The Sony A7R III takes the A7R II and essentially puts it in the body of Sony’s professional A9 camera. The A7R III has twice the resolution of the professional A9 and runs at twice the frame rate of the old A7R II, along with many other features that previously were unique to the A9. The A7R III adds a much bigger battery, a second card slot, a third memory recall position on the top dial and many other important new features to the old A7R II.
The new Sony A7R III is a joy to shoot. Once set up, everything just goes, and the pictures look great. Better than DSLRs, you never need glasses to see the rear LCD; the electronic finder also works for menu setting, playback and zooming-in on both playback and shooting!
The Sony A7R III runs at up to 10 frames per second, and does it silently, if you activate this in a menu. I turned it on while shooting an event and it took a little bit getting use to it not making a noise. Awesome for you wedding photographers.
This is the first Sony mirrorless other than the pro A9 with two card slots, and has just as tough a mechanical shutter, “tested” to 500,000 cycles! The mechanical shutter is tough, and the silent electronic shutter has no moving parts to wear out.
The AF system is awesomely quick: focus and fire. It also offers facial recognition autofocus over the entire frame, not just in the center of the picture like full-frame DSLRs. Autofocus is essentially instantaneous with the right lenses. Presuming you activate face recognition in a menu, the A7R3 instantly recognizes faces, focuses on them and tracks them as they move around. It works flawlessly. The only way to trick the A7R3’s facial recognition is when you have several faces at different distances for which it may swap back and forth as to which face it thinks is most important. However, you can easily program it to which faces are the most important.
It also has 399 phase-detection AF sensors that it uses to focus on things that aren’t faces. These sensors cover the central picture area inside the big gray brackets in the finder.
Whats not to like about the Sony A7R III…
● 10 FPS, up from 5 FPS.
● Two card slots.
● Bigger NP-FZ100 battery lasts about 1,500 shots in normal shooting (CIPA rated 530 single shots; old A7R II was rated only 290 shots).
● Three memory recalls on the top mode dial, with four more presets almost as easy to recall.
● New thumb-nubbin controller on rear.
● Touch screen, but only for AF point selection.
● 425 contrast AF points, up from 25.
● Ability to shoot-through flickering lighting.
● Two separate AEL and AF-ON buttons, instead of just one button with a selector lever as on A7RII, A7SII, A7II and A7.
● C3 button moved to left side of camera; it’s on the right on A7RII, A7SII, A7II and A7.
● Higher resolution electronic viewfinder.
● In-camera 5-axis sensor-shift stabilization now claims 5.5 stops improvement.
● Pixel Shift mode uses sensor-shifting to make four sequential scans of a fixed image that, if combined later in your computer with Sony’s “Imaging Edge” software, might improve resolution. This only works on a tripod and only with rigid subjects; if anything moves even slightly you’ll get weird color fringes.
● 14-bit raw.
● Shoots 4K video using the entire 36mm width of the image sensor.
● Uncompressed 4K HDMI output.
● XAVC S high-bitrate video formats for 60~100 MBPS video.
● Under- and over-crank video from 1 FPS to 120 FPS, MOS (without sound).
Metabones Mark V Adapter
The Metabones Canon EF to Sony E-Mount Mark V Adapter is the best I’ve used. This is great for all of you canon shooters.
Summary
Stick with lenses sold by Sony, be they branded Sony or Zeiss, for the best results as you expect. Sony’s G and GM lenses are especially excellent in every way on the A7R III.
Adapting lenses of other brands, even though these lenses may be state-of-the-art on those manufacturers’ cameras, probably won’t be that breathtaking on the A7R III. The Sony G and GM lenses on the Sony A7R III won’t let you down.