Looking Back - The NEX-7

 
NEX-7, Micro-Nikkor 85/3.5 VR G DX

The NEX-7 is one of the three mirrorless bodies that I shot a truly significant amount of work with, the other two being the Panasonic G1 and the original Olympus OM-D E-M5.

I found the NEX-7 to be an outstanding street & walkabout camera, but despite its then class-leading resolution, it was a truly poor landscape camera due to the utterly terrible tripod mount and complete lack of any remote release option. It simply wasn't possible to sturdily mount the NEX-7 to a tripod, you had to use a tripod foot on an adapter and/or lens for a solid mount. Ironically that made the NEX-7 the best landscape shooting option for APS-C A mount shooters as it had the best low-ISO IQ of all the APS-C Sony bodies since it did not give up noise/IQ performance for a light-stealing pellical mirror unlike its sibling the A77.

For street shooting the combination of small size, good overall handling and a high quality EVF made it work quite well for street shooting. The only real downside was the relatively large size of the E ZA 24/1.8, which was the go-to street lens for this camera. One overall challenge with E mount was the general lack of mid-speed/mid-size lenses. There eventually was a nice selection of smallish f2.8 lenses from Sony (16/2.8, 20/2.8 pancakes) and Sigma (the 19, 30 and 60 f2.8 trio) but aside from the 35/1.8 OSS, there aren't any really compact APS-C options. That's a significant contrast to m43 and Fuji X mounts, both of which are well supplied with compact f1.7-2 lenses in the mild wide to mild tele range.

As I was an early adopter (I had one of the very first NEX-7's to hit Canada, some 6 months after it was announced) this was even worse, as the earlier NEX bodies hadn't really driven development of lenses. Even with Sony's general ignoring of the APS-C side of things there is a really solid selection of lenses for APS-C E mount users, especially if you are willing to manual focus.

I also briefly picked up a NEX-7 last May, which I returned fairly quickly. While the handling remained good, what was class-leading AF in early 2012 was noticeably slow in 2018, and of course I made the decision to replace the NEX-7 and D800 with a single A7II. That mostly worked, and probably would have worked better if I'd had a single AF lens for the system.

The NEX-7 did have some distinct issues that Sony could have resolved. The biggest was the lack of configurability of the Manual Focus assist. This was an ongoing issue for me, as you could not set the zoom function to button only, it was either button with manual lenses and auto with AF lenses, or off.

Overall, I produced excellent work with this system, but can't really see myself looking at APS-C E mount unless Sony actually puts some effort into it and introduces an SLR-style body and a selection of APS-C oriented primes. Oh, and I'd have to want to give up the X-T1, which seems unlikely right now.