chez wrote:
I'm not here to convince you. You do what you do...other's do what they do.
Why do you worry about how others might use the extra pixels in the A7R6...if you don't see a need, then don't buy it.
Easy...peasy.
Exactly. It seems like half the posts here are threadcrapping. The a1 has been around over 5 years and it was easy to simply buy it or buy the a1 II now if that's what the user prefers.
First of all, fine art printmakers know that Epson large format printers give best quality at 360 or even, if possible, 720 ppi. A 30 x 20 inch print (at the lower of those two resolutions) calls for a 10,800 x 7200 file. That's if you don't crop at all or do any perspective control.
A larger print, a cropped image, or a perspective-controlled image must have a much bigger starting file than that to hold ultimate quality. Sure, you can fudge, and uprez. Or use a less optimal resolution in the printer. It might even be absolutely necessary to make those compromises, given the resolution of current mainstream sensors!
If you are happy with that, fine. Prints may still look good for your purposes. But you definitely aren't getting the very best print quality that the printer can produce. If you print for exhibition, that might be an issue. The differences in detail may seem obvious or slight depending on the person and the situation. But there's no pretending the differences aren't there, even for moderately large prints. (Jim Kasson has some good thoughts on this matter.)
Second of all, higher resolution sensors tend to minimize digital artifacts. For instance, take a look at the ugly color moire in the upper left hand line drawings in DPReview's test charts. The difference in color moire between lower and higher resolution cameras is obvious. There is even some visible difference between the A7RV and the A7RVI.
Another ugly digital artifact is stair stepping in geometrical subjects like urban landscape; also false detail in tree branches and other detailed natural subjects. Such artifacts tend to get worse, not better, if you use AI programs to uprez or sharpen.
These digital artifacts, which are the result of the Bayer sensor grid undersampling the fine detail resolved by the lens, can really affect image quality in some situations. And sometimes it requires extreme measures to overcome them in post processing. It makes much more sense to oversample, and eliminate the artifacts during capture if possible. That's another reason I look forward to the roll out of higher resolution sensors (that I might even be able to afford!).
High resolution files are cleaner, even when downsampled. And files at optimal printer resolution yield more detailed prints. These things are each noticeable in some use cases more than others. But they are real.
Pixel Perfect wrote:
Buffer is bigger again at 20fps and this would be my standard fps in 90% of shooting, also gives the camera longer to acquire focus.
Shooting at 20fps does not give the camera longer to acquire focus. The camera will adjust focus at a constant speed of either 60 or 30 times a second.
duncangr wrote:
Shooting at 20fps does not give the camera longer to acquire focus. The camera will adjust focus at a constant speed of either 60 or 30 times a second.
Not true. If you shoot 30fps at 30(60) AF calculations you will 1(2) updates per frame, at 20fps you will get up to 3 updates per frame.
Pixel Perfect wrote:
Not true. If you shoot 30fps at 30(60) AF calculations you will 1(2) updates per frame, at 20fps you will get up to 3 updates per frame.
Look at it this way - for the 60 af calcs scenario:
In the 3/60 seconds prior to the images captured at 20fps you get 3 af calculations performed at 1/60s intervals.
In the 3/60 seconds prior to the images captured at 30fps you get 3 af calculations performed at 1/60s intervals.
The only difference is that first af calc in the 30fps scenario is the same as the last one for the previously captured image.
rob_ww wrote:
Should someone tell Mark Galer then? It appears he has innocently made an intuitive but inaccurate assumption. He might appreciate knowing that.
For maximum AF accuracy shoot at 1fps - your camera gets 1 whole second to acquire focus. .
Better still shoot at 1 frame per minute, that way you'll never miss a shot ! Oh wait....
Jack Flesher wrote:
Okay, I accept all that. Can you describe a situation in your photography where the extra resolution will make a visible difference to one of your final images? I’m not trying to be argumentative, I want to make sure I understand and am not overlooking a situation(s) where it would possibly be a better choice for me as well 👍
I have sold/licensed prints for commercial use at sizes up to 30’ wide and 11’ tall. I have an in-house Epson P-9000 44” printer. My main (though not my only) photography with my current FF system is landscapes and similar subjects.
I don’t focus on sports photography nor on other subjects requiring absolute fastest burst rates, so the capabilities of the A7r6 are more than sufficient for me. I’ve managed to do my bird photography for over a decade with a much slower cameras. While the A1ii is an impressive tool for those who need that, what it offers over the A7r6 is not really relevant to me.
As to extra resolution (and speaking here as a person who is about to move to Sony), if I already had the A7r5, I would not upgrade to the A7r6 for the small amount of additional resolution.
YMMV.
- - -
After reading the rest of the thread following the post I replied to, I’m back with one more perspective.
To some extent, we are arguing over pretty small differences at this point. While one can certainly point out that the A1ii has the highest level of performance for really fast-moving subjects and that the A7r6 has higher resolution… today the differences in suitability between cameras with these supposedly incompatibile design objectives are much less meaningful than they were a decade or more ago.
Very early in the development of digital cameras the differences were striking. For example, in order to get enough speed you typically ended up with a 1.6x (or possibly 1.3x at the very high end) sensor, while if you went of a higher resolution (16MP!!) full frame sensor you ended up with a small fraction of today’s frame rates and with impaired low light performance. The choice was pretty stark.
Today (to consider these two cameras) on one hand we have the camera with the fastest system (fps, focus calculations, etc.) and a slighlty lower resolution 50MP sensor. On the other hand we have the highest resolution system (66+MP) and a not-quite-as-state-of-the-art system for higher speed subjects.
Out at the fringes, the choice is likely significant.
If you are spending a lot of time stopping the action of hummingbird wings or perfectly aligning the fuselages of jets as they pass one another at hundreds of miles per hour… you want the fastest system you can get. You sound like an A1ii buyer. And your A1ii, having a 50MP sensor, can also do a fine job with just about any other subject, too.
If you place a high value on optimal resolution rather than optimal speed and perhaps spend a lot of time photographing selects like landscapes or architecture and you reproduce your photographs at large sizes and/or for a fine art market, then you place a higher priority on maximizing the system resolution, and that 67MP A7r6 sounds right for you. As an A7r6 buyer, you’ll still get a very fast camera, capable of working effectively with any speed-requiring subject that you’re likely to photograph.
Back in the day, there wasn’t all that much overlap meeting the cameras that the two types of photographers might choose. Today there’s along of the lot overlap. For the vast majority of buyers, the fast camera has plenty of resolution and the high resolution camera has plenty of speed.
gdanmitchell wrote:
I have sold/licensed prints for commercial use at sizes up to 30’ wide and 11’ tall. I have an in-house Epson P-9000 44” printer. My main (though not my only) photography with my current FF system is landscapes and similar subjects.
I don’t focus on sports photography nor on other subjects requiring absolute fastest burst rates, so the capabilities of the A7r6 are more than sufficient for me. I’ve managed to do my bird photography for over a decade with a much slower cameras. While the A1ii is an impressive tool for those who need that, what it offers over the A7r6 is not really relevant to me.
As to extra resolution (and speaking here as a person who is about to move to Sony), if I already had the A7r5, I would not upgrade to the A7r6 for the small amount of additional resolution.
Okay, think I understand you now. It isn’t about resolution per se, it’s about features on the A1ii you don’t feel you need and so aren’t worth the expense to you; and as such, the added resolution from the A7R6 becomes a bonus. Totally fair point.
For me, I think the added features of the A1ii will come in handier on more occasions than the bit of extra resolution would.
PS comment on billboards. As you know I was connected with PhaseOne for several years. Through that at a meeting in Copenhagen to go over new model designs, I met one of the top Chinese commercial fashion photographers. We met in the lobby of our hotel, both of us with a then new Nikon D800 over our shoulder. He asked me how I liked it, and I admitted I was impressed. He told me he was abandoning Phase medium format for the Nikon. The reason was even though the images weren’t as technically perfect, the clients couldn’t see the differences. He said he’d recently put files from both in front of his top client and they chose based on a look, and they happened to all be from the Nikon. Then he added that he could capture a lot more images a lot faster with the Nikon and so could get a greater quantity of poses, and the Nikon files were more than adequate quality for his billboards. For those not aware, the Nikon D800 was a 36mp camera.
Used the same sensor in the original A7r1. Sony’s initial advantage was that its mirrorless design provoked lot of interest… and it was largely marketed to Canon owners who were then limited to — IIRC — about 20MP, but who could bring their EF lenses to the Sony camera via adapters, with varying levels of functionality but plenty for, say, landscape photographers.
(This was an absolutely brilliant marketing move on Sony’s part since they could bring out the new camera even though they did not yet have anything approaching a line-up of lenses for it… and because a prime market for high MP cameras was landscape photographers, who weren’t so troubled by some of the downsides of their adapter with Canon lenses, which meant that they could switch systems without buying new lenses!)
