Douglas L wrote:
Thanks again, Ross. I read somewhere more than once that if compressed raw is chosen, the AF calculation drops from 60/seconds to 30/seconds? I wish there is an official Sony white paper with the technical details. Both ChatGPT and Gemini got conflicting information.
You can trust Mark Galer’s info (Sony Imaging Ambassador). It’s the opposite of what you heard - AF calculations drop to 30 per second if you are shooting in one of the 14-bit raw settings - Lossless or HQ - and when you choose standard Compressed (which is lossy) it goes to 12-bit and now you have the maximum 60 calculations per second (but your A1II is still better at 120 per second in full 14-bit). Jan Wegener also reports this same info and says it came from Sony.
Ross Martin wrote:
You can trust Mark Galer’s info. It’s the opposite of what you heard - AF calculations drop to 30 per second if you are shooting in one of the 14-bit raw settings - Lossless or HQ - and when you choose standard Compressed (which is lossy) it goes to 12-bit and now you have the maximum 60 calculations per second (but your A1II is still better at 120 per second in full 14-bit). Jan Wegener also reports this same info and says it came from Sony.
Here is the slide from Mark Galer’s video review:
It can be summarized pretty easily as follows:
If you want to maximize the speed of the camera, then shoot in compressed RAW (i.e., lossy compressed) with the electronic shutter. This increases the sensor scan speed, increases the AF calculations per second, and lets you get more shots before the buffer fills up, and you can shoot up to 30 fps. It still doesn't have the advantanges of the speed of the A1 or A9 cameras, but it gets closer to them
If you want to maximize the IQ from the camera, then shoot in lossless compressed RAW and use the mechanical shutter. This will increase the dynamic range and give you the best shadows at the cost of less AF calculations per second, a smaller buffer, and you will get at most 10 fps.
IMO, anyone who has the camera should consciously choose which mode they want to use based on what they are shooting. I think most people will want to switch between these two modes for almost all their shooting or just use just one exclusively. There may be some rare instances in which you want to mix them (e.g., mechanical shutter and compressed RAW or electronic shutter and lossless RAW) but those will be pretty unusual circumstances.
Douglas L wrote:
Thanks again, Ross. I read somewhere more than once that if compressed raw is chosen, the AF calculation drops from 60/seconds to 30/seconds? I wish there is an official Sony white paper with the technical details. Both ChatGPT and Gemini got conflicting information.
