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 p.14 #7 · Pre-orders open! Sony A7R III and FE 24-105mm f/4 OSS lens! | |
Justin Stone wrote:
Having watched the Sony Press Release Video and the panel they assembled I'd say Sony is billing this is the new jack of all trades camera.
2 years ago the R line was a high megapixel, quite capable camera, but always better suited to slower moving photography. Sony said so themselves (during the presser) that two years is an eternity in camera tech. Now they pump up the speed and handling essentially give us the camera we all wanted 2 years ago.
So that leaves us with the a73 being the budget FF (with features removed).
And I argue it leaves room above the a7R3 for the resolution boost most people expected from the a7R series.
This to me is the ultimate (and crass) play for our dollars. To get people to buy multiple bodies, in a sense chasing after features as they trickle out. I know there were many people who purchased the a9 because it offered the speed and handling and QoL features that the a7r2 lacked, but these folks would have preferred the resolution to be at least the same or equal. Did they get a lot for their money in the a9? Sure they did, it's a beast in terms of speed, but maybe they woudl have traded some of that speed more more resolution. In waltzes the a7R3. And the a9 people buy a a7r3.
Now, depending on how fast the a7r3 really is (af, drive, slient, no-blackout and all the combinations thereof), Sony may have put enough into this camera to keep people from needing more resolution. But for fine art work, and landscapers who chase resolution and definition the a7r3 doesn't offer as much. So it's not hard to imagine an a9r release in 9 months that does. Forcing, once again sony users to trade up with a load of cash for another camera.
TLDR: Sony keeps giving us just enough to chase and purchase and use, but maybe never quite enough to make our wildest dreams come true so we buy more cameras than we would if they gave us big updates say every 4 or 5 years. There will be people who buy 4 cameras in 4 years if a hypothetical a9 appears. a7r2 -> a9 -> a7r3 -> a9r. That's a lot of scratch. ...Show more →
Crass is one interpretation of Sony's strategy. But as someone who is in the camp of preferring a little more resolution over raw shoot speed, I have another interpretation - Sony's seemingly haphazard efforts to catch up in a market dominated by longstanding incumbents using a technology format that many "pros" were skeptical about may be the result of real technical and experiential constraints. There's certainly some business strategy in the product parsing as well (and why not? CaNikon are notorious for their seemingly arbitrary inclusion or denial of features in a given model), but it seems that as the capabilities of cameras and the market for them evolves, the increasing push for more versatile cameras will dominate Sony's thinking now that they have the technology. This is in evidence with the A7R III and A9, and with Nikon in its D850 product.
In less than five years Sony has (through two iterations of the A7 in its various flavors and one iteration of the A9) caught up to the incumbent SLR cameras in most respects. They've also shown through the A9 the potential advantages of a solid mirrorless platform going forward. I imagine they're still trying to figure out how to parse the feature sets, but this may not be totally arbitrary or driven by "crass" business considerations. Some of the features unique to the A9 live on the sensor, and the sensor on the A9 isn't just a variant of the one on the A7 - it's fabricated entirely differently, with a lot of additional functionality etched right into the dye. The benefits of that fabrication approach may not be so easily descendable to other cameras in the lineup. Furthermore, designing a 42MP version of the BSI sensor may itself require significant design, testing, and retooling of the chip fab to handle it. Hence, an A9R may just be a question of finalizing a BSI design and manufacturing process for a high resolution BSI sensor, which may present challenges that the 24MP sensor did not.
So, even if we assume that Sony is planning an A9R, I don't think that Sony was wrong or "crass" to release an A9 with a 24Mp sensor. That camera rightly made a pretty big impact in the minds of photographers looking for a high performance camera, as it matches or outperforms much larger and more expensive Canikon equivalents. I know it certainly influenced me, considering that I own an A9 as my first-ever Sony camera. the camera is fabulous and makes great images, and while I initially did consider selling it in favor of the A7R III, I see now that there are aspects of the A9 that may give me pause in taking that course of action.
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I decided to sell my well cared for, two-year old A7r2 and am looking to get the shutter count. The tool I normally use doesn't seem to be working with macOS High Sierra. 
