Dan Chung previews the A7rII and says it has a surprisingly good performance!

July 10, 2015
reviews
90 Comments

The A7rII with Canon EF lens (image courtesy: Newsshooter).

Video expert Dan Chung from Newsshooter had the chance to test the preproduction Sony A7rII and writes:

1) The S35 4K image really is free of any obvious errors – fine detail was incredibly well resolved and there was virtually no evidence of aliasing and moire at base ISO. When I looked at the image on a monitor it was very clean. It had excellent detail and in S-Log2 there was certainly a lot of information in the shadows and highlights. There was some noise in the shadows but nothing excessive.

2) The second big surprise is that the full-frame 4K mode also looks remarkably good. I assume that pixel-binning is being used to reduce the output of the 42-megapixel sensor to achieve this. The 4K full-frame output of the a7R II is really excellent. There are some traces of aliasing visible on lines of high contrast, but you really have to look for them.

3) Low light performance was the third big surprise. I wasn’t expecting great things from a camera with such a high pixel count – I was wrong. The camera acquits itself very well even at 6400 ISO. Noise is present but the image was still usable.

4) The fourth big surprise came when I panned the camera from side to side looking for evidence of rolling shutter.

5) A small bad news: Autofocus with adapter EOS lenses does not work as well in video as it does in stills mode. The only way to get the PDAF working continuously in video is to use Sony’s own E-mount lenses. It doens’t work with A-mount or Canon EF lenses.

You can see all his four A7rII test videos on Vimeo (Click here).

A7rII and RX camera preorder list:
In USA:
A7rII at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama, SonyStore US, FocusCamera, Uniquephoto.
RX10m2 at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama, FocusCamera, Uniquephoto.
RX100m4 at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama, FocusCamera, Uniquephoto.
In Europe at:
A7rII at Sony DE, UK, FR, IT, ES, NL, BE, CH, AT, SE, FI, NO, PT. Wex UK.
RX100m4 at DE, UK, FR, IT, ES, NL, BE, CH, AT, SE, FI, NO, PT. Wex UK.
RX10m2 at DE, UK, FR, IT, ES, NL, BE, CH, AT, SE, FI, NO, PT. Wex UK.
In Asia at:
A7rII at Digitalrev, CameraPro.
RX10m2 at Digitalrev, CameraPro.
RX100m4 at Digitalrev, CameraPro.