Switched to Sony - 3 month thoughts...

a big thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video if you need a website or a domain go to squarespace.com forward slash james for 10 off your first purchase [Music] i am i apologize in advance if you hear my son scream at any point my wife has given him a bath next door so could happen at any moment anyway welcome to a video everybody that lots of you probably won't care about at all hopefully the title helps you decide whether it's relevant but basically if you're not a sony shooter we don't care about gear i completely get it i'll see you next week if you are hopefully you are interested to hear the thoughts that i've compiled over the three months of ownership that i've had with my sony cameras so far and that's basically what this video is also i'm aware that lots of you won't have heard a word that i've said yet because you're trying to work out if any of those photos are wonky and the answer is yes yes several of them are that's kind of a temporary solution for them i was basically just testing see what they look like there i will straighten them i promise anyway enough of the pointless waffle this is a sony a7r mark iv and it's the second sony camera that i bought and its primary job is stills i get some video clips with it but for the most part it's my stills camera uh now the camera that's filming this video is a sony a7c and that's the camera that i use primarily for video it's the second camera that i used primarily for video or the fourth depending on how you can so three months ago my first sony camera that i bought was a sony a73 about two and a half weeks after that i got another one because the mic input on the first one broke and about two and a half weeks after that i got another one because i might import on the second one broke and about two weeks after that you can see where this is going i got the a7c basically decided after the third one i could see the future and what was going to happen so yeah that wasn't an ideal introduction into the world of sony cameras but ever since i've not had any hardware problems that said one problem i do seem to find is that when i change lenses on this my a7r mark 4 i always have dust on the sensor and i'm sensing about changing lenses i try not to do it in exposed places i always hold the camera down i turn it off when i'm changing lenses but i seem to get so much dust on this sensor that has never really been a problem for me with other cameras now i'm not particularly worried about the dust itself dust is easy to get off a sensor one way or another what i am worried about is water because anywhere dusk can get water can also get and i'm not the sort of photographer to stick a shower cap on top of a camera while it's raining i always get weatherproof cameras and i always trust the weatherproofing on those cameras with this though because of the dust i do feel at the minute that there is a question mark and granted i've taken it out on really stormy days and it's been fine but there is a bit of a worry there apart from that build quality and stuff no issues so far now let's talk about menus because menus was the only reason i was hesitant to get into this system because i'd heard terrible things about sony menus the first 48 hours with my first sony camera was horrible a lot of the menu items don't make any sense they might as well not be in english they're called really weird things they're in really strange places i didn't enjoy that experience of setting up a camera the thing is after that first 48 hours i've not really needed to use the menus on either camera that i use because i've got all the custom buttons set how i want them and therefore i very rarely need to dig into page 64 of the eighth menu luckily now for what it's worth i can talk you through my uh my custom setup basically c1 is aps-c crop mode on this a7r mark iv and i never shoot an aps-c crop but what i find it handy for is if i'm shooting on say my to 16-35 lens and i'm at 35 mil and i want to see what 50 ml looks like or roughly then i hit c1 and immediately i get a look at what 50 ml looks like or 52 mil something like that now even if i decide not to change my lens and i want a shot that represents 52 mil ish focal length and i won't shoot an aps-c i'll shoot in full frame and crop in post because that gives me so much more flexibility just in case i actually wanted a shot that was 51 or 50 or 49 millimeters if you get what i mean uh c2 is autofocus so primarily i'm in expand flexible spot for my autofocus but occasionally i mix that up for the most part though if i'm changing my autofocus it's because i'm pressing this button on one of my lenses and when i do that i've got it set for iaf so basically if i'm taking a photo of a horse or a person then the focus will immediately lock on to the horses or the person's eye and that's pretty cool uh c3 i've got set for interval shooting so if i want to put myself in the frame and i just want to take loads of shots and interval shooting is fantastic for doing that and then the bin button or the trash button depending on where you are i've got that set to minimum shutter speed which i've spoken about loads before so i won't go into it now but yeah that is minimum shutter speed unless you're in playback mode in which case it's bin or trash and then finally the ael button auto exposure lock i've got set for uh auto exposure lock funnily enough basically i find that sometimes if i'm filming and i'm in changeable light then the exposure will kind of yo-yo and i really don't like that so yeah i lock the exposure quite often when i'm filming so in short all of that means that i very rarely need to go into the menus to change anything stabilization in short is not as good as my lumix cameras that i've used previously which i knew going in but uh yeah it's definitely not as good and i can tell that just from video actually more so than i can tell with stills and it's a tricky comparison when it comes to stills because this has a 61 megapixel sensor and the previous cameras that i had had like 20 24 megapixels so trying to work out how the stabilization is working in both this and the old cameras does get a bit tricky but with video it's very obvious and so yeah even though this has five access stabilization it's not as good as the lumix and for a point of reference i used to be really comfortable shooting handheld at like a tenth of a second or a 15th of a second unless it was really windy or unless i was using like a telephoto with the sony it's more like a 30th or a 40th of a second i find which is a price i'm willing to pay in hindsight for the the extra resolution but i wasn't sure about that at first turns out i love the resolution [Music] so this isn't something that's sony specific really i mean lots of camera manufacturers now have a high resolution body i have been amazed with it though i was slow on the uptake of high resolution this is the first body that i've had that's had over 24 megapixels i think and i was never really sold on it i've spoken at length before about how printing for example is all about viewing distances not resolution but it is incredible to be able to capture that much detail uh to be able to crop as much as you can with a body like this and to be able to retain so much detail and so much dynamic range despite the fact that there are so many pixels in here big fan at the high resolution and as i say it might be resolution that's contributing quite a lot to having to up my shutter speeds my minimum shutter speeds but to be honest and i can't really believe i'm saying this i'm happy to get the tripod out a little bit more if it means that i can use the high resolution so autofocus really was probably the main reason that i got into sony cameras i mean when it comes to video the autofocus is incredible i absolutely love it and yes some of the lenses that i own including this 20 mil have quite heavy focus breathing and that's not ideal but ultimately i'm not making hollywood films here i'm making youtube videos and being able to focus immediately while i'm filming on my own makes things so much easier and so much less frustrating when you get home to find that half eclipse are out of focus that doesn't happen with these cameras and i'm incredibly grateful for that and that alone is worth the price of admission after changing from the lumix cameras that i had before and i still love those cameras but the autofocus particularly in video makes such a huge difference to me and last of all ergonomics which leaves a little bit to be desired on the a7c i mean it's a tiny camera it's got a full frame sensor something's got to give not a massive problem for me really because that camera lives its life on a tripod because i'm always just filming on it with this the ergonomics i think are pretty good and ergonomics is a big thing for me cameras are designed to be held and therefore they need to be comfortable the buttons need to be in the right place and since i need to make use of all the buttons because i don't want to go anywhere near the menu system it helps that i'm able to get to them really easily one point of ergonomics i don't like with the a7r mark 4 is that on the exposure dial there's like a click up and click down thing to lock it and unlock it whereas on the mode dial you've got to push the button down to turn it i don't understand why these two things are different why can't they just be the same that that's an added complication that just feels a bit strange to me also another point of ergonomics this time for the lenses lots of the lenses that i have or have used have aperture rings i don't know if you can see that and they can click or you can turn the click off which is handy for video now i think these are great except for the fact that i normally always leave them on a which i assume means automatic and that's just because i like to change the exposure with the dials the problem i find with these is that they very easily click from a to f 22. so if you take the camera out the bag and you just want to take a quick snapshot maybe there's something happening in the scene you just need to grab a shot quite often i find that i've ended up having to get that shot at f 18 or something and my my iso has been through the roof so i'd quite like to find a way other than super glue to just lock these lenses onto um onto a anyway yes there are um some initial thoughts on on sony ownership overall so far quite impressed is there anything else i would like some more touchscreen functionality actually the touchscreen functionality on this is basically non-existent and you can touch to focus on the a7c but apart from that can't really do anything i think that's about it battery life very good too anyway a big thank you for uh for watching this video and a huge thank you to the sponsor of this week's video squarespace so as many of you know by now i've used squarespace for years uh first of all i just picked a photography template and i started using it to showcase my images online and then a few years later as my youtube channel grew i started using it as an online store as well and for someone like me who hasn't got a clue about coding wouldn't know where to start with building a website from scratch squarespace is fantastic and there's lots of drag and drop there are sliders for things like text size you don't have to worry about things like image resizing it's all automatic it is super simple to use so if you would like to show off your images or your work online or perhaps you'd like an online store or you'd like to send newsletters out then definitely check out squarespace and you can do subordinate on squarespace.com to start a free trial and after that if you'd like to make a purchase then go to squarespace.com forward slash james and you'll get 10 off that first purchase and i'll see you next week when hopefully we'll be up to no good back outside again taking photos with my sony cameras that i quite like hopefully not in the rain but if they are in the rain it should be fine i think it'll be fine hopefully not in the dust

Channel: James Popsys

Views: 35,289

Keywords: sony, sony a7riv, sony a7c, sony e mount, sony full frame, landscape photography, sony 16-35, photography, james popsys, custom settings

Id: DIwGGLDwjJ0

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021