anyone using a Sony A7s purely for portrait stills photography?

Yeah I agree, that's why I decided to try both out this past weekend at my film house. Ultimately I ended up keeping the A7 and returned the A7s. Both are great cameras but they both behaved a bit different when in full auto "P" mode. I found I was getting more blurry shots with the A7s compared to the A7, and it seems down to two differences. For one it seems to me like the A7 auto focuses a little better than the A7s, but also on some shots the way they prioritize shutter speed and iso differs. The A7s seems to favor low iso and would drop iso down to 100 even if that meant shutter speeds as long as 1/25th. My hands simply aren't steady enough for that and hence those photos were blurry. The A7 doesn't do that, the slowest it would go is 1/60 (usually quicker than that though) and it would favor bumping iso to keep the shutter speed quicker when in full auto "P" mode. Oddly that's the opposite I would have expected. With the A7s being able to have cleaner images at higher iso I would have thought the A7s would push iso up to keep shutter speed fast. Anyways I know I can go with manual "M" mode and set the shutter/fstop myself, etc, but I did want a full auto mode available just to make for quicker and more natural shoots, that ability to take a picture of a model at a split second notice. So the A7 slightly better auto focus and its tendency to not drop the shutter speed as slow as the A7s meant the A7 was the one for me.

At the end of the day I only really consider this a 6 month camera, I'm sure Sony will have something new in no time and I'll sell the A7 but for now I've settled on the A7 + 55 f1.8 as the combo that works best for me. I decided to pass on the A7r totally as I find I don't really need the higher resolution it offers, and I think the auto focus on the A7 would be better than the A7r anyways. It does go to show though, you really need hands on experience with the gear to know what works best for you. My needs are quite orthogonal to what reviewers seem to want, which in this case led me to the "cheapest" of the A7 line as the one that suits me best.
 
Question: Is the A7S better for video than the R and regular A7, even if you aren't interested in high ISO performance?

If I wanted something good for both video and stills, at least going with the A7 or A7R would give me a decent amount of megapixels to crop and work with in post like a normal DSLR.
The high ISO of the A7S is magical, no doubt, but any full frame camera is going to give me better ISO performance than the micro four thirds sensors do. If I go with one of those, is the only thing I'm giving up ISO performance? Or is video quality not as good either?
 
Without a doubt. The A7s's sensor was designed specifically for video, with full sensor readout and no line skipping (both the A7 and R, like most DSLRs, line skip). The high ISO performance is just a side effect of this sensor design. If all the A7s had for video was high ISO, nobody would be buying them. The attraction is the amazing 1080p (and 4k) quality off the sensor. In terms of comparisons to m4/3, Dave Dugdale has a long video comparing the 2; short answer is that GH4 4k downsampled is slightly more detailed than the 1080p of the A7s (pretty impressive for the A7s) albeit with some other minuses and issues coming along with that.
 
Without a doubt. The A7s's sensor was designed specifically for video, with full sensor readout and no line skipping (both the A7 and R, like most DSLRs, line skip). The high ISO performance is just a side effect of this sensor design. If all the A7s had for video was high ISO, nobody would be buying them. The attraction is the amazing 1080p (and 4k) quality off the sensor. In terms of comparisons to m4/3, Dave Dugdale has a long video comparing the 2; short answer is that GH4 4k downsampled is slightly more detailed than the 1080p of the A7s (pretty impressive for the A7s) albeit with some other minuses and issues coming along with that.

Interesting. If the A7S sensor was specifically designed for video, why is it in a still-shooter body with still-shooter ergonomics? EOSHD even complained that movie mode was actually very limiting compared to the stills M mode, as it seems they designed the menus to be a photography camera first.

Why wouldn't they have made this an FS100-style shooter if that was the goal all along? Seems to me that they aimed to make a super-sensitive stills shooter (hence the A7 monicker and sitting along side it at the camera stores) and the happy side effect was that it happens to record great video.

That's why it seemed an honest assumption that the other A7 cameras would have similar looking video, but apparently that is a mistake to assume.
 
Interesting. If the A7S sensor was specifically designed for video, why is it in a still-shooter body with still-shooter ergonomics? EOSHD even complained that movie mode was actually very limiting compared to the stills M mode, as it seems they designed the menus to be a photography camera first.

Why wouldn't they have made this an FS100-style shooter if that was the goal all along? Seems to me that they aimed to make a super-sensitive stills shooter (hence the A7 monicker and sitting along side it at the camera stores) and the happy side effect was that it happens to record great video.

That's why it seemed an honest assumption that the other A7 cameras would have similar looking video, but apparently that is a mistake to assume.

Because the SENSOR, as I said, was designed for video. The CAMERA was designed for stills. The 2 are not developed together. This sensor, or derivatives of it, will no doubt make their way into cameras that have video stylings and menus.
 
Interesting. If the A7S sensor was specifically designed for video, why is it in a still-shooter body with still-shooter ergonomics? EOSHD even complained that movie mode was actually very limiting compared to the stills M mode, as it seems they designed the menus to be a photography camera first.

Why wouldn't they have made this an FS100-style shooter if that was the goal all along? Seems to me that they aimed to make a super-sensitive stills shooter (hence the A7 monicker and sitting along side it at the camera stores) and the happy side effect was that it happens to record great video.

That's why it seemed an honest assumption that the other A7 cameras would have similar looking video, but apparently that is a mistake to assume.

I think the fact that they put SLOG2 into the camera shows it was first designed around video, a camera based on the A7 series that excelled at video, and it does.
 
Interesting. If the A7S sensor was specifically designed for video, why is it in a still-shooter body with still-shooter ergonomics?

To add to what others replied, my understanding is that there is a class of shooter out there that prefers to be able to work more discretely in public areas, they don't want to attract any attention and a large pro looking video camera always attracts attention. With the A7s you can take both stills and video very discretely especially with it's silent shutter option. One can get used to odd ergonomics, but large camera gear will always be large camera gear and hence more cumbersome to carry around and work with in public without being noticed. Also a small lightweight camera can be easier to handle for certain types of shots and is preferred in those circumstances compared to large bodied dedicated video cameras. So the A7s can serve very nicely as a dual purpose stills/video camera for some.
 
Interesting. If the A7S sensor was specifically designed for video, why is it in a still-shooter body with still-shooter ergonomics?

IMO its meant to compete with the GH4, and a hot stills camera gets far more attention and has a wider reach than something like a VG or FS camcorder. Sony will likely sell many more A7s' compared to e mount camcorders as a result.
 
A7s is not a stills camera.
I went out shooting today in FF silent shutter and cont. shooting. jpg. m42 lenses.
Got raped by sony. I'll try to reproduce that with silent shutter OFF.

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You shouldn't use silent shutter unless it is necessary; that is, unless you need silence.
There are a bunch of artifacts associated with it, most notably tons of jello and decreased internal bitdepth precision (= more noise and less DR).
 
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