A7RV is a well-polished camera with a slow sensor which wasn’t even good enough 3 years ago. Very sad situation. Sony kind of have this strange rule that every sensor has to be recycled at least once, with very few exceptions like the A7R. But I’ll not beat the dead horse again (already bashed the sensor when A7RIV was announced). There are plenty of new stuff on this camera:
4-Axis screen: I think the only shortcoming of Sony’s implementation is that you can’t quickly go to the vertical low/high-angle position unless the LCD was facing the camera body to begin with. Nikon Z9 is capable of doing that, but it can’t do selfies or narcissistic vlog. Overall I still like Sony’s idea better. Compromise has to be made. Another upside is that when you’re doing vlogging you can move the screen away from all the cables. More degrees of freedom are always good.
Bulb-Timer: you can shoot maximum 900s in the bulb mode now. Sony cameras were able to do it years ago (NEX era? Don’t remember, don’t care to find out) but somehow they removed it, and you can only do 30s automatically without a remote control.
Ultrasonic sensor cleaning: this is not the regular shake-the-fucking-sensor-out-of-the-body-cleaning. It’s a new cleaning method starting from A7SIII (could be wrong, maybe another one) and the reception is very good, although Sony somehow doesn’t talk about it. This is much better than just shield the sensor with the shutter blades. Love it.
Low-light AF: 1 EV better than the A7RIV and it’s confirmed by Sony Northrup’s test. Although still not as good as a Canon R5.
Focus bracketing: we still don’t have in-body stacking which means no preview. OK I guess you can’t expect that much from Sony, but what’s weird is that there is also no focus breathing compensation, which makes post-processing much easier and is already available for video shooting. Anyway, better than nothing.
All-time DMF: reserved feature on some of Sony’s $$$$ GM lenses but now it’s available for all Sony lenses (not sure about the 3rd party lenses). Nice touch.
Pixel-shifting movement removal: in previous Sony camera it’s basically unusable. You always have micro movement that ruined the shots. What’s weird is that this seems to be an improvement to Sony’s desktop software instead of the camera itself. So basically all Sony cameras that have pixel-shift mode should be able to benefit from it. But AFAIK this is going to be an A7RV exclusive feature. Dick move.
IBIS: seems to be better now but I haven’t seen anyone thoroughly tested it yet. We do have someone who claimed to have handheld a 1.6s exposure here. On the other hand the walking around vlog test doesn’t look impressive at all. It’s still better than the previous Sony cameras so if your standard is low then it’s usable I guess. Another test can be seen here but it’s easy to tell that she’s being cautious to not make Sony look bad.
AI AF: Sony’s main selling point but frankly there is nothing to talk about. It’s quite similar to what EOS R5 already has. Interestingly it can auto switch between other animals/birds, but not the other stuff. Hopefully one day it can be more intelligent so you don’t have to switch at all. A feature that I want is “ignore that fucking fence”. Would be very useful in a zoo. Shouldn’t be that difficult? A focus range limiter could also do the job.
All in all I think Sony has done a very good job fixing all their flaws. There are still rooms for improvement (smooth reflection or more advanced stuff) but I consider it “good enough”, meaning it’s not perfect but there is no dealbreaker compared to the other brand now. The only problem here is the sensor. Funny that years ago Sony cameras are basically “super sensor in a barely usable body” but not it’s the opposite. I guess we’ll have to wait for the ultimate camera, again.
Photo Engineering 