Andreas Seibert noticed that Sony made a special Sony A77II 4D focusing manual. You can download it here: sony.net/Products/di/common/images/products/g2sw/ILCA-77M2_4DFOCUS_Camera_Settings_Guide.pdf.
Enjoy the reading!
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Sony A77II store links
Sony A77 in USA at Amazon, Adorama, Sony Store and BHphoto.
Sony A77 in Europe at Sony Germany, Sony UK, Sony France, Sony IT, ES, NL, BE, AT, CH, PT, NO, SE, FI and Wex UK.
54 Responses
Why bother releasing this if A-mount is dead? Or is it too little too late?
“Sony spells the beginning of a new autofocus era”…that doesn’t imply dead. For people who don’t understand auto focus and want to shoot brick walls FE is there for you. For everyone else…the secret sauce is in the A mount.
I totally agree with you. I do own A77II but it would have been a great info had this been published the same time as the camera’s release unless it was the case and I missed it or didn’t come across it on the internet.
I agree — would have saved me a lot of grief, but better late than never!
I don’t know if I’d state good AF performance as being the sole purview of the A-mount. The a6000 pretty much stands right up there with the A77/II, and in fact, has more AF points covering more of the sensor (this is one of my favorite thing about E-mount, actually). The 77ii might be *slightly* faster, but it’s really a negligible difference from everything I’ve read (I’ll be able to compare myself soon enough). Yeah, FE sucks compared to 77ii performance, but that’s FF (the a99 is weak compared to the a77, too), and if we’re to compare apples to apples, the 6000 is the one to compare to.
The problem with the A6000 is, as soon as you attach a proper high grade A-mount lens with LA-EA2/4 (Since there are no fast/long zooms/primes in E-mount you have no choice), you lose all the 4D AF capabilities. With the A77II you can mount Sony’s latest telezooms/primes with full AF compatibility.
A6000 doesn’t track as well as A77II either, even with native E-mount lenses.
True, it all goes out the window once you throw on the adapter; you have to use native e-mount lenses.
http://downloads.canon.com/camera/brochures/EOS_7D_Mark_II_AF_guide_CUSA_9-2014.pdf
7d m2 have the AF guide already at the day of launch
It has 51 page and explain everything about AF detailedly.
While a77ii come out a brief AF guide after 8 months of lanuch
Well,
This manual actually exists. But no statement that a-mount is dead exists.
If the two cannot be combined. what does that mean?
There is an a6000 4D focus guide as well.
http://www.sony.net/Products/di/en-us/Learnmore/4d_focus/a6000/guide/index.html
Also available in PDF format:
http://www.sony.net/Products/di/common/images/products/qb9a/ILCE-6000_4DFOCUS_Camera_Settings_Guide.pdf
The choosen images for the examples sends a clear message about the intended customer! 🙂
Does not seem to be very correct. The AF Track Duration and AF Drive Speed do affect AF tracking operation when shooting stills.
And all the FE mount users said…what’s auto focusing?
Jeezo krikey holy techno chaos! Talk about consumer overload…
Just give me a joystick, wide AF area, and release priority…
…all the stuff Emount doesn’t have.
you want a joystick? go play commodore
Perfect timing – I just ordered by A77II today (despite my better judgment about buying another A-mount)! 🙂
Let us know what you think. I’m debating this week ditching the A7 for it.
Why don’t you keep both? For fast stuff, like cheetahs, A77II and for the rest the A7 with adapted A-Mount lenses.
Good point. I don’t care for my A mount glass on the A7. I don’t find it well balanced and I already have another small compact system. It’s just in my situation where I feel it would have been better to grab the A77II.
While I wouldn’t ‘ditch’ an A7 for it, I’m still contemplating using one side by side. Borrowed one from Sony for a week and it was a brilliant camera! Just not a replacement for my A7S.
Now that Sony has a module with lots of AF points, there is a need for proper management of all those points… When using Zone Focusing, instead of limiting the user to 9 points, there should be a way to increase the ”zone” area to 15-points and 21-points, in a similar way to Nikon Pro cameras.
It works in the same way as Nikon, you can select a point and track across all points.
“Tracking duration: High – Quickly focuses on a closer subject (easily switches subject in focus).”
(p. 31) To me that sounds like the exact opposite…a high tracking duration should track the subject for a longer amount of time. Or am I missing something here?
Tracking duration : 5 <– is for fast switching focus.
Tracking duration : 1 <– is for slow switching focus.
You can do a simple test on A77ii, the difference is obvious.
Thanks, I know how it works, I just wanted to say that for my understanding it should be labelled exactly the other way round. High tracking duration (5) should mean that the camera keeps tracking the subject longer than it does when it’s set to 1. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one seeing it this way, so I’m wondering why Sony didn’t explain the feature in a better way.
I think they want to follow Canon setting “Tracking Sensitivity” -2-0-+2
(use high value for fast obj. & low value for slow obj.)
but can’t think of any proper word to replace it.
and the camera is made by Japanese, so no surprise 🙂
No, it makes perfect sense because “high” refers to the speed at which the focus switches lock to varying subjects in the frame sticking on whatever is closest to you. “Slow” means it doesn’t switch fast, making it “sticky” on your initial subject you locked on.
Yeah, I know it works that way, but still the description suggests exactly the opposite. To me, “high duration” means “more time”, and “more time” for tracking certainly doesn’t mean that the focus lock switches faster, but that the camera should (!) lock on to the subject for longer.
We have to remember that there is a translation between different languages here. English and Japanese languages do not even belong to the same language family. Descriptions that are fully logical in Japanese, may not always come out as clear and logical after translation into (e.g.) English
You may perhaps interpret it as something like this: Tracking duration – High speed moving Objects – 5.
Let’s have an improved LA-EA 6 adapter inspired by this instead of the elder A65 one
Sony said recently in an interview that to improve the af of the laea2/4 the adapter would have to grow in size and it sounded like from the text that it would be an unacceptable size.
Maybe they should start and let the users decide what’s best for them instead of patronizing everybody…
totally agree!!!!, they surely just not want E mount camera replace the A mount ones so easily with just an adapter 😉
Link?
A-mount is a dead end. Mechanical aperture lever is a dead end. Good that Sony created the E-mount.
E-Mount is a dead end. Fly-by-wire focus is a dead end. Good that Samsung created the NX mount.
E-mount is not limited to fly-by-wire only focus.
just like driving a stick shift vs an automatic transmission. Automatic transmission is always “higher-tech”, you can get lots of good stuffs like paddle shifters, launch control… and it is faster.
Are you Ed Millibad?
You have not seen the Loxia line or Samyangs for E mount have you?
Videographers actually prefer lenses with mechanical aperture lever.
even canon has moved on to electronic one instead of using mechanical aperture lever
I know, and that’s why videographers don’t like to use Canon lenses, they use Nikon or Zeiss Cine Primes (if they can afford them).
Electronic aperture is not a smooth transition. For still photography, there are benefits because it’s so accurate, but for video it’s a disadvantage. If you read reviews of the Sony FS7 they talk about it there too and the irony being that it’s an E-mount body but how the A-mount lenses are preferred because of the aperture lever and the third party adapters that add an aperture ring to control it. It’s why all Arri & Zeiss Cine Primes have manual aperture rings for mechanical aperture control.
aperture ring on zeiss loxia lenses are super nice and FE28135PZ too
A-mount is a very old invention and simply has no room for technology advancement.
Most misguided statement I’ve ever read on SAR.
certainly a lot of potential to be misunderstood 🙂
I predict camera sizes will stop getting smaller, and actually start getting bigger. a new trend. Bigger lenses and bigger bodies.
I add my prediction to that as well, the cameras will get a mirror and we get true viewfinder that isn’t limited by the colors and exposure. We can feel to be true photographers as we get more missed focuses and exposures.
It seems that a6000(the longest with the “cool” af is 200mm) is not a match for the 7d2 and d7200, so sony finaly decieded to look at their other bad child, which can actually be a match to these two if advertised and documented properly 🙂
No it’s because no one (read here: test/review experts) can use the 4D focus properly and make statement like “Oh It’s bad, I get only 33% keepers !!”
I’m a professional photographer who has shot with Sony A-mount since 2009 and even I didn’t understand all the settings the way they were named. This guide is super helpful!
Is it just me? But it appears to be the case of really Sloppy Editing:
Page 11: Shooting a series of pictures while pointing the cam era to track the subject’s movement
Page 16: Swiftly responding to the sudden appearan ce of a subject
Edit: Never Mind. I get it. Its supposed to be the center of the Page for folding. Hence the extra space.