After working with the A7r yesterday afternoon I came away with some questions and wanted to pass them on to the members of the forum. As I feel that everyone has their own opinions on image quality, I am only looking for help on useability features/functions.
I used the A7r with my LA-EA2 with Sony Alpha lenses, 16-80 and 24-70 both of them the Zeiss lenses. I shot both raw and fine jpg and worked up the files in LR RC 5.3. I saw lots of fine details as I expected but also noticed some issues with a stock blue sky in that I was having a hard time nailing down the blue hue. This is something that probably will get worked out over time and or was a sign of my inexperience with the raw files. I am hoping to shoot my D800 next to the A7r some tomorrow mainly for some color testing. I will say the screen on the A7r is a bit misleading as the actual useable LCD is much smaller than the holder. There are large dark sections on each edge of the screen. The camera feels very good in the hand and the grip to me is excellent, just enough.
1. The camera iso starts at iso 50. Unlike the Nikon D800 family which allows you to get to 50 with menu settings, (Nikon never really calls it 50), Sony just allows you to dial right down to the iso 50 setting. I am wondering if Sony has tweaked the chip so that you are at a "true" iso 50 base and not a tweaked iso 50 as Nikon did. Nikon's base on the D800 is iso 100.
2. Both of the lenses I used, 24-70 and 16-80 did not focus well with the LA-EA2 with AF on. This was more apparent in the 50mm to 80mm range. I did not have time to make a AF adjustment. With Focus peaking on and MF mode focus was very good and I my hit miss ration dropped way down. All shots were hand held. There was some vignetting with the 16-80, very slight.
3. LR does not see the camera as a alpha, thus it will not allow the use of the 16-80 profile (alpha). This may change later on but for now all lens adjustments with an Alpha lens on would have to be manual. I had this same issue with my Nex 7 when I used the LA-EA2 on it.
4. The use of any Nikkor lenses, G will rely on a adapters like the Metabones or Novoflex style. These do not allow any AF. What I am also curious about is if they allow 1/2 or 1/3 aperture settings. From looking at the adapters on-line it seems like the aperture adjustments are done totally manually thus you only get full stops. This would be just like using a copal shutter on a tech camera lens. Focusing in close with MF was easy, at distance with peaking on (16mm to 35mm) was hard at first, but after figuring out the zoom function, you can pretty much nail a good focus each time. It's just having to be manual for every shot to me eliminates this camera for most some shooting conditions.
5. Has anyone tested the metabones AF III with Canon lenses? If so what are your opinions. Is the AF fast and accurate? Also I am curious if on shifting with a 17mm TS-E or 24mm TS-E if there is a bit of corner vignetting especially on shifts?
6. Remote support, from what I can tell this is pretty non-existent. Dpreview mentions a wired remote, but on the Sony site under accessories, there is no mention of a wired remote only a wireless unit which has very basic support. The USB 2 port on the camera is a proprietary Sony pinout, one that they started using with the Nex-6. If a pin conversion did exist to take it to the more common mini USB2 port (like the one used on external hard drives 3.5 inch) then it might be possible to get a remote to work. However since this port is where you charge the camera from it may not have the ability to be used with a remote. With the older Sony Nex line there was as IR remote, and some people have found ways to convert it to a intervalometer However I don't think the A7r has the IR port, instead it appears to use wireless. I would like to be able to use this camera for night shooting, however without the ability to use a intervalometer then stacking frames will be out. Sony does sell a camera app called Timelapse however from what I can tell it's much more oriented to the creation of a time laspe movie and like Nikon's tool on the D800 and D600 is driven by the camera's timer which will only go to 30 seconds. 30 seconds will not work in most night time stacking situations where you tend to be more in the line of 2 to 3 minute shots. If you use the timelaspe camera app, you required to have a phone or iPad to run it at least from what I can tell. Interface is between the device and camera via wireless. Also not too sure how this will effect the battery life of the camera since a wifi connection will need to be running the whole time. Currently Sony does not allow for the A7 family in the Timelaspe camera app.
These may be non-issues for most folks. However the AF issue with Nikkor lenses concerns me but the lack of a remote that works as a intervalometer surprised me. The fact that Sony uses a proprietary port is pretty standard for them and thus I don't see an easy way around this.
This is all based on the limited time I had to work with the A7r in my hands, and research I have done. If someone has some different information, please share it.
Paul Caldwell