Wednesday 3 February 2021

Playing Some More With The A7II


A7II, Nikkor 105/2.5 AI-S

I've had the A7II out a couple times more, and have been having fun with it and my Nikkor manual focus lenses. It's just a solid platform for those uses and somewhat nicer than the Fuji's for adapting old 35mm lenses. This is for a couple reasons.

1. Field of view. Because there's no crop factor, the lenses have the same field of view as they do on film. Since my current selection was largely built with FF in mind (film and the D800 and/or D750 I bought them for) this works better than they do on crop like the Fuji's, or even my D300

2. IBIS. Yeah, the A7II's IBIS is nothing to write home about, giving at best 2 stops of stabilization. But it's there and it does save shots.

3. Better handling in winter. Bigger buttons beat dials when you tend to leave things in Aperture Priority and are wearing gloves. I do retain a preference for Fuji's ergonomics when ungloved, if only for the joystick (Need a Mark 3 on Sony to get that).

It's not perfect though, the big issues as a MF platform are:

1. No focal length written to EXIF. This is key for figuring out which lens you used where. Even my X-T1 has this even though it gains no functionality beyond EXIF from that.

2. Over-sensitive EVF eye sensor causes inconsistent LCD/EVF switching when using the LCD tilted. The Fuji's suffer from this too, but much less due to a better tuned sensor

3. Crap battery life. The main issue this time is self-discharge. the Fuji's sit better with a battery in the camera and their batteries self-discharge slower when sitting. You always have to charge the Sony batteries if the camera has been sitting for a while, not so much with the Fuji's.

All in all, I'm really looking at a platform for shooting FF manual lenses, and it's GOT to be mirrorless this time. Need to be patient though, as a work award I received may result in a free camera (usually it's a trip, but this year they can't really do that, the question is how are they going to handle alternate prizes)

 

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