Sony A7r II focus modes by Gary Friedman
7 Tips and Tricks to Master the Sony a7R II (Explora).
New firmware feature request for all A7, a remedy for dust? (SonyAlphaForum)
Review of Zeiss Batis 25mm with full size sample shots at Pixelmania.
2015 ZeissImages Contest winner!
Elmar: “I am a photographer and im using Sony cameras A7rII /7MII i love underwater photography as well as landscape, events, wedding people, sports, and more.
I thought maybe my work is interesting to see the result of the combo underwater, for me it is the best combination for underwater macro photography.
I m using the new underwater housing from Nauticam for the A7rII+Macro G OSS FE90mmF2,8, 2x Inon strobes,2x lights from Sola light & motion ports and on some of the pictures the SMC(super macro converter) from Nauticam.
I went on a trip to Bali in November on the link below you can enjoy some of the pictures.
http://www.blueworldpixel.com/#!macro-art/cml2“
19 Responses
Gary Friedman
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Gotta love Gary.
I’m a bit skeptical about 4K, especially in S35 quality retainment when using this “zoom” feature, as it’s the very first time EVER I’ve heard about it and this could be incredibly useful if it works how Gary described. Too many questions like what does it do to the DOF, rolling shutter, how much does it zoom out, etc., aside from the the IQ impact. I’ll be tinkering with this myself, shortly.
I’ve no reason to doubt Gary as he’s proven time and time again to find and share some really obscure details about Sony’s, but why the ‘eff wouldn’t Sony promote this feature or at least make a point to mention one somewhere.
“(…)Too many questions like what does it do to the DOF, (…)”
Like all digital zooms it just increases or decreases the crop factor. So the Optical DOF will stay the same, but the perceived seperation of the motive an background may change. However a face i.e. that lies completely in the DOF will remain there no matter how you zoom in or out.
Hope this makes sense 🙂
And with that feature you basically have a parfocal, fixed aperture short zoom for filming.
Parfocal, yes, but not fixed aperture. Little example: a generic 24-70 f2.8 has 11ft total dof @ 24mm f2.8 but only 1ft. total dof @ 70mm f2.8. With this digital Zoom you can take a 24mm f2.8 prime and can (probably) zoom/crop to a similar fov of a 70mm lens but you would still have a total dof of 11ft. This would look like a 70mm prime shot at roughly f22.
Edit: All dof values are claculated with a subject distance of 10 ft.
Hm, but I’d say the aperture is “fixed”. In fact, everything’s “fixed”, including DOF. What’s changing is the angle of view, that’s all.
My post above was done with Batis 25mm at F2.0 and when zooming in none of the parameters changed except for the crop/frame, i.e. I was still shooting with a 25mm lens, blades opened to F2.0, no changes to exposure of any kind… nada. The only difference is what angle of view.
All this means is understanding how your given lens behaves at a given aperture. Or, am I missing something?
I guess it was a communication problem on my side. I think I obersimplified “fixed aperture zoom” to “fixed f-number zoom lens”. My bad 🙁
About the Clear Zoom, is the same name that they use for their professional video camera FS5 and FS7. Wich every review I saw praised a lot this feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ss83YhUPl8
I hope they develop further this tech, would be awesome if you could transit between full frame to aps-c seamlessly while recording video.
Phase Detection AF cells are switched off on A7rII by default (check the menu). So my question is, when using 70-200 G2 F2.8 lens and mirrorless adapter, does it use contrast detection mode only?
That’s very useful. He’s actually very good.
No matter how well you think you know your camera, there is always Gary Friedman… So impressed by this guy!
Thankfully we have Gary. Sony can’t explain there tools like he does, but they can build it.
Whoa!!! So check this out for anyone interested… Some really awesome “findings” and a some compromises about the zoom:
1) GOOD: Parfocal zoom (makes sense as it’s digital so no elements are moving… NICE!)
2) GOOD: amazingly it works with RM-VPR1 remote just like it does with any actual power zoom… the zoom is perfectly smooth and you have 2 speeds, just like on the actual power zoom… NICE! This is huge for me because aside from 28-135 PZ I only use primes to shoot video and using the remote control really does seem to turn it prime into a zoom… holly shiet!
3) GOOD: works perfectly fine with HDMI to external monitor (I use SmallHD), NICE! All external monitor functions (zebras, peaking, etc. seem to work as normal)
4) NOT GOOD: looks like you loose all control over AF Area settings… Can’t quite figure out yet what this focus area defaults to, but in short – you can’t select you zone/spot/etc. areas while using the zoom.
5) Have to change the stills settings from RAW to JPEG… small step but an annoyance nonetheless.
I can’t quite tell the impact to IQ yet, this will require much more testing but at first glance appears to be OK? Also, Clear Image Zoom (2x) and Digital Zoom (4x) seem to function same as described above, but I can’t quite tell the difference yet – never bothered to use these before so I simply don’t understand the differences. Initial online searches on this topic are inconclusive, some claim (and present) lossless/magical performance, others claim (and show proof) of IQ loss… I gotta figure this out for myself, but so far looks promising!
p.s. So far I’ve tested this with A7Rii… curious what this means for A7Sii… I suspect the results to be different due to massive pixel count differences and likely different algorithms.
p.p.s. Gary mentions the magic to be based off different pixel sampling-down/upscaling, but I’ve now come across several other sources that claim it to be based off in-camera database that analyzes the content and upscales accordingly. Need to research more!
There’s a slight misstatement at 9:25 in the video, where he says that the embedded phase detect autofocus points can only detect horizontal lines after he had just shown—and meant to say—they can only detect vertical lines.
My performance in that video would have been much better if I had not been drugged up with cold medicine at the time. 🙁
Clear zoom does not work with RAW and turns off focus point selection.
SONY, give us more crop factors!!!
All APS-C lenses can give us 1.3 crop factor and 24MP pictures on A7RII!
Thanks Gary. Very well explained and demonstrated!
Does anyone know if there’s a mode that averages the focus when multiple faces are detected? Great video explainer, by the way.