Thanks for the comments and questions folks...
As for the shutter noise, slap and blur, I think I'd need to do some comparative testing but my impression is that it is a louder shutter than pretty much anything I have owned for the past few years apart from Phase One bodies. I also was at a Remembrance day ceremony today and didn't even want to shoot my EM-1 but the A7R would have been a total no-no. But as for shake, I will need to test for that when I get a full-time copy, which should be very soon.
One thing that has me scratching my head slightly is that to me the RAW files 'feel' somewhat different from the D800 and E. For some reason, maybe pre-production firmware, maybe different processing choices as the RAW file is part-baked, they feel like they have slightly less clean shadows, maybe a touch more chroma noise. I could so easily be wrong about this though, it is very hard to know without shooting a lot more frames and some comparative ones too. But from first impressions I would place this with an IQ180 rather than a D800 in terms of the processing feel of the file.
One more thing: I am quite intrigued by the 28-70 lens because it seems, to me, to have better edge performance than the 16-70 E Mount OSS that I recently tried, even after that lens had been repaired. Not perfect but actually better than I wold have thought for a Sony kit lens. It is full of distortion though, even at 50mm, and of course correcting that distortion chops off the edges and therefore loses the weakest parts but nonetheless...
Here is an in-camera JPEG compared to the simultaneously captured RAW file processed into JPEG with nothing but sharpening applied. It looks as if in-camera shading correction was applied to the RAW file but distortion corrections clearly weren't!
The full-sized files can be downloaded from
the gallery