{"id":5394,"date":"2013-12-27T12:18:57","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T16:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=5394"},"modified":"2013-12-27T12:18:57","modified_gmt":"2013-12-27T16:18:57","slug":"sony-a7r-dream-camera-with-crippling-autofocus-shortfall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/27\/sony-a7r-dream-camera-with-crippling-autofocus-shortfall\/","title":{"rendered":"Sony A7r: dream camera with crippling autofocus shortfall?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Friends and I have been playing around with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B00FRDUZUK\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B00FRDUZUK&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pgreenspun-20\">Sony a7R<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important;margin: 0px !important\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=pgreenspun-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=B00FRDUZUK\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/>, supposedly the dream camera of 2013. Indoors, it turns out to be very slow to autofocus, to the point that it is almost unusable for conventional family photography. A friend who is a regular Nikon D800 user said &#8220;I really wanted one of these but now that I have seen how slow it is, I will stick with a conventional SLR.&#8221; This was after an hour or so of taking pictures at a noon to 2 pm party lit by a fair amount of window light and also some incandescent bulbs (i.e., much darker than outside but nowhere near as dark as a home interior at night).<\/p>\n<p>I tried it last night taking pictures of a sleeping baby in a room lit by a table lamp. A Samsung Note 3 mobile phone didn&#8217;t have any trouble capturing focus on the baby&#8217;s face (though the result was grainy). The a7R hunted, despite blasting the baby with a bright AF illuminator. It really was not a usable device, though in theory it has reasonable manual focus capabilities (hard for an old Canon EOS user to wade through Sony&#8217;s interface, though!).<\/p>\n<p>For now I think it is safe to say that the Sony a7R is a dream camera for landscape photographers looking for a lightweight hiking companion but I don&#8217;t think it is as good a general-purpose camera as an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B0096W1OKS\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0096W1OKS&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pgreenspun-20\">Sony NEX-6<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important;margin: 0px !important\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=pgreenspun-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=B0096W1OKS\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/>\u00a0(still slower than an SLR but usable).<\/p>\n<p>Is all of the excitement about mirrorless cameras misplaced? The old Canon Rebel G film body was very light and compact and had much better AF than this latest Sony (at 10X the price!). I&#8217;m wondering if we aren&#8217;t all suffering from a collective delusion and if it wouldn&#8217;t be better to stick a sensor in the back of a Rebel G.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve posted <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/photos\/118285941584671534729\/albums\/5962108926886119729\">some example images on Google+<\/a> and will be adding to the collection periodically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Friends and I have been playing around with the Sony a7R, supposedly the dream camera of 2013. Indoors, it turns out to be very slow to autofocus, to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Sony A7r: dream camera with crippling autofocus shortfall? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/27\/sony-a7r-dream-camera-with-crippling-autofocus-shortfall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sony A7r: dream camera with crippling autofocus shortfall? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Friends and I have been playing around with the Sony a7R, supposedly the dream camera of 2013. 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