Ming sent me a note and was wondering why I said what I did. I appreciate that to be honest. It was not meant as a personal attack on him but anyway I will reply tonight after my day shoot. It's actually one reviewer I actually like so I was a bit surprised by some of his comments. So I will first apologize in public than send him a nice note tonight. Okay time to put this body in full working order today. Real paying gig. LOL
I admit to my real issue with the negative on this release , it's the worst I have seen in recent years. So some of my frustration was thrown his way. For that I'm sorry and I kept saying I should leave this thread. As a admin I should know better
I have to agree with you Guy, this camera release was a strange one indeed, even for Sony. ReviewMania, at its best?
I haven't fully decided where I come down on the A7RII camera yet because I haven't done more than hold one. I didn't even fire the shutter. I can say the grip is more ergonomic to my hand than the small-bricks-with-tootsie-roll glued on feeling my A7R and A7S have. Why not? Because I already made up my mind there is no way I can give up four stops of higher ISO for the work I do. For me, my A7S right now is the perfectly balanced camera.
When the A7S Mark II comes out though, I'll likely be first in that pre-order line.
With that said, I am close to many who are using the A7R II and really love it. I'm also blessed in living just over the hill, seven miles from Samy's Camera and their Fairfax headquarters location. For those not familiar with the camera dealers in LA, Samy's is the largest West Coast camera dealer, who positively RULES cameras sold in Southern California. So we always get the same kind of major market introduction attention NYC gets, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. In the case of the A7R II, it was a couple weeks later.
But that doesn't mean we didn't get the same quality. The Samy's introduction featured Sony Interchangeable Cameras USA Product Manager Kenta Honjo, Sony Senior Technical Representative Rob Shelley, and my good friend Orange County, California Wedding and Portrait Photographer Paul Gero. Paul is one of the Sony Artisan of Imagery shooters, so is partially sponsored by Sony and paid to do these presentations I would expect. Paul also got his camera when first available, and has been using it in his busy Wedding and Portrait business this past month.
I felt since I was invited to the introduction, why not take my A7S along with my 35mm 'Cron and film it. Many of the subjects being brought up and discussed here on GetDPI are also subjects that came up in questions from the audience in this largest camera introduction in Samy's history. They didn't use the big classroom for this one, they used the entire first floor of the building! They did three (3) one and a half hour sessions over the afternoon. The information was so good, I filmed the third and final one. NOBODY I spoke with afterwords was sorry they invested the time to come and see this presentation.
I've cut the edit down to 33:00, which is long for a video I normally do, but I felt the value of the material they were demonstrating how to use and the questions they were answering - as Sony employees, the "horses mouth" so to speak - was worth the running time. The link for those interested in watching is here:
Sony A7R II: From The Experts At Samys - The Camera Forum®
I learned a lot from this, hope many of you do as well. Uncompressed RAW is coming, just nobody is sure or is saying, exactly when. The target is 16 bit too, though again nobody is saying much more than that. Will be a backward looking firmware upgrade or a whole new hardware version? I expect the latter, given the normal Sony method of introducing new features only on new models. Sony is a consumer electronics manufacturer. You get the benefit in a less expensive cost, but pay the price in needing to purchase newly developed features and upgrades.
Oh, and don't shoot the messenger here guys, I'm just the DP on this one