A7II - One Week on the Second Go

 
Sony A7 II, Nikkor 50mm f1.8D

So I'm a week and around 450 images into the second time through with the A7II.

Things are going a little better this time. A lot of that is simply in the fact that I actually own an AF lens this time around, the FE 28-70 OSS is getting a lot of use. Most of the rest is simply in the fact that I've managed to keep my shooting interest up for most of  the year. I'm at a little less than 1/3 of the images I took with the A7II last year, in only a week.

I'd had 3 main complaints with the A7II the first time.

1. Battery life. After a year shooting with the X-T1 and E-M1/E-M5II pair I have a different take on it. The battery life on the A7II is just enough better than the Fuji or Oly bodies that it's noticeable. Putting the on/off back where it belongs does help manage battery life, as does the relatively fast start time. Much different experience than coming from the long-lived D800.

2. The over-sensitive EVF/LCD switch sensor. Yep, still annoying. It triggers at around twice the distance it should and doesn't disable when the screen is flipped out.

3. The buried format menu option. Still mildly annoying but no worse than Oly or Fuji. Nowhere near as nice as Nikon though. Not really annoying after a year with equally bad menus on other systems.

I do have a new item to add though, Sony's horrid Imaging Edge Mobile app. Whoever wrote this needs to be condemned to actually using it as their only interaction with a camera for a year.

The workflow for image transfer is actually really nice, you hit Fn while viewing an image, pick the images you want to transfer, trigger the transfer, then select the wifi network on your mobile, start the app, watch everything flow over and go from there. This is much nicer than the Fuji and Oly apps.

The downside? 50% or more of the time, the images disappear after the transfer is concluded, meaning you have to repeat the process 1-2 times before you can actually do anything with the transferred images.

Now for camera remote control, it's just a mess. No real control over camera settings, lousy framerates, poor UI and poor focus control. And with the mkIII's and later you lose tap to focus. I guess there's a reason why there's a half-dozen alternative apps for this (one of which I will most certainly buy)

The app, which replaced the already lousy Playmemories app, is just a complete gong show. At a moment where the competition is very rapidly getting better Sony not only got worse, but managed to make the one thing the app did well almost completely unreliable.