Jeff’s Mini Review Of Sony A7R3

Jim talks to Jeff about his recent experience renting the Sony A7R3 camera:

* Only had the camera for a 7 day rental, so not an exhaustive review by any means.  It was also a lot of firsts for me. First time shooting mirrorless. First time shooting Sony (or anything other than Canon).  First time shooting full frame.
* Rented the camera for two reasons

* First, I have some attendees at my post-Retreat Camera Ninja workshop who shoot Sony and I wanted to get familiar with the camera to be able to help them
* Second, to shoot the high school senior nights for the mens and womens basketball games.


* First decision I needed to make was to rent native glass with the camera or an adapter so that I could use my Canon EF mount glass.  I decided that one of the things I wanted to get out of this rental was to see what it would be like if I chose to go to Sony and for me that would mean slowly moving to Sony glass over Canon mount glass.  Would have to get my wife moved over too and selling it all at once just wouldn’t work for me right now. So I decided to adapt my Canon mount glass just to see what it was like.
* I rented the Metabones T IV adapter with the camera so that I could put my Tamron 70-200 G2 glass on it for the games.  I made sure ahead of time that it would work with the Tamron glass. That Tamron lens is new enough there isn’t full compatibility via the adapter like there is for Canon glass or even older Tamron lenses, but I watched some YouTube videos show it working well with that specific glass and decided to give it a try.
* I rented the camera one day before the first game, the men’s senior night so I knew I needed to spend some time with the setup to figure out how to do focus in particular with the fast action that would be going on at the game.   Let’s go over the positives from my experience with it first (7 things):

* Fun to shoot: The camera was really fun to shoot.  Though to be fair, I always feel a certain giddiness anytime I get to use a new piece of electronics, no matter what it is.  That inner geek in me just can’t help but put a smile on my face the first time I turn something on.
* Menu systems were fine: I had heard so much about how the menu system on the Sony cameras was so awful, but at least on the A7R3 I didn’t find them to be terribly different from Canon.  Different terms than Canon for features and functions, which is going to be different between every manufacturer, but even without digging into instruction manuals I was able to get things going very quickly.
* EVF was great: I was really looking forward to seeing an Electronic Viewfinder and was extremely impressed with it on the A7R3.  Since I haven’t ever used any others I can’t compare it to anything else, but I can compare it to the optical viewfinder and can say that I mostly didn’t even notice a change between the two.  Looks a little different for sure, but it also has some capabilities like focus peaking that give it an advantage. It was very responsive and gave me plenty of detail to follow the players in a basketball game and get good action shots.
* Focus works well for action sports: I can’t really give a solid review of the focus system because I was using adapted glass.  I am quite certain native glass would have been an entirely different experience. But I imagine that a number of listeners would be in a similar situation I am where switching brands isn’t a simple thing.  I don’t want to be without a camera and the budget isn’t there to buy the new system and then sell my old system, but if adapted glass works well then it is something I could actually consider. So what I can say is that the Metabones T adapter did a very good job.  I had to use it in “green” mode, which you select by having the camera turned on, pressing and holding a button on the adapter, and then twist the lens on the camera.