Oops, I Did It Again

 
Sony A7 II, Nikkor 50mm f1.8D


Well, I succumbed to the lure of Full Frame again, for a few reasons. Traded in my Oly kit and came home with a new Sony A7II and FE 28-70 OSS and a little leftover store credit.

Why did I do this? A couple reasons.

For starters, we're going into the winter darks, and that means that all my after-work shooting will be after sunset. The Oly bodies are at their weakest here, especially when you get above ISO 1600. The reality is that is the real-world limit for getting really usable results from them, something I'd been hesitant to accept. The A7 is better at ISO 6400 than the E-M5II was at 1600. I needed something that was comfortable shooting in those conditions to get through the winter.

Second, I'd already been looking at what body I should plan for to get around the set of challenges I'd identified with the 16MP m43 bodies, mostly around short telephoto work in lowish light in the forest. What shocked me was the realization that the cheapest usable option was Sony FF, not APS-C or a newer m43 body. The A7II kit is actually cheaper than the E-M5III body only, and comparable in price to getting a Fuji X-T20 kit or Nikon Z50 kit. That's just insane. Combine the cheaper body with the fact that there's a surprising selection of modern, native and inexpensive glass for the Sony, with that selection being wider and cheaper than what's available in the crop systems and that just flips the whole FF cost/benefit ratio on its head. Most of these lenses have shown up in the last 18 months or so, with some being not even on the market quite yet (Tamron's upcoming f2.8 compact 20, 24 and 35mm lenses aren't yet out for example and the 20 at least is a must-buy for me). But Tamron and Samyang have been killing it here, and Sony's set of base FE lenses may be limited, but they're well targeted.

I'd not been looking at FF originally because I thought the economics didn't work. That remains true by and large for FF if DSLR's are off the table. The Nikon Z and PanaSigmaLeica L mount systems don't have any cheap entry level options and due to the poor lens line the EOS RP (a great handling little body for a great price) has no viable lenses without relying on the EF adapter for all your glass except the 35/1.8 Macro. But Sony's choice to keep their older A7 bodies in production and get aggressive on pricing has resulted in a value inversion compared to crop frame options. If you don't shoot fast action, and I don't, an A7II is just a lot more camera than an A6x00, Z50, X-T20/X-T30, or any EOS M or m43 body, and it's cheaper out the door. That's resulted in a boom in inexpensive but good enough glass for FE mount that has not followed to Z, R or L mounts as of yet.

Third, the Sony files let me get in a single shot the same sort of DR I needed to use HDR multishot to get with Oly. I generally didn't mind that, but I can definitely work more efficiently now. I liked the results I was getting, but I was mildly frustrated by the shots I was missing that I probably wouldn't have missed with APS-C or FF. Now I recently described the A7II files as kinda crappy, but before I made the decision I did take a close look at them. The out of camera colour is definitely a big miss, but the dynamic range and detail most certainly is excellent and the colour is fairly easily tweaked in CaptureOne, the files are actually noticeably easier to work on than the Olympus files because of the better data quality. They really look worse at first glance than they actually are. The D600 and D800 files are still better but the A7II to D600 gap is pretty much down to just the default colour rendering.

What am I giving up? Really good sealing, some ergonomics (the E-M1 is just better sorted ergonomically than the A7II), lens size (FF is just bigger in most cases), the touchscreen UI and that brilliant little 9-18 zoom.

What am I getting? Around 3 stops more working room in ISO (2 at the high end, 1 at the low end due to the lower base ISO), 1.5 to 2 stops of DR, my old lens collection becomes much more usable as the wide-ish lenses are now viable for adaptation (28/2.5, 35/3.5) plus my 50-135/3.5 is a more useful range. Oh, and a pretty solid system future. I don't need to worry about whether my investment will still be viable in the future, Sony is the dominant player in FF mirrorless and will remain a viable player for years, while m43 is really on the cusp of becoming a stagnant system with very little development going on since 2017.

So yes, the A7II has become the first FF digital body that I've owned 2 copies of. I even actually bought new this time, they're so inexpensive that going used made no economic sense. Lets see if I manage to take 7500+ images with it, like I did over the last 4 months with the Oly kit. And this time I got an AF lens, so I think I'll take a miss on my biggest frustration with the A7II last year. I like shooting manual lenses, but I don't like being stuck shooting manual lenses.

And on another note, 200 shots into the A7II's career and I've now exceeded my stretch goal of 10233 images for the year. I'm very happy with that.