By site editor Dan Chung:
This week at the Sony Europe press event in Germany for the a7S II I had the opportunity to run some quick comparisons of the new camera against my trusty original a7S. Although the body, 4K internal recording, image stabilisation and processing has changed, the sensor of the two cameras is essentially the same. I’ve been using an a7R II for the past few months and feel that the colour science is better than the original a7S, especially when it comes to skin tones. With the a7S II I was keen to see if the colour has been similarly improved.
The base sensitivity in S-Log 2 has been reduced from 3200 ISO in the previous model, to 1600 ISO in the a7S II. In addition there is now the option to shoot S-Log 3 as well.
The shots above are with both cameras set up identically in S-Log 2 at 3200 ISO, both recording 4K externally at 25P to an Atomos Ninja Assassin external recorder in ProRes HQ to get as good an image as possible. The lens was an 85mm Zeiss Milvus in Canon mount on a Metabones Smartadapter IV. White balance was set to tungsten and all lighting was from 3200K Dedolights.
The idea here is to see if there are any obvious differences in colour between the two when shooting S-Log 2. So far I’m not seeing a huge difference between the two. Feel free to download the shots from Vimeo yourself and have a play around. (Please note that these aren’t the original files as I had to compress them for Vimeo).
Next up I’ll post some noise comparisons between the two at different ISOs.
