So it's been a bit now since the A7 / A7R came out.
What do you Canon users think about it as a Canon body replacement ?
- How do you like the AF using a Metabones adapter ?
- What do you think about the quality of the adapter (i.e. have you encountered asymmetric images, possibly due to the skewness of the adapter). Have you preferred to get another adapter, losing AF but gaining image quality ?
- Handling with a big lens (like a 24-70 f/2.8 II or even a 70-200 f/2.8 IS) and a small body, connected by the adapter ?
Any other comments from the point of view of treating the Sony as a Canon mount camera ?
My thoughts are this camera is not a replacement, but it depends. If all you care about is image quality, then maybe. I have the a7r and the Metabones III adapter. The original thought was to simply bolt on my Canon mount lenses and be done. But once you start using this camera, you realize how great it is to have this kind of quality in such a small package. But then you mount a big lens and that small package benefit diminishes and/or completely disappears, along with any reasonably quick autofocus. As far as I know, the only fast and accurate autofocus adapter/lens combo is a Sony A lens / LAEA4 adapter.
Personally I don't value autofocus much, so that part doesn't bother me. Manually focusing almost any lens on this camera is great w/ the zoom and focus peaking features, and in my opinion more precise than any autofocus system (especially with wide angle lenses). The only Canon autofocus lens I use much is the 70-200 f/4 IS, and that is incredibly slow to focus with the Metabones adapter. My Canon lenses are: Zeiss 25 f/2, Zeiss 35 f/2, Canon 90 ts, and the 70-200. It may be that a faster lens, say f/2 or 2.8 would do better, but I haven't heard that. AF gets close then hunts back and forth in small increments for 1/2-1 second before it locks green.
The lens size really got to me though; in my opinion it ruins the "gestalt" or whatever of this camera. And so far Sony has come out with some very good primes in the 35 f/2.8 and 55 f/1.8. These are quite small compared to what I have available in my Canon glass. I actually went out and got a Leica 90 f/2. So my standard kit is now the Sony 35 and 55 plus the Leica 90. I did a comparison in one of the Sony threads; Zeiss 100 f/2 vs. Leica. I just couldn't get past the huge benefit in size of the Leica (with Novoflex adapter):
In order to get the full quality out of this system you need to be quite careful and meticulous (and this is coming from a technical camera user). I really love the a7r, but it is because I am using very good quality lenses that are also very small.
My Metabones adapter seems fine, i.e. no built-in tilt feature
but again, AF is pretty much unusable in all but the best lighting situations.
So here is "my" conclusion:
If you have (and regularly use) relatively small Canon lenses (like the 35 f/2, 85 f/1.8, 24-105 f/4), AND you are in situations where you can slow focus / manual focus, then I think it is a reasonable replacement that will give you great quality.
Other than that situation above, you will not be gaining much
as a replacement body. Big lenses make the kit still kinda big so the size advantage goes away. Hand holding and autofocusing will not only be frustrating, but will rarely give you a noticeably better file. When I use the 70-200 the AF is off.
Dave