By site editor Dan Chung:
Sony surprised many people, myself included, when they announced the video specifications of the a7R II. I had expected it to be just another high resolution stills camera with little to offer the video shooter. I was completely wrong. This diminutive shooter offers internal 4K recording at 100 Mb/s and both S35 and full-frame crop options. Video image quality was claimed by Sony to be excellent, and the same range of image controls that are found on the a7S are also found on the a7R II. Importantly the base ISO for S-Log2 shooting is 800, much more usable than the 3200 ISO on the a7S. It also has in-built 5-axis lens stabilisation with the right Sony lenses – a feature that is going to be incredibly popular with news and documentary shooters.
Today I received my brand new Sony a7R II from the good folk at Warehouse Express in the UK. As usual I was desperate to go out and shoot to see how the camera performs. Unfortunately the courier Parcel Force didn’t deliver it until early evening and so my plans to go and film something interesting went out of the window. I usually prefer to test cameras while telling a story but this time I’ve had to settle for some rather standard shots around London’s St Pancras and King’s Cross stations.
The good news is that the image doesn’t fail to disappoint. I shot with the new Zeiss Batis 24 and 85mm lenses and a Touit 12mm f2.8. I shot to the internal SD card at 100 Mb/s in 4K. The picture profile was S-log 2 with S-Gamut and all noise reduction was turned off. I’ve thrown together a strong of the shots on a timeline for you to see.
The version you see above was given a five minute grade in FilmConvert to give an impression of what corrected footage can look like. The version below is ungraded and has notes to explain the settings of each shot. Apologies for the compression needed to display it on Youtube in 4K, I hope you can still get a reasonable idea of what the camera is capable of.
Edit: I’ve just uploaded the same videos to Vimeo, from where you should be able to download them if you are a member https://vimeo.com/135103669 and https://vimeo.com/135103668
I tried shooting a couple of test shots at ISO 5000 which I expected to be pretty unusable. It turns out that they were much better than I thought and you can see them at the end of the video. The high ISO performance might not match the a7S, but it is much better than several other ‘professional’ large sensor camcorders and for many people I think it will be good enough.
I’ll do more thorough testing over the next few days and hopefully get to pit it against some other cameras. I still wish the camera had 4:2:2 recording internally, but the 4:2:0 footage is surprisingly nice all things considered. Hopefully I can shoot something with an external 4K recorder over the weekend to see if it improves even more.
