One year after the announcement the A7s review just got posted at Dpreview (Click here). And it earns a Gold Award:
The more you delve into the a7S, the more it becomes apparent that it was designed primarily for video. And it’s superlative in that context: producing clean, detailed video from its large sensor, even in low light. It’s less compelling as a stills camera, and its ergonomics aren’t a great match for videography, but if you’re serious about video, it’s seriously impressive.
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38 Responses
In other news, one year after announcement, DPReview finally gets around to reviewing a Sony camera… Guess they finally decided the A7s was high enough priority to look at…
They had to get it out there before the a7s II.
It’s kinda the same thing as the case with.. not many exotic 3rd party 0.95 lenses tested by dxomark
Lol dpreview… Who cares about their review
I don’t get the Gold Award. This review was not very positive. Guess anything can win a Gols Award no matter what the opinion of the reviewers? Based on the review Nikon is and others are still far superior and this coming from a guy who absolutely love mirrorless cameras and thinks Nikon is in the dark ages when it comes to the future.
A7s may not be the best camera for still.
but A7s is target for video user.
It gain a lots of score from their video ability.
It’s a terrible camera for video usage with the exception of its ISO performance, but have you heard of a thing called lighting?
Sony’s Raw compression scheme can lead to posterization at high contrast edges.
At least they comment on this
make no mistake…the A7s takes great low light pictures too.
This review was super fishy.
You can tell by the fact that it draws comparisons to Sony A7 II and Samsung NX1. Two cameras that were released several months After the A7s was released.
In principle, this is like ignoring a CPU for 10 years, then 10 years later review the CPU, and complain the CPU is too slow compared to today’s standards.
Yes but it’s not a CPUs and is only 1 year old.
The a7S is a very special camera. It does not matter what do you compare it to, you will always find this camera to be unique in its own ways. Unless of course, there’s a direct competitor of it.
1 year in digital photography can be same as 1 year on CPU’s.
There are many cameras that are unique in their own ways, it doesn’t make all of them to deserve a gold award.
No, CPUs are much further apart year-by-year compared to cameras. Cameras are much more complicated than packed up transistors, hence there the performance gap between generations are not as well pronounced as CPUs.
‘Unique’ in my previous message was defined as ‘unique in a nice way’. Hassleblad’s ‘Unique’ pricing will never be in this category.
This is easy to explain. There’s a lot of hype about the A7s as a stills camera. But it’s *stills* high ISO is not much better than any other, and it’s low ISO worse, and it’s low rez. It’s not a good stills camera (waits for attack) compared to the A7II and others. But, the quality of it’s high iso video is unbelievalby good for the price…
The review fails to acknowledge that under indascendent low light and with deep shadows in general, even compared to the second best (D4S), differences go up to almost 2 stops in extremely low light at or above ISO 100k. Up to 12k, yes, most new FF cameras are similar. Niche usage? Yes. No better than others in low light, period? False.
Actually. Dpreview says: “a Nikon D4S manages to stay neck-to-neck against the a7S up to ISO 409,600”
And then they link to a sample where the A7s is clearly superior.
I believe this qualifies as cognitive dissonance?
If you tested the device to be better, then say it’s better. Instead of saying they are neck to neck.
“… But it’s *stills* high ISO is not much better than any other, and it’s low ISO worse, and it’s low rez. …”
Wow, I didn’t hear such BS since a looooooong time!
Yeah, it is a pretty negative review for a gold award.
DPR always writes in a very negative tone when it comes to Sony, they almost write like ‘we hate Sony and would never ever choose to shoot one, but we can’t deny it is a very capable camera so it still gets a good award’.
Yet in reviews of Olympus, Fuji and recently Panasonic they get absolutely glowing fanboy speak throughout.
Step by step with such things as gold awards, the mentality will evolve, and mirrorless cameras won’t be considered anymore by many to by inferior to DSLR.
nex7 chosen for “best camera of the year 2011” on dpreview. If that couldnt change the opinion, i doubt gold awards will.
I think they deserve credit for acknowledging the importance of well thought out video capabilities, which they pretty explicitly state influenced their decision. So they’re almost rewarding Sony for thinking outside the box, which I commend.
It’s also funny to read comments from enraged photo ‘purists’, who seem to resent that video is being recognized at all.
soooo where’s the Sony a77II review?
Maybe they thought A Mount is very not important right now.
that would be a lame excuse for a review site that already did a first impression of the a77II back in May of 2014… Bring on the review of the Sony a77II
I don’t think dpreview has ever been lame for nikon fans.
do you realize that A7s was released one month before A77II??
guess that indicates A7s was exactly as unimportaint,right?
Why complaining/arguing to me? I said ‘THEY’, so that is not what I think. They don’t usually review ‘unimportant’ cameras such as cheap or small sensor cameras so I think THEY found the A77II to be unimportant.
My kingdom for a “disable RAW compression” option. Unfortunately it seems this will be ignored by Sony. No news of firmware updates, no nothing, just crickets.
It can be choise of amount of wiring to the sensor etc surrounding chips. Who knows .. they could give a proper answer and it would not hurt them too much.
With more processing power the low light abilities go even further. . Sony seems to have 1 stop poorer iso performance from the same sensors than Nikon. It’s probably down to the ability to make proper use or the choise of camera processor.
I’ve heard otherwise… do you have a source?
Elaborate that.
DPReview always was Canon-Nikon biased. Sometimes they’ve noticed similar things as PRO for Nikon and as CON for Olympus. Now we see their new strategy. If Sony makes a REALLY good camera with little bad things to point to, review it after a year of existence, when it is already not a new camera and the momentum is already lost. Well, at least they gave gold to this wonderful camera.
Yeah. They did not like the ergonomics, they hated how it handled, and they wrote it felt like a toy. Yet it ended up with a Gold Award. That’s how ridiculously good it is in the areas that matters the most.
And considering all the complaints I’ve seen here at SAR regarding the A7S price, this sentence made me smile:
“… but the price is rock bottom for pros, and reasonably accessible even for most consumers.”
Double Penetration Review is no place I’ll ever let my children visit on the web.
But mommy and daddy might check it out this weekend.
I hope you don’t have any children
and.. DPReview gets 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Sony-dollars…. 🙂
Frank Sinatra: ” Thats..Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiffffff…. “
But the guys from reduser say that video on Alpha 7s, actually, is not good enough!