Pleased as peaches when I got my A7s yesterday. Thought I put it through the paces at the worse possible place to shoot video - Night Safari! Anyone who's been there can attest to how dark the place is. No strobes or LED lights allowed. Animals are usually under foliage and enclosures are dimly lit so it's no soccer stadium.
First thoughts - you can't trust your eyes anymore with this camera. Looking through the EVF is like looking through a night vision goggles ( but with vibrant colors) The LCD tend to give you a slightlu darker picture than what is actually recorded so its better to err on the underexposure side if you are not using a field monitor. Even in pitch darkness, the A7s is capable of squeezing out a slightly greenish image. And with very minimal light, the colors are vibrant and accurate. Some of the shots looked like they were shot in broad day light. I actually over-exposed many shots of the lighter colored animals.
I can't comment on autofocusing because I have only manual lenses. But manual focusing is a joy with the A7s. There's expanded view focus assist, focus peaking and very sharp and bright EVF with diopter adjustment.
Fortunately, there are no shortage of assignable buttons for all these features. The only button I didn't like was the movie record button. In the dark, it's hard to feel for it's position flushed against the camera grip. It's definitely not designed for gloves.
Hopefully, Sony will come up a firmware to allow the shutter release to be used movie recording in movie mode like the GH range.
Other glitches is the slow start-up when powering on the camera and the wimpy battery life. In the time you go through all the camera settings, it would have drained 15% of the battery life.
Little niggles aside, this is beast of a camera, especially at night. For the first test, I shot in AVCHD 25p and it looks very nice straight out of the camera. I hope the footage below will hold up to youtube's compression:
[video=youtube;T_M0rSEwmHY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_M0rSEwmHY&feature=youtu.be[/video]
First thoughts - you can't trust your eyes anymore with this camera. Looking through the EVF is like looking through a night vision goggles ( but with vibrant colors) The LCD tend to give you a slightlu darker picture than what is actually recorded so its better to err on the underexposure side if you are not using a field monitor. Even in pitch darkness, the A7s is capable of squeezing out a slightly greenish image. And with very minimal light, the colors are vibrant and accurate. Some of the shots looked like they were shot in broad day light. I actually over-exposed many shots of the lighter colored animals.
I can't comment on autofocusing because I have only manual lenses. But manual focusing is a joy with the A7s. There's expanded view focus assist, focus peaking and very sharp and bright EVF with diopter adjustment.
Fortunately, there are no shortage of assignable buttons for all these features. The only button I didn't like was the movie record button. In the dark, it's hard to feel for it's position flushed against the camera grip. It's definitely not designed for gloves.
Hopefully, Sony will come up a firmware to allow the shutter release to be used movie recording in movie mode like the GH range.
Other glitches is the slow start-up when powering on the camera and the wimpy battery life. In the time you go through all the camera settings, it would have drained 15% of the battery life.
Little niggles aside, this is beast of a camera, especially at night. For the first test, I shot in AVCHD 25p and it looks very nice straight out of the camera. I hope the footage below will hold up to youtube's compression:
[video=youtube;T_M0rSEwmHY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_M0rSEwmHY&feature=youtu.be[/video]
