It seems obvious to me that the 7r has strong vignetting and corner shift that do not show on the 7. Disregard all the expert opinions and follow your own eyes. I bought the 7 for exactly these reasons. turnstyle wrote:
Why would the somewhat different lighting between pairs of comparative shots consistently result in darker, pinker corners for the A7r -- in photos from two totally different people?
I don't mean for that to sound snarky, I hope it doesn't!
I defer to a ton of amazing expertise here, but my eyes seem to keep telling me a different story?
Um yeah, not sure about what people are thinking, but it's been proven IMO that the A7R has much more pronounced vignetting and color shift than the A7, with just about every lens that I've seen examples of on both cameras.
Yes, I think that's a given now. Bit like the NEX6 vs NEX7. I have tested down to 28 RF (CV Ultron 28/2) on the a7 and this lens shows no obvious colour shift although there is definite lateral shading, easily removed with the Flat Field plug-in in LR. Cannot yet comment on presence / absence of corner smearing because I was taking sky shots to check for colour shift only.
turnstyle wrote:
Why would the somewhat different lighting between pairs of comparative shots consistently result in darker, pinker corners for the A7r -- in photos from two totally different people?
I don't mean for that to sound snarky, I hope it doesn't!
I defer to a ton of amazing expertise here, but my eyes seem to keep telling me a different story?
Isn't it just an overall difference in white balance? Are you sure it's just the corner that's more pinkish?
Nanh wrote:
Isn't it just an overall difference in white balance? Are you sure it's just the corner that's more pinkish?
+1 @ this ^^ as a piece of the puzzle.
I also see an overall difference in color and luminance rather than a "corner issue". (see crops)
Both cameras were set to Auto for WB. Given the two very different colors of lighting, the amount of adjustment being applied could be 1) applying more warmth to the cool soft lighting 2) applying more gamma to try and get the scene to have white/black points closer setpoints of (x,x,x) and (y,y,y).
The amount of change being applied to a low contrast cool light is different from the amount of change being applied to a high contrast white light. This is part of why I never shoot Auto WB. I'd rather know that I shot the image at a given temperature (say 5500K) and then make my own adjustments to gamma/color after assessing which lighting my subject was being illuminated with ... as ambient changes are very difficult for us to evaluate in changing light since our eye/brain accommodates very well as those changes are occurring.
Illuminating a neutral subject with a soft cool light will require adding warmth to render that subject neutral. Illuminating a neutral subject with a specular warm light will require cooling it to render it neutral. Pretty basic color theory stuff in concept but when you recognize that the camera is trying to make decisions on "how much" to apply and just like a camera can be "fooled" or "slightly off" @ applying too much or too little exposure from a given subject/lighting combination ... so too can it apply color adjustments that are slightly off. The camera is making certain assumptions about your lighting and subject (based on the programming).
Shooting in different lighting with different color and different contrast levels is going to have the camera trying to bring each image to what it is assuming to be "most correct" based on its "read" of the scene's starting point. For that reason, I would be judicious about putting too much information from images shot in different lighting conditions at how two different cameras handle them via AWB. A camera making global adjustments from its read of the "important areas" in mixed lighting may render one portion of the scene "correct" while applying an overcompensating effect for a different area.
Looking at the circled areas, we know that the subject is the same color. Yet the two images are vastly different, both in color balance and in luminance values. If this portion of the scene is this vastly different, why wouldn't the corners also be different. This isn't the camera being different, it is the response to vastly different lighting. Judging corners and color shift from lighting that is THAT different doesn't bode well, imo, for making meaningful comparative assessments.
Casual observance of the image might seem like the two images were of the same scene, but the lighting is significantly different. Realizing that everything is energy/light from origin to atmosphere to subject reflectance to pass through the lens, to microlens / sensor ... the only way to really compare two diff sensors response is to have the other aspects be the same. While the lens was the same and the subject was the same ... the lighting was very different, thus two variables @ camera (sensor/response) and lighting. These two cameras did NOT receive the same optically projected image ... thus, how can you make any objective comparative analysis between the two.when you absolutely know that they received different projected images onto them.
My neck of the woods is not blessed with good lens/camera testing conditions for a couple more days, a mix of fog and rain, can't get much worse than that! I did fire off some shots in my house at around 3 meters last night. My CV35/1.2 v.2 is the best of the bunch across the frame. Both the ZM25/2.8 and ZM35/2.8 needed stopping down to f/11 to get crisp corners, but were of course very good across much of the frame at larger apertures. The CV15/4.5 does indeed have bigtime vignetting! I'll need to work with that one outdoors to see if it is salvageable or will go on sale, but it's severe enough that you almost need to overexpose the center to get enough exposure of the edges and corners. Time to download the new Lightroom release candidate so I can mess with the RAWs, and finally learn to use the flat field plug-in.
I briefly loaded up the 100/2 Makro-Planar, and boy was it nice to nail focus wide open every... single... time It looks like these cameras will be great for some RF glass in some circumstances, but will really shine with well-chosen SLR lenses and the native glass released in the future.
edwardkaraa wrote:
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your comments. In fact I only received my adapter yesterday so didn't have much time for shooting. The weather is very nice in Thailand so hopefully in the weekend I also heard the same thing from my supplier, that Sony is cranking up the production and in fact my camera arrived 2 weeks early.
Taylor Sherman wrote:
Um yeah, not sure about what people are thinking, but it's been proven IMO that the A7R has much more pronounced vignetting and color shift than the A7, with just about every lens that I've seen examples of on both cameras.
Yeah, but at this point if neither works really well with wide RF lenses (including good performance wide open),
I decided to change my wide strategy, forget about my small 21 SEM and take the full advantage
of the high resolution of the A7R using the best lenses which do work. I feel like telling myself "yeah, it kind of works"
would be exactly what I tried with my NEX-7 and it didn't work for me.
On the other hand 28R is very small and light and I can live with it perfectly fine, especially if it gives me
great image quality. The same about the 19R, which is heavier, but not big neither. And from me tests
with NEX-6, it's the best wide angle lens I have ever had in my hands.
I have seen some images from D800E and those lenses and some early samples from A7R.
I believe this will be a real improvement for me. Remember, with RX1R setting up such high standard,
to get me excited with image quality, I need 36 stinking glorious megapixels A7 won't cut it.
Using super-expensive Leica M wides and be forced to stop down to get half-a$$ results makes no sense to me.
I shoot wide open most of the time, even often my landscapes...
And if my strategy works and I like shooting with A7R, I will sell a couple of M wides to offset the cost
(I guess not that easy these days).
Matt, it is definitely my experience with the ZM 25/2.8 and 35/2. They both need f/11 for optimal sharpness.
I don't shoot much landscapes but when I do, I will certainly make sure to shoot well stopped down.
The good side is that my lenses have gained a new character due to the exaggerated field curvature in the image periphery, while they were rather "clinical" on the M9.
So to sum it up, the A7 is not the ultimate solution for RF glass users, but it will make do until something better comes out. Being relatively cheap does help a lot in buying this less than ideal purchase.
uscmatt99 wrote:
Edward,
My neck of the woods is not blessed with good lens/camera testing conditions for a couple more days, a mix of fog and rain, can't get much worse than that! I did fire off some shots in my house at around 3 meters last night. My CV35/1.2 v.2 is the best of the bunch across the frame. Both the ZM25/2.8 and ZM35/2.8 needed stopping down to f/11 to get crisp corners, but were of course very good across much of the frame at larger apertures. The CV15/4.5 does indeed have bigtime vignetting! I'll need to work with that one outdoors to see if it is salvageable or will go on sale, but it's severe enough that you almost need to overexpose the center to get enough exposure of the edges and corners. Time to download the new Lightroom release candidate so I can mess with the RAWs, and finally learn to use the flat field plug-in.
I briefly loaded up the 100/2 Makro-Planar, and boy was it nice to nail focus wide open every... single... time It looks like these cameras will be great for some RF glass in some circumstances, but will really shine with well-chosen SLR lenses and the native glass released in the future.
p.133 #10 · A7/A7r - performance with WA RF lenses
All good points snowboarder. I had a really difficult time choosing, for the same reasons, between the A7 and A7r. I decided to start with an A7 as it allows me to shoot with all of my current M and F mount glass (except the CV15/4.5) without too much fixing going on in PP. It's also cheaper and has the electronic first curtain shutter. But as native glass becomes available, if I like the system, I can see myself getting a second higher MP body to use with it, especially if they release these manual focus wide-angles from Zeiss.
This is very interesting information. Obviously all adapters are not equal. As the interest for M lenses on the A7(r) seems to be quite big, I've been imagining adapters that slightly (within the boundaries of physics) optimize the performance of RF glass on the the camera. Perhaps even containing some sort optical element.
Someone more knowledgeable in optics is welcome to bash
p.133 #12 · A7/A7r - performance with WA RF lenses
edwardkaraa wrote:
It seems obvious to me that the 7r has strong vignetting and corner shift that do not show on the 7. Disregard all the expert opinions and follow your own eyes. I bought the 7 for exactly these reasons.
I don't disagree with Edward @ follow you own eyes ... just be sure you know what you are really looking at first. My eyes (and my numbers) tell me that the lighting is very different (see crops).
A Leica or Zeiss shot in soft cool light may not look as "sharp" as a Vivitar shot in specular neutral balanced light. From that some would suggest that the Vivitar is sharper, but it is really that the subject is being illuminated in higher contrast light, and thus deduce that those other lenses are no better than the Vivitar.
I'm just saying that making comparisons with highly variable ambient lighting isn't as much of an objective comparison as we might like to believe ... and we wonder why we've gotten "mixed results" that range from "works great", to "that sucks" from the plethora of "real world" images we've been using to make comparisons.
p.133 #13 · A7/A7r - performance with WA RF lenses
uscmatt99 wrote:
Edward,
My neck of the woods is not blessed with good lens/camera testing conditions for a couple more days, a mix of fog and rain, can't get much worse than that! I did fire off some shots in my house at around 3 meters last night. My CV35/1.2 v.2 is the best of the bunch across the frame. Both the ZM25/2.8 and ZM35/2.8 needed stopping down to f/11 to get crisp corners, but were of course very good across much of the frame at larger apertures. The CV15/4.5 does indeed have bigtime vignetting! I'll need to work with that one outdoors to see if it is salvageable or will go on sale, but it's severe enough that you almost need to overexpose the center to get enough exposure of the edges and corners. Time to download the new Lightroom release candidate so I can mess with the RAWs, and finally learn to use the flat field plug-in.
I briefly loaded up the 100/2 Makro-Planar, and boy was it nice to nail focus wide open every... single... time It looks like these cameras will be great for some RF glass in some circumstances, but will really shine with well-chosen SLR lenses and the native glass released in the future.
p.133 #15 · A7/A7r - performance with WA RF lenses
I just spent 15 minutes with a Craigslist Elmarit-M 2.8 V3 on an A7R and decided to not make the purchase. There is definitely a magenta color shift and smearing on the edges wide open. Not nearly the amount of shift as the ZM 35 2.8, but still noticeable and would require fixing IMO. The edge smearing (f2.8 - f4 at 6-10ft and infinity) was disappointing as I had high hopes given posts in this thread. It does improve a bunch stopped down, but I'm looking for better performance between f2.8 and f4. Happy to post the terrible photos if you'd like - outside Dunking Donuts in Chinatown But would have to be later tonight.
p.133 #16 · A7/A7r - performance with WA RF lenses
I haven't yet shot anything rigorously-set-up enough to share (I'll post once I do) but rough tests suggest that A7 + CV21/4 is not going to cut it for serious landscape and architectural work but will be fine for many uses.
p.133 #17 · A7/A7r - performance with WA RF lenses
Dustobub wrote:
I just spent 15 minutes with a Craigslist Elmarit-M 2.8 V3 on an A7R and decided to not make the purchase. There is definitely a magenta color shift and smearing on the edges wide open. Not nearly the amount of shift as the ZM 35 2.8, but still noticeable and would require fixing IMO. The edge smearing (f2.8 - f4 at 6-10ft and infinity) was disappointing as I had high hopes given posts in this thread. It does improve a bunch stopped down, but I'm looking for better performance between f2.8 and f4. Happy to post the terrible photos if you'd like - outside Dunking Donuts in Chinatown But would have to be later tonight.
Thanks for the report; I would be interested in seeing a wide open shot with some sky or something where the cast can be seen, and something where the smearing can be seen.
It looks like these cameras will be great for some RF glass in some circumstances, but will really shine with well-chosen SLR lenses and the native glass released in the future.
I also heard the same thing from my supplier, that Sony is cranking up the production and in fact my camera arrived 2 weeks early.