
ergonomics here. And while the body is basically the same size
as what we saw previously, they have managed to tweak that grip just a little bit more and so that it does fit the hand a little bit better. I don't feel like I used to with Sony bodies
where I always felt like my pinky had nowhere to go.
There's now enough grip there, enough grip depth that I have room to put it. The one thing that I will continue to point out
is a kind of an ergonomic fail for Sony, and it really is somewhat lens-specific, but the nature of that narrow lens mount and the reality that, you know, they're designing around a
very narrow lens mount, and often lenses will widen out quite significantly. Sony hasn't really ever made their cameras
a whole lot wider. And as a byproduct, sometimes, I feel like
my knuckles are pressed up in between the grip and the lens without a lot of room to go. So I actually wouldn't mind them adding a few millimeters
to the width of the camera itself, and so that you can get just a little bit more room
for your knuckles to go in there. Another headline upgrade is to the autofocus system. Now, on paper, it's only, you know,
improved in just kind of a minor way. You know, kind of the main stat that you can look to, is that there are now 693 face detect
AF points versus 567. The other thing that is significant on that front,
before we move to other more important things, is that when you're shooting in APS-C mode,
and of course, the R series always has a great APS-C mode.
In this case, you got 26 megapixels of resolution in APS-C mode, which is currently, at the moment at least, higher than
any of Sony's actual APS-C cameras. Before, you had only 325 face detect AF points available
when you were shooting in APS-C mode. They have vastly improved that now, however, to where you have 567 face detect points
available when shooting in APS-C mode, which interestingly is as many face detect points
as what we had for the full-frame sensor on the A7RIV.
And so, that's a certain improvement. So really, if you want kind of the best APS-C performance
you can get on a Sony camera right now. It's actually an APS-C mode on the R5 because it is just so improved in so many areas. But really, what has improved the most, and it's
a little bit harder to demonstrate on paper, but they have moved towards the AI learning and the ability with the new Bionz XR sensor,
to have advanced detection. And so, it is detecting in a lot of different ways. Detecting, you know, various body movements. And so, there's a variety of ways where this really helps. First of all, you're now able to recognize, the camera can recognize and track
far more different subjects. Before, you had the option of humans,
animals, and birds. Added to that now are insects, cars, trains, and airplanes. And so, there's a lot of different subjects that
the camera will detect and actively track. But beyond that, it has improved the technology of really the more important subjects, namely humans,
and to a lesser degree, animals. And that with humans, there's a lot better detection
that's taking place when you don't have an eye to track. Sony has done a good job for quite a while
when it comes to eye detect tracking. But now, even when an eye is not visible, maybe
you've got the back of the head or the profile, the camera is, or maybe, the subject is
too far away to actually, you know, where the eye is too small to
actually be detectable and trackable, but now, it is actually, you know,
tracking the subject movement and recognizing a human even if it can't see an eye. And as a byproduct, it is just really effective. And I found that in shooting in an
event-type setting in a church, that even when people had their, you know, the back
of their head to me or we're in profile, the camera was really good at picking up on those things. And what really kind of stood out to me about this, is I was actually testing for the in-body
image stabilization, which I just noted, and I was shooting with first, 150mm and then
at 200mm, two different lenses. And I noted that, as I was looking through the viewfinder
and looking at a mirror, I wasn't really looking at a mirror; I was looking at something that said "Home" on the mantle. But I noticed that the eye or the camera
was detecting something in the mirror, and it was detecting my closed eye behind the camera
in extremely dim lighting conditions. I was trying to test in very dim lighting
because I wanted to see how the camera would do at a very low shutter speed. And so, as a byproduct, I was quite amazed because
there's a little bit of distortion in a mirror. Anyway, the fact that my eye was closed
and mostly hidden behind a camera, you know, the viewfinder of the camera, and the fact that the lighting was very dim, and yet I could see that there was a
tracking box on my eye. And it was really, really impressive to think about
how far that technology has come. And I also saw, you know, very strongly when,
you know, working with animal subjects that just the detect is better in general. And then, also, even with inanimate objects, you can see that a bigger box is being drawn, and it's actually recognizing, like here's an object
I'm focusing on and starting to track it. And so there's just a lot of intelligence in the autofocus that, you know, makes for a very more
complete autofocus experience. The best certainly that we've seen in the R series, and I would argue that at this point that the
autofocus tracking is getting very similar to what I'm seeing in my Sony Alpha 1. And going back to that event setting, when I looked through all of the various photos, you know, regardless of what the position
of the subject was, everything was just perfectly focused,
just pen-sharp. Another thing that's a huge advantage here
when it comes to making this camera versatile for tracking action, is the fact that
we have vastly improved buffer depth. The RIV actually took a little bit
of a step back relative to the R3, but the RV takes a huge leap forward. The limit on the RIV was only 68 RAW images. In this case, you can get nearly 600 RAW images. And if you're talking about JPEGs, it's a thousand plus. And so, really, we've got the kind of buffer depth
you would typically associate with a dedicated sports camera, and that is obviously going to really add to the
versatility of the autofocus system here, and just makes the camera in general
a more effective one. Add to that, you can either go into that, you know,
deep crop APS-C mode. And then, also, you have the ability,
which we'll talk about in just a moment, to shoot at either mRAW or sRAW; something I've been asking for years from Sony. But the ability to do that means that now,
say, if you didn't, you know, you wanted to have burst,
but you didn't necessarily want dozens, if not hundreds of 61-megapixel images, you can shoot at that 26-megapixel level, or even
as low down as the 15-megapixel level at the small RAW, the sRAW setting, and thus, you know, not have so many images, but to have a lot of images of a particular
sequence of action and so you can choose what you prefer. It could also be incredibly useful in an event-type setting. And so, the autofocus is just vastly improved here. Now, on paper, we have the exact same sensor
as what we had before - that 61-megapixel sensor, but as noted, the ability to choose either mRAW
at 26 megapixels or sRAW at 15 megapixels, really helps to manage that resolution. I came away from the RIV,
thinking, "This much resolution in some ways is a liability because you're kind
of locked into that much resolution all the time." Yes, you did have some options
about the compression rate. You could do an uncompressed RAW, huge files,
about 130 megapixels. You could go down to a lossless compressed RAW,
which is anywhere between megapixels, and is my preferred format, or you could go to a lossy compressed RAW
at a slightly smaller file size. Now, you could choose different resolution levels. These three same resolution levels on JPEGs before,
but not when shooting RAWs. So now, you have all of those options. You can choose the different resolution levels. Now, when it comes to the resolution level
for RAW images, you are shooting lossless compressed RAW. That's where mRAW and sRAW are available. Fortunately for me, that's what I prefer to shoot anyway
so it's no problem to me. But if you were looking for an uncompressed RAW option at the 26-megapixel or 15-megapixel level,
that's currently still not available. You also now have the ability to choose between
JPEG or HEIF file formats, and so just more options there. And so, overall, you've got a lot of different ways
to kind of manage that resolution, and of course, with the 26-megapixel APS-C mode
as well, if you so desire. I will note, I just want to be clear, that mRAW
and sRAW are not a cropped mode. They are the full angle of view,
just at a lower resolution level. And it's something that we'll come back to
right after our sensor performance test here and talk about that it's
really relevant when it comes to that. But first of all, we're going to dive in
and we're going to take a look at the performance of the sensor
and break that down in detail. So first of all, let's talk about that resolution for a moment. Now, I did break this down in detail on my review of
the A7RIV, which has an identical resolution. But this just gives you a little bit of an illustration
on how you can take a wider angle of view, and due to that massive amount of resolution, you can crop in quite deeply as you can see here on the right. It's just a crop out of that original image, however, if we zoom in here to a pixel level, you can see that, of course, they're going to look,
you know, similar on a pixel level because it's still 100% magnification. But what you can see is that there
is still a lot of detail there. There would be plenty of room there for
printing or something similar because you're starting off with such
a massive amount of resolution, thus, you have a lot of ability to take, for example,
a landscape shot like this or say a portrait shot, and really do a lot of
different things with it as far as cropping. Now, one of the realities of high resolution is that you are very likely, if you haven't done this shot
with a high-resolution body before, you're going to learn to really value sharp lenses because, really, the flaws of a lens, but also, I think some of the strength
of the lens, are magnified when you put it on a high-resolution body. For example, this is, I hesitate to call it "underrated", but after the release of the 50mm F1.2 G Master,
this is the 35mm F1.4 G Master, and in some ways, I think it is an underrated lens. You can see that even at F1.4, this lens
is really, really sharp. And on the A7RV, you can see that, you know, the detail here it's able to produce
is really quite stunning. Likewise, here, this is the Samyang AF 135mm F1.8. It's a very, very sharp lens, and so, you put it on a really
high-resolution body like this, and frankly, it kind of sings with all of that detail and the ability to, you know, deeply crop in. There's just a really fantastic amount of detail that's there. Here's the Sigma 85mm F1.4 DN at F1.4. Another really, really sharp lens. And as you can see, if you have a sharp lens,
even if it's not a terribly expensive one, but a sharp lens, you put it on a body like this,
and you have got a lot of detail to work with. Now, this is the Samyang AF 50mm F.4 II. It's a lens I really like for the character, but it's not
as jaw-droppingly sharp. And so, you can see here at a pixel level, it doesn't look
nearly as sharp as what those lenses do. You can also see just a little bit more
of the aberrations that show up because they occupy more pixels. That's just the reality of a high-resolution body. Then there are some lenses that will surprise you
like the surprisingly sharp, Tamron 28-200mm. And you can see here that even at 200mm F5.6,
which is wide-open at this point, but you can see that the amount of detail it's producing
in this shot is really quite good. So, bottom line is whether it's an expensive lens
or non-expensive lens, if it is a good lens, you can put it on a high-resolution body
like this and get really nice results. So we're going to take a look at ISO. One of the downsides of high resolution
is that they tend to either have more noise or the more likely reality is that you see the noise
more because it occupies more pixels. And so, in this case, this is the base ISO, and I'm just going to kind of pan around here
in the image for a moment, look at these dark areas, which, of course, are inky black. There's no, you know, kind of hot pixels
or whatever. It's very smooth. And then in these areas here, you see no visible noise.
Everything is nice and smooth. There's no discoloration, no banding,
any of those things. So we'll take a look as we climb up the ISO. Now, I'm going to skip the two stops in between
and jump right to ISO 1600. Good news is these days, that modern cameras
do very well anywhere underneath 1600, so I don't foresee any kind of issue, and frankly, there isn't really one to see. And you can see looking, for example, in this mirror, an area where we'll see a lot of noise, there is,
if you're looking long and hard, you might see a tiny bit of additional noise. And down here in the tabletop, you can see just a little bit of additional noise,
but everything is inky black. Contrast is still good, detail still looks good. Frankly, there isn't a whole lot of difference between
the base ISO and ISO 1600. Just a tiny bit more of a fine noise,
but nothing that is destructive. Nothing is discolored. Everything looks good
at this point. So how about if we go the next stop from
1600 here on the left to 3200 on the right? We'll start by looking at the grip area here, which as you can see, there's a color constancy.
Everything looks fine. Looking in here at the mirror, there is ever so slight
a bit more of a fine noise there, but really, it still looks very, very good. Looking down to this tabletop, we can see that there is a very slight bit more noise, but frankly, there's not a huge difference
between 1600 and 3200, and our black area is still inky black
with consistently dark pixels. Now, from 3200 to 6400, we'll take a look at that jump. And so, again, looking in here, we can see not really a whole lot
of difference in this area. Looking in on the mirror,
you can see just a little bit more noise. If I pan up this way, you can see that the noise
is just a little bit more obvious, and you can also see that there's
a very slight beginning of like a little bit of like a checkerboarding effect to where the pixels aren't quite as
consistent as what they were. Looking down into this area that really
shows off the noise, you can see that the noise is definitely getting rougher. Looking up here, there is the beginnings
of some inconsistent pixels, to where you're gonna start losing some contrast
and the blacks won't look as black because the pixels are not consistently
dark at that point. In the stop from 6400 to 12800, we can see that this stage, the noise is
becoming quite obvious. You can see it in there on the mirror. Still, in areas like this, it still looks pretty good. If we take a look over on this side, we can see
the detail looks pretty much the same. You can see that the noise is getting a lot rougher, and then you can also start to see as we transition up
just a lot more of those hot pixels. Even relative to 6400, they're much more obvious here. And then if we take a look over in this area, you can just see a more pronounced amount
of not only noise, but just kind of that checkerboarding pattern that is there to where it's just not a consistent,
you know, grade of colors, but rather, there's more of a pattern that is showing up. So the next stop is to 25600, and here's where things
start to really fall apart in my opinion. First of all, you can see that there is some discoloration. And Sony sensors have a tendency to go towards
the green when they're pushed to the limit. And we can see that here. You can see very obvious
rough noise inside there. If we look over towards the, you know,
what should be a black area, it's littered with, you know, what looks like
a lot of dust in the air, so to speak. And down here, things are just looking
really rough altogether. And you can also see that those patterns is becoming all the more pronounced here
at these higher ISO settings. Now, 1/3 stop further is kind of the
upper natural limit. At 32000, you can see here that it's just, you know,
steps further in the wrong direction. And so, more discoloration, more visible noise, you know, more busyness in the shadow area. And of course, you know, the noise pattern
is just getting rougher and rougher. And should you be so foolish as to go into the
extended range, which starts at 51200, you're getting into the territory of just kind of
a failure as far as the resolution. The image quality is just falling apart at this point. And if you push it all the way up to 102400, you can see that green trend that we saw
in the beginning has reached its logical destination, and everything
has a really strong color cast to it, and the noise is just fantastically bad. And so, there are hardly any shadows left, and details are being obscured just by
all of the junk that's going on. Do not venture there. Now, coming back to 12800 just for a moment, I want to show you something that was
interesting that I first saw going all the way back to when I reviewed
the Canon 5DS R, and it was the first really, really high-resolution
body on a full-frame camera, which is 50 megapixels.
And so I noted that if you shot in medium RAW, that you could get actually a reduced noise,
a cleaner end result. And so I was curious to see if that's the case here. Now, what's interesting, of course, is that in this case,
it's not a crop like before, but this is rather, you know, compressing down
to a lower resolution. Now, obviously, the noise is obviously going to be
less visible. There's fewer pixels here, and so as a by-product, you get a cleaner,
you know, out-of-shadow area, but of course, for you to blow it up
to this level, you could argue, well, maybe you would see that noise.
It's just, you know, much fewer pixels. But what is interesting here is that
if you look inside the mirror, you can see we have a much more neutral color tone here without any of that kind of green tint
that is in the full-size image. And likewise, if we look in other places, we can see that detail and contrast is holding up better, and that's partly because, as we can see here, there's just fewer of those hot pixels
that is messing up contrast. And if we look up into our color swatches, you're not really seeing kind of the
checkerboard pattern and things like that. It's just a much smoother end result. And so, just a little bit of a pro tip
hat if you're in a situation where you need to shoot at really high ISO and you
don't need massive amounts of resolution, you can shoot at mRAW, and then as an alternative
on the far right here, I have got sRAW, and you can see that, you know, I don't think
the result is quite as dramatic as what it was comparing full-size RAW
to medium RAW, but certainly shooting at the medium RAW setting, you can get a cleaner-looking end result and have still plenty of resolution for
almost every application, but with much less noise and certainly
no creeping and color cast. Just an interesting observation. So let's take a look now at our dynamic range here. So we're going to start by looking at how we can
recover shadows when I have intentionally underexposed and have crushed those shadows. So starting at just one stop, at one stop, we would expect with modern shadow
recovery, everything to be nice and smooth, no additional noise introduced,
contrast remaining the same, you know, color swatches being consistent, and of course,
we see all of that at one stop. So if we skip on to three stops, we can see now
that the shadows are really quite crushed. And so, all the information here, if you look
on the left has been lost inside here, even all the texture of the grip. But if we look at the right side, we can see that
that is recovered cleanly. We can see the mirror has been recovered cleanly.
Very little noise there. If we look down here into the shadow information,
there's really not a whole lot there, just a little bit of noise, but nothing looks too bad
and no hot pixels over here, everything looks pretty good. Now, at this stage, we're all the way up to five stops, and the last that I showed you was actually
four rather than three stops. So we can see at five stops, we've got a little bit
more noise that's coming in, a little bit of hot pixels, but, and I would say, just a little bit
of a color cast there. By and large, however, you're able to recover
those shadows fairly cleanly, and as we saw on the last one, you can go
all the way to four stops with a really clean, you know, recovery of those shadow information. So at this case, I mean, you know, basically
everything had been lost previously, but we're pulling all that back without
a whole lot of cost. And so, certainly, fairly positive when it comes to
shadow recovery. Now, where Sony sensors tend to do fairly well
relative to competitors, is when it comes to highlight recovery. So we can see here, starting with just
the one stop of overexposure, we can see that, you know, textures that
would otherwise have been lost, for example, hotspots emerging here,
we're able to pull that back. We'll also be looking at these color swatches
back behind and seeing how the colors can be recovered. You can see here that, you know, already like this
very light pink color was being lost, we're able to recover that without any kind of problem. And then looking at spaces on the timer face to see as that, you know, color texture begins to be lost,
whether we can recover all of those things. So as we move ahead to two stops, we can see now
that the overexposure is, you know, fairly intense. Definitely, some of the colors are being lost
in terms of the swatches all along here. But we can also see
that these are being recovered looking here on the right. We can also see that, already, there is some definite
hotspots that were emerging on the face of the camera, but we can see that those things have been recovered. And as you look on this dial, for example, or lever, you can see that all of the texture information
has been recovered. So still very, very positive at a two-stop overexposure. Now, most cameras in my experience fall apart
in between two and three stops, and we can see that that is a lot of overexposure. A lot of those color swatches, for example,
here on the left side, are just completely gone in that overexposure. But where Sony does really, really good is being
able to pull those things back. And so we can see that for the most part,
those color swatches have been recovered. If we look here on what is a very definite hot spot, we can see that the textures-- Some of them
have been brought back. We can see here on this front lever here that most
of the texture information has been recovered, but not the way it was at two stops. And over here, even on the timer face, this is actually doing really quite well
for a three-stop overexposure. And so, that part is done quite well, but definitely, when it comes to some of the hotspots,
they're starting to be blown out, and we can see like on the face of this book here
that things are really starting to be lost. But for a three-stop recovery,
that's actually really, really good. So finally, at four stops, you can see that
this is completely blown out. This would-- You would never look at this and think
of that as being a usable image, and it's certainly far too much to be recovered. Now, overall, I think that Sony is still doing
quite a good job for this amount of overexposure in recovering
these color swatches. I mean, if you look here, you can see that those colors have been brought back really, really quite well. And so that's a definite strength. But on some of these hotspots here, the end result
is not nearly as compelling. And you can see that there's a lot of lost textures
that are just not going to come back. We've barely recovered some of that text, but overall, I mean, this information has been lost, and while you can get back a sense of it, I mean, there's just hotspots that are just
not going to be recovered. That's just too far; it's beyond the limits. And so, a little over three stops where the limit is here. That adds up, however, to a quite strong
real-world dynamic range performance. So before we began that sequence,
I mentioned that there was something that I discovered that was unique, and that was, I was interested when looking
at the ISO level at say, 12800, I wanted to see how it compared to having
the full-size RAW image compared to a medium RAW, and to see if
we actually got less noise and some of those negative effects of high ISO.
That was in fact the case. And it's not just less apparent noise, which you
would expect at a lower-resolution level, but also, some of the little bit of green
discoloration that I saw, and some of the gray areas, and some of the
hot pixels in the shadow areas. Those were also eliminated as well. So I was curious, I wanted to see, would I see
the same kind of effect if I took that lRAW, the large size RAW, and I down-sampled it in photoshop
to that same resolution level. So I did that, and then I compared it to the medium RAW, and I found that the in-camera medium RAW option was actually still a little bit cleaner than
what I was able to get down-sampling. That was encouraging to me because
it tells me that you can get top-rated performance right in camera. It also tells me that the conversion engine,
however it's happening in camera, is doing a really good job of that
over-sampling or down-sampling however it's actually accomplishing that.
So that was impressive to me. Let's talk about video for a moment before
we wrap things up here today. One of the complaints on the A7RIV is that a lot of people expected that
we would see a bump up to 4K60. We remain locked in at the 4K30, which we
had seen for several years at that point. Fortunately here, we have seen those upgrades
that we were looking for. We can go all the way up to 8K, though at a maximum
of a 24 frame-per-second bit rate there, but we also see that 4K60. And as you can see from this chart here, we have a number of different bit rates and
recording levels that are available here. Just a lot more control, once again,
over the resolution of the camera when it comes to video work. Also, hugely important for those that do something
like what I'm doing or teaching, long-format, whatever the case may be, there is now no longer an artificial recording
limit at 29:59. You can basically record until the card runs out,
until your battery runs out, or until the camera overheats. Though that last point will be less of an issue because Sony has redesigned the camera architecture
for better heat dissipation. And they say even at the highest setting of 8K24, that you still can get at least 30 minutes of record time. So at lower bit rates or lower resolution levels, you're probably not going to have
any kind of issue at all for that. I've already mentioned the active mode in-body
image stabilization that helps with video. Another feature that has come into the RV
is the focus breathing compensation. Now, for this test, I used the Sony 35mm
F1.4 G Master. It's an amazing lens, but video people
don't love it quite as much because it does focus breathe fairly heavily. And so, here, you can see the focus breathing
without the compensation turned on. Now, if I turn the compensation on, there is a bit
of a crop as you can see, but you can also see that the focus breathing
is diminished, and so it's less obvious with the lens. And so, obviously, that's going to be
another area of versatility that adds to the usefulness of the camera. You have, as expected, you have all the various,
you know, Sony packages of codecs, including, you know, things like log profiles, S-Log 3, you've got the ability-- HLG for high dynamic range. And when shooting in S-Log 3, Sony touts that
there are over 14 stops of dynamic range. And so, going onto the video front as well, this is a camera that's got a lot of different options. And no, it's not quite an, you know, A7SIII
when it comes to that full range, but for most people, there's going to be plenty
of video options here to satisfy whatever you need to do in video capture. Again, goes back to just having an
overall true hybrid versatile camera. At the end of the day, this is a very complete camera
that had very few flaws. I find that having that mRAW option makes just
a huge difference on so many levels. I love the idea of having 61 megapixels available
to me; I just don't want it all the time. And so, as a byproduct, being able to shoot
a true RAW image at a lower resolution point is huge to me. And the fact that it can help also in high ISO situations to help to mitigate some of the negative impact
of having high resolution, is also extremely useful to me. Add to that, the improved in-body image stabilization, this unique tilting and articulating screen,
a great viewfinder, amazing autofocus, on and on the list goes.
This is a camera that has a little bit of everything. And when I was trying to describe to Craig
what my findings were on it, the word that really came to me was "complete". This felt like a very complete, a very mature camera, where it's not just as Sony used to be. They kind of promised technologies
and never quite fulfilled them. The A7RV really helps to bring a lot
of that technology to completion. It just-- Everything just works really,
really well in this camera, and I'm left with a very positive impression
of it in the end. I'm Dustin Abbott, and if you look
in the description down below, you can also find linkage to my full text review
or to an image gallery if you want to look at photos. There are buying links there
if you'd like to purchase one for yourself. Also, linkage to follow myself or Craig on social media, become a patron, to get channel merchandise. And of course, if you haven't already,
please like and subscribe. Thanks for watching. Have a great day,
and let the light in. [outro music]
