Sony a7 IV

jonpais

jonpais

Well-known member
The a7 IV has been anticipated for a long while by Sony shooters, but the worse color, poor rolling shutter and 60p crop ruled it out for me as a second body to my a7s III. The a7s III is pretty sensational once you balance the color. Here’s an HDR clip with minimal correction.

https://youtu.be/QItsQTz09b4 (HDR)
 
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Regardless of the many negative a snipes a new camera gets, happens to all of them I think Sony have a winner on their hands with this one. As Gerald Undone has demonstrated the 4K 50/60 crop has way less rolling shutter and this would work for me having a number of S35 lenses. I think the thing that has surprised me so far out of what I have watched is Potato Jets night time comparisons below 12800 ISO between the A7Siii and the A7iv. More than surprised me. It's only once in a blue moon that I go much over 3200 so again this suits me. Check out from 9.54 onwards.

Chris Young

 
jonpais said:
Why do you say that? The build quality is on par with the a7s III.
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the sensor. why do you end up with more color shift

and beyond build quality, there could be other electrical components where they save money. noisier circuits or something. I don't know
 
ahalpert said:
the sensor. why do you end up with more color shift

and beyond build quality, there could be other electrical components where they save money. noisier circuits or something. I don't know
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What precisely does build quality have to do with the color? When it comes to noise, the a7 IV is much cleaner than either the a7 III or the R6 at higher ISOs.
 
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when I said cheaper parts in the context of color shifts, I was referring to the electronics not the housing

and we know for a fact that it's cheaper to manufacture, or they wouldn't be selling it for less. i'm just speculating about why there are color issues

noisier circuits -> compared to a7siii. even just interfering with reading color info. there are many steps in the signal pathway
 
ahalpert said:
when I said cheaper parts in the context of color shifts, I was referring to the electronics not the housing

and we know for a fact that it's cheaper to manufacture, or they wouldn't be selling it for less. i'm just speculating about why there are color issues

noisier circuits -> compared to a7siii. even just interfering with reading color info. there are many steps in the signal pathway
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I don't believe your comments about noisier circuits or cheaper parts are relevant, but hey, whatever. It sounds like an imagination working in overdrive if you'll pardon my saying so.
First of all, the a7 IV is not a particularly noisy camera - it is superior to its rival, the Canon R5, it does better than the a7s III between 640 and 12800 if I recall correctly, and it's cleaner
than the a7 III, which I owned for three years and whose noise was never an issue. So there's that. As far as the color, each and every alpha camera has different color - the a1 is different from
the a7s III; the a7 III is different from the a7 IV. Whether someone prefers a slight green shift or a slight magenta shift, none are perfect yet any of them could be intercut with footage from any other camera, or even one of the more expensive cinema cameras. The a1, a7s III and a7 IV share close to the exact same body and processor. Do you have anything more than speculation to prove that the a7 IV is somehow of inferior build quality?
 
just general knowledge of camera manufacturing. even if 2 camera lines are manufactured with the exact same parts, 1 of them can be held to a higher quality control standard and a lower tolerance of deviation in the performance of its parts. that was determined to be the difference in dynamic range performance between the large format alexas and the regular, according to John Brawley having spoken with the manufacturers. (Only cream of the crop sensors were selected to go into the larger format camera, and it was the variation in specific unit performance that made the difference)

you were the one who mentioned that the a7iv had worse color performance than the a7siii. what do you infer to be the reason?

and why wouldn't sony be cutting corners over a more expensive camera? the a1 has superior performance in certain fundamentals of IQ than the a7siii, for example

re: performance between 640 and 12800, that's not a surprise seeing as the a7siii higher gain circuit doesn't kick in until 12800. the a7iv probably has one that kicks in sooner. I believe that most stills cameras do

then there's internal noise reduction which probably can't be turned off, muddying the whole picture of how these things actually perform

at any rate, I was discussing why the color fidelity would be inferior. i didn't mean to imply that specific circuits were leading to a noisier picture, just inaccurate color
 
ahalpert said:
just general knowledge of camera manufacturing. even if 2 camera lines are manufactured with the exact same parts, 1 of them can be held to a higher quality control standard and a lower tolerance of deviation in the performance of its parts. that was determined to be the difference in dynamic range performance between the large format alexas and the regular, according to John Brawley having spoken with the manufacturers. (Only cream of the crop sensors were selected to go into the larger format camera, and it was the variation in specific unit performance that made the difference)

you were the one who mentioned that the a7iv had worse color performance than the a7siii. what do you infer to be the reason?

and why wouldn't sony be cutting corners over a more expensive camera? the a1 has superior performance in certain fundamentals of IQ than the a7siii, for example

re: performance between 640 and 12800, that's not a surprise seeing as the a7siii higher gain circuit doesn't kick in until 12800. the a7iv probably has one that kicks in sooner. I believe that most stills cameras do

then there's internal noise reduction which probably can't be turned off, muddying the whole picture of how these things actually perform

at any rate, I was discussing why the color fidelity would be inferior. i didn't mean to imply that specific circuits were leading to a noisier picture, just inaccurate color
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TLDR: There is nothing whatsoever inferior about the build quality of the a7 IV. When you've done a teardown, please enlighten us about the build quality. The rest is just pure fantasy. The viewfinder of the a7 IV isn't as high resolution as the a7s III, so there's cost savings there. Not sure what noise reduction has to do with cheaper parts or build quality, probably because it doesn't.
 
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ahalpert said:
really? then why the **** do so many a7iii shutters break? I've heard this multiple times from photographers who have experienced it

https://petapixel.com/2021/03/27/son...cking-cameras/

and that doesn't even have to be a problem with the cost of the parts themselves. it could be that they're assembled more quickly and sloppily than in a higher-tier camera
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What do a7 III shutters have to do with your insistence that the a7 IV has inferior build quality? Unlike you, I don't jump to conclusions without the facts, and I'm not about to guess why just about every camera ever made from the beginning of time has had parts fail.

You are steering the conversation way off topic. No one on earth has suggested the a7 IV has cheap parts or build quality issues, yet you are already starting rumors.
 
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I've never had an issue with my a7siii from 640 up to 3200. If Sony could clean up some of the noise from 3200-12800 in a firmware update that would be great...
 
jonpais said:
What do a7 III shutters have to do with your insistence that the a7 IV has inferior build quality? Unlike you, I don't jump to conclusions without the facts, and I'm not about to guess why just about every camera ever made from the beginning of time has had parts fail.

You are steering the conversation way off topic. No one on earth has suggested the a7 IV has cheap parts or build quality issues, yet you are already starting rumors.
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I'm making an observation about general camera manufacturing practices

To the point - what is your hypothesis for the greater color shift of the a7iv? And do you think that they could produce a similar sensor or imaging pathway at greater cost that would perform better?
 
ahalpert said:
I'm making an observation about general camera manufacturing practices

To the point - what is your hypothesis for the greater color shift of the a7iv? And do you think that they could produce a similar sensor or imaging pathway at greater cost that would perform better?
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Actually, if CVP hadn't compared the a7 IV's colors directly to the a7s III (whose colors are nothing to write home about either), I wouldn't have been aware of the difference - and in fact, most reviewers appear to have been unaware of just how much the newer camera departs from its predecessors in that regard.

Nevertheless, a7 IV footage can still be easily intercut with the other alpha cameras.

As far as I'm concerned, the colors of the a7s III are fine in rec.709 (the color chips on the X-Rite line up almost perfectly on the vectors of the vectorscope in Davinci Resolve, skin tones are pleasing enough if not mind-blowing) and it's the HDR WCG colors I'm most concerned about.

Unfortunately, as I've written extensively about elsewhere, reviewers don't test cameras' handling of WCG and things like banding, noise, highlight roll off, skin tones, etc. in HDR.

Erik Messerschmidt is the first filmmaker in my experience to even mention those things in relation to a new camera when he brought them up while talking about the pre-production model of the DJI 4D in the company's launch video.
 
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