I took 2 a7RII's on a trip last fall, and here's what I had to say:
First off, the things the camera is not particularly good for:
Fast action, such as sports or some kinds of wildlife photography. The native lenses just don’t autofocus fast enough, and the frame rate doesn’t go high enough.
Use with very long lenses and nonstatic situations. The manual focusing on the a7RII and its siblings is about as good as it gets for a full frame camera, and in static situations that’s all you need. However, native long lenses are thin on the ground. I’m not a Canon shooter, so I can’t use the Canon big iron lenses, but that may be a way around this issue.
Single shot, nosebleed megapixel landscapes. For that, you should probably buy an 100 megapixel Phase One, and be done with it.
It’s actually a pretty short list. I might think of a few more items, but those are the ones that might make a difference to me. How I deal with that list is by using the Nikon gear for fast action and/or long lenses, and stitching for extremely high resolution landscapes. If I can’t stitch, then 42 megapixels is going to have to be enough for me, and I don’t feel deprived at this point. My Hasselblad H2D-39 received very little use before I got my hands on the a7RII. It has received no use at all since.
What’s so great about the a7RII on a trip? I hardly know where to start.
Electronic first curtain shutter (EFCS). The camera shares this feature with all of the alpha 7 cameras except the a7R, which, it could be argued, before the a7RII came out, needed it the most. It is great to have a high megapixel wonder and not worry about shutter shock. I note that the Nikon D810 also has EFCS, and is quite usable on a tripod once you get used to pressing the shutter release twice. However, because of the way that Nikon implemented it, and more fundamentally, the presence of a flapping mirror on the camera, EFCS is not usable when the camera is handheld, and, although I took a tripod on this trip, I never used it.
In body image stabilization (IBIS). This is a real confidence builder, and let me use ISO 100 in situations where I would’ve had to switch to 640 or 800 without it.
Autofocus performance. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, for static subjects, the autofocus accuracy of the a7RII exceeds that of any camera I’ve ever used, not by a small amount. When the lenses are wide-open, it’s almost as accurate as manual focusing. When they are stopped down a bit, it is absolutely as accurate, unless the subject contrast is weirdly tricky. I am not used to being able to zoom in to one-to-one in Photoshop and to reliably see pixel-level sharpness, but, since I’ve been using the a7RII, I’m beginning to trust the camera more. I still shoot a few extra shots of a really good subject just in case the first one isn’t in critical focus, but so far in my experience with the a7RII, I’ve never had use those shots.
Live histogram and zebras. Having a live histogram makes exposure in fast-moving situations easier, but you do have to take it with a grain of salt. I wish the Sony engineers could’ve provided a three channel live histogram overlayed like the one in Lightroom. Before this trip, I’d never used the zebras, but after getting caught out by the live histogram in one situation, I I now use them with the level set to 100+%. If you’re not going for the whole ETTR ball of wax, that seems to be a good number. It's a little conservative, but it's as aggressive as the camera allows.
The two speed ISOlessness. Having the increase in conversion gain occurring at ISO 640 is a great thing, allowing almost all photographs to be exposed using the camera set to one of two ISO levels. This simultaneously provides simplicity and high-quality.
The ability to use just about any lens ever made for full frame cameras.
What’s merely good?
42 megapixels. How dare I call the full frame camera with the second-highest pixel count merely good? Not because it’s not a 50 megapixel Canon. It’s just that 42 megapixels is not much of an improvement over the 36 megapixel standard set by previous generation Sonys and Nikons.
Size and weight. Adding IBIS to the camera caused the a7RII to bulk up a little bit. It’s still a relatively small and light full frame camera, just not as strikingly so as it once was.
Battery life. Some of you are probably surprised that I didn’t put this in the negative category. I find the battery life to be entirely adequate, if not up to the standards of pro-level cameras like the D4, or even the D810. During the entire trip, I never had to replace a battery in the field. In fact, although I brought two chargers, I only plugged one of them in, and never had a queue of more than one battery awaiting charging.
The direct exposure bias adjustment dial. I’ve figured out how to incorporate this handy feature into my exposure strategy:
http://blog.kasson.com/?p=11768What’s ugly?
The menu system.
I devoted a Last Word post to that.
The automatic EVF/LCD switching. This is been well covered by me and others. When you bend over to have a good look at the LCD screen on the back of the camera, especially if you’re wearing a hat, the screen goes dark. This “feature” also keeps the camera from being as useful at waist level as it otherwise might be. There is a great workaround which came from a reader, which gets you the equivalent of the a directly accessed manual two-way (EVF/LCD) toggle on the Leica M240. Set C3, the custom button next to the finder, to “Finder/Monitor Sel.” Then go to “Gear>4>Finder/Monitor” and set it to manual. I didn’t know about this on the trip, but, since the EVF on the a7RII is better than the ones on its forbearers, by the end of the trip, I was holding the camera up to my eye whenever I needed to access the menu system outdoors.
No passive LCD panel on top of the camera. This means that you have to go into the menu system for things that would be more simply and directly accessed on Nikon or Canon systems.
Controls too easily moved. The dials, buttons, and wheels all have a light action. Sony could take a lesson in haptics from Nikon and Canon here. Some have complained about the new lock on the mode control. This fixes a problem that I didn’t have; one of the few controls on the previous cameras that I didn’t inadvertently misadjust was the mode dial.
A few more details, and some pictures, are here:
http://blog.kasson.com/?p=11839Jim