One of my favorite sites just did (photoreview.com.au) of the A7 (but not the A7r yet). It is sad as an aside that even the guy who runs canonrumors.com is buying one (and Canon has no more announcements planned until April of next year!). Here are the interesting facts:
- The Sony A7 is about the same size as the Olympus OM-D EM-1 and just a little bigger than the diminuativ EM-5 I just used. Wow.
- They did their first Imatest on JPEG (RAW should be better!) with the Zeiss Sonnar T FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA lens (what a mouthful). Imatest show maximum resolution at ISO 100 or 3550 lw/ph (?!!) center and 3300 lw/ph edge which is an effective 17.5 MP (averaging the center and the edge). Wow that’s pretty amazing given the 24MP resolution it has
- This resolution holds up with with out of the camera JPEG to ISO 3200 where it is still 3050 lw/ph center and 2750 lw/ph edge and very little noise.
- You can even shoot very low noise shots at ISO 6400 (2800 center, 2550 edge) so that is incredibly usable 11MP effective resolution.
As a basis of comparison, the Sony RX-100 M2 at its best is an 11MP effective and the Olympus OM-D EM-5 is 11MP effective as well with zooms.
Also for older comparison, Photozone says that my faithful old (and now dead) Canon 5D Mark II with Canon’s high quality EF 35mm F/2 USM IS is 3721 lw/ph at F/4 and 3132 lw/ph at edge. Wow, that’s actually about the same kind of quality as the Sony at 17.6MP effective with a 21MP sensor which shows that the Sony with good glass is about as effective as Canon’s older system in effective resolution
