Choosing lenses/adapters for my future A7S: advice needed

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wilecoyote

Member
Hi all:

I'm planning on purchasing an A7S for a job in about a month. Unlike most, I don't have a huge collection of Canon lenses that I need to keep using, so I'll have to pick an E-mount lens too to use as my "main" lens. This opens the following considerations:

1) From what I've seen, most of the E-mount lenses are APS-C only. Can the Sony shoot 4K in APS-C mode too? I haven't found a definitive answer after some quick searching. (I.e.: if I buy now an APS-C only lens and in one year I decide to go 4K, will my lens become useless?)

2) I do have a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 EF-S lens, which I'm using now. I could invest in a "good" full-frame lens (like the Sony-Zeiss 24-70), to use for photography and more controlled jobs (ads, music videos), and then keep using the Tamron for more run-and-gun, handheld-style jobs, where I'll shoot APS-C. So, which adapter should I buy for this? I.e.: a Canon adapter that can take an EF-S lens to shoot in APS-C mode… and that, for maximum flexibility, can also take normal EF lenses, in case I decide to buy some new ones in the future.

(I know that this adapter thing has been discussed to death; I apologize. But after reading one thread after another, I'm more confused than before, and besides, I haven't read much about using EF-S lenses with this camera).
 
1) - Don't know - would be interesting to find out the answer to this as welL!

2) - May have seen I posted it in another thread -> I just picked up an A7s, and only had Canon glass. The Tamron 24-70 is my go-to for most of my live event shooting. The metabones adapter (mark iv) didn't work well at all with any lenses I tried, and even caused the camera to stop recording at times. I returned the adapter and have bought 2 Rokinon e-mount lenses. I may play with some older vintage type lenses and use adapters, but those will be full manual aperture lenses. I won't touch any adapters that have to electronically communicate with the lens to be able to use it, not for anything I'm being paid for anyway. Not worth the headache and potentially missing a shot (and making me look like an idiot to a client). Go full manual lenses, or E-mount lenses would be my suggestion!
 
I believe I read somewhere that the crop mode can output 4k as well, but trough internal upscaling.
 
chappelldigital said:
I won't touch any adapters that have to electronically communicate with the lens to be able to use it, not for anything I'm being paid for anyway. Not worth the headache and potentially missing a shot (and making me look like an idiot to a client). Go full manual lenses, or E-mount lenses would be my suggestion!
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I hear you, but on the other hand… My idea for the APS-C lens is to use it as a "secondary" lens, since I won't have that many opportunities to use it. Given this, if I buy an adapter, it will be potentially cheaper than buying an entire new lens, and besides, it gives me the possibility to add more lenses to my kit in the future (things like the Dog Schidt optics, for example, come only in EF or PL mounts).
 
Sony do say it will output 4K in APS-C mode. Quite strange.

Don't crop modes only make a point when we're using a higher pixel number on the sensor than the final output? (like 12mp for 1080p), so a crop mode lets you use a native center 2mp part of the sensor to get a s16 crop for example, that's very useful. But when you have a mode where you can record ALL the sensor pixels (4K in full frame mode) wouldn't it pointless to offer crop modes? You just crop to 2.8k later in post for s35 and to 1080p for s16, having a crop mode in-camera shouldn't give better image quality than post cropping. This would be like offering a crop mode on a 21mp DSLR (in stills mode), pointless and nobody does it because we have the option to get the full 21 mp resolution sensor output and crop later much more percisely and freely, even reframe, pan, stabilize, etc.

Perhaps there's a bit of magic going on in the upscaling though!
 
The point of shooting APS-C, from what I've read, is that the rolling shutter is much less pronounced in that mode, so it can be useful to shoot that way when going handheld.
 
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