Mirrorless Cameras

#41

EOS R has launched.

There’s some stuff to really like. Wow, everything can be customized, including the focus ring on the lens and the ring on the adapter! And what a lens line-up at launch! Wow.

And then there’s stuff that’s puzzling. Only single-card slot. No IBIS, which is sorta huge. IBIS works amazing on Sony, and even Nikon put IBIS in their first-generation mirrorless. And it also has a slow shooting speed compared to other mirrorless. Hell, it’s slower than mirrored cameras. The latest Sony’s are close to 24 frames per second of shooting. You could create video from just the photos alone. The EOS R does a whopping 8 frames per second, but if drops to 3-5 fps when AF tracking. Yikes.

#42

I think I’ll wait for the second generation.

And a lottery win.

#43

Sony has put the A7II with an kit lens on incredible sale the past few weeks. $998 for the body and the 28-70mm kit lens.

If I didn’t just buy an A6500 and lens, this is what I most definitely would have purchased.

#44

Got my new toy! This is arguably the best lens you can get for the Sony APS-C cameras. It also gives me a better general-use lens than my 16mm, which is a bit of a landscape lens.

I now have the Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN and the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 DC DN.

Meanwhile, the brand new Sigma 56mm f/1.4 DC DN launches next week! I’ll have to get that next year. But it’ll round out the group: wide-angle, standard, and telephoto.

#45

Sell me on the Alpha A7 IIK vs the Canon 70D.

My experience with the 70D has been one endless frustration, tbh. I think perhaps 3/4 or more of the Ireland photos were total trash. By the end of the trip I was bracketing every photo because I didn’t trust the camera to do what I thought I was telling it to do. I mean it’s so bad I spent the entire day before leaving practicing taking photos with it, and it still didn’t help.

I mean, sure it’s a me thing, not the camera, but over and over the menu system and logic and the weird autofocus that always picks the foreground, the underexposed photo after underexposed photo, resetting my file save system settings away from RAW over and over and over… ugh.

#46

My wife uses a 70D so I’m quite familiar with it, and it’s been a great camera body. These all sound like setup and operational issues, to be honest, but who knows. It sounds like you’re fighting auto-focus and auto-exposure settings here. How do you have the camera set up? Having the camera switch away from RAW is definitely not standard behavior (we use RAW all the time and the settings never shift).

Actually my wife’s Sigma 150-600 C lens is currently being repaired because it’s switching from auto to manual focusing mode. It could be the 70D itself that’s going fruity, but it seems fine with my lenses. Hard to pin down faults sometimes.

#47

Not sure what you’re doing with your camera, but on paper the A7II is a way-better camera than the 70D. It’s two years newer (more recent tech), full-frame vs 70’ds APS-C, 5-axis in-body image stabilization, higher-resolution, smaller and lighter, and the A7II was Sony’s top-of-the-line camera when it launched whereas the 70D was a more budget-minded option in the Canon lineup.

I will say that the achilles heel of the Sony cameras (until the A7III and its huge Zebra battery) is the battery life. I’ve left my Canon DSLR “on” for weeks, and I can pick it up and shoot hundreds of photos. That’s because DSLRs don’t consume any power until they’re tasked with actually focusing/shooting. Sony mirrrorless cameras suck power like crazy when they’re on, especially if you have the screen on. But even with the screen off, they’re always analyzing whatever is coming into the sensor. But you can always turn them off when you’re not shooting, or buy more batteries.

If you don’t have a huge investment in Canon, I’d do a lot more research into the A7II.

#48

Also, if you’re shooting people, Sony cameras have an eye-autofocus function that identifies and locks onto eyeballs instantly. Razor sharp portraits.

#49

Is that a Sony thing, or a mirrorless trait?

#50

It’s typical across all mirrorless cameras, but Sony didn’t help by having a smallish battery. And because a lot of pros like to use Sony cameras for video, that really exacerbated the battery issues.

But @Enidigm, that might be another reason to switch. Because they have no mirror, mirrorless cameras use electronic view finders to display what the sensor is seeing. So you can actually see what is in focus, or how bright the exposure is before you shoot. It’s really cool, because you see what your adjustments are doing in real-time. For instance, crank up the shutter speed, and the image gets darker, and vice versa.

I went with my nephews and nieces on Halloween this year, and I put my aperture to 1.4 and ramped up the ISO, and using my camera was almost like having night vision goggles. It was dark outside, but look through the viewfinder and everything was practically daytime.

#51

I don’t have it with me but i tend to use auto-ISO and select for aperture or shutter speed.

There’s something about the difference between operation from the eyepiece to the screen, and that many/most of the functions in one aren’t reproduced or available in the other.

I mean, the problem me, just to be clear.

I will say, to be fair to Olympus, that the EPL1 Pen mirrorless camera i still have from a few years ago has great standby battery. I just threw it into the car before heading up to Santa Fe and it’s still at 90-100% of battery months after charging it (i’m using a 20mm prime with it, which is great for sharp photos, but not for long distance photography in the mountains).

After i wrote my post above i think i determined what i need is not so much a camera that’s good in the abstract but one that i can use. I did try the A6300 at Best Buy today and was kind of blown away by the autofocus. I literally complained to family (yes) about how to shoot in sharp focus with the 70D i had to set it up on a tripod, zoom in normally, than use the “digital zoom” on the screen to go to 10x past the optical zoom, than use the focus ring to focus manually.

I played with the A6300 with the 135mm lens, and when i turned the focus ring it automatically zoomed in to max digital zoom in the electronic viewfinder. Honestly i almost walked out the door with it right then. But apparently the A6300 is APS-C and doesn’t have in body stabilization. OTOH… that was a nice lens, and it records in 4K.

#52

If you’re talking about the Live View using the rear screen, yeah that takes a lot of control away from you. Unless you have the camera on manual, it ignores aperture / shutter priority and selects those automatically, plus it uses multipoint AF. I believe on the 70D you can select your own focus by tapping on the screen, but I’m not certain. If you want control using Live View you need to use manual mode. Frankly I find it a pain in the ass unless I’ve got the camera on a tripod or I’m shooting video (where it’s still a pain in the ass anyway). I guess I’m a bit old fashioned, I have to be using the viewfinder at all times, even if it means I have to be lying in the mud to get the right angle.

Auto-ISO is generally ok most of the time, but I don’t use it myself for a simple reason. If I shoot a little over or underexposed with RAW, I can fix that easily in Lightroom as there’s plenty of latitude to do so. But if the camera uses an excessively high ISO it’s much harder to deal with the grain it introduces. I prefer a slightly underexposed look anyway, which is a personal choice, but Auto-ISO won’t have any of that nonsense!

#53

Here are a couple shots from the 70D

Action photos taken with default “action” photography preset.

… and here is the Alpha 7 II

#54

Nice! You got a great camera!

And that’s just the kit lens, right? There are some fantastic lenses out there that deliver gorgeous photos.