With the amazing trinity of full frame mirrorless A7 cameras from Sony, we couldn’t resist welcoming them into pictureline. Heralded as the smallest full frame cameras money can buy with 3 different yet stunning sensors, each packs its own unique punch.
Sony A7ii
The perfect, all-around full frame mirrorless camera. The Sony A7ii packs an image-stabilized 24 megapixel sensor. This means you can use any non-image stabilized lens (with a lens adapter) on the camera and now have image stabilization! Imagine the possibilities with a Canon 85mm f/1.2 or Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f/0.95 and image stabilization!
Sony A7r
This is the landscape photographers dream camera. Capturing a stunning 36 megapixel full frame image in a amazingly small package makes it easy to cary while boasting some of the highest image quality of any camera available. In fact, the images from this camera easily rival the monster D810 from Nikon.
Sony A7s
The "S" stands for sensitivity because this camera is amazingly sensitive in low light situations. It can actually go over 400,000 ISO. Not that you would really need to, but we've seen incredibly clean images from that camera at over 50,000 ISO. One of the ways they’ve managed to accomplish this engineering marvel is with the lower megapixel count of 12. Possibly the most popular party trick from the A7s is its ability to export a 4K video signal from its HDMI port. To put this into perspective, the Sony A7s is the ONLY camera that can shoot 4K video from its full frame sensor. The Red Epic, Canon C500, Sony F55, FS700, FS7, Black Magic Cinema all capture 4K but use Super 35 which is smaller. The Canon 1DC has a full frame sensor but it crops the sensor down to a 1.3 crop when shooting 4K and the Panasonic GH4 uses a micro 4/3 sensor. So, in this tiny package, you can shoot in 4K with a dynamic range that approaches the amazing Arri Alexa, on a full frame sensor, with the best low light ability of any camera on the market, you're getting a camera perfect for ANY video shooters arsenal.
E-Mount Lenses
The best and worst thing about the Sony mirrorless system is the lens mount. It’s tough, because there’s a limited selection of FE (Full Frame E mount) mount lenses. At the time of this writing, there’s a total of seven. The good thing is the mirrorless system allows for a wide variety of non-E-mount lenses so almost any lens can be used. When using non-native Sony FE mount lenses, auto focus will be limited regardless of the lens adapter. So, to help shooters in these situations, Sony has included focus peaking and image magnification so you can be sure to nail accurate focus every time even with non0-auto focus legacy lenses. Being mirrorless, it has a very short distance from the sensor to the lens mount, which allows for use of nearly any lens that supports the full frame or even cropped frame sensor cameras! So yes, you can use the stunning Lecia or Zeiss lenses. You can also use any Canon EF or EF-S lens, as well as all Nikon FX or DX lenses. When using cropped frame sensor compatible lenses, the camera can either automatically or manually adapt its sensor to fit the lens size. Rokinon even started making native E-mount lenses so you don’t need an adapter. This means you can get an 85mm f/1.4 lens that mounts natively to the camera for about $300!