Sony a7III: Time for Full Frame 2 (and some PDAF striping/fake RAW)

6 months ago I ebayed Sony A7II and thought that It will be with me for a while. But life is full of surprises - seller did not sent me few missing parts, I returned the camera... and by that time A7III was already released. There are quite a few nice features - BSI sensor with higher sensitivity, very pleasant high-ISO noise reduction, flexible autoISO settings... Some like larger battery and dual SD slot.

For me personally flexible autoISO is what gave me largest increase of good shoots yield. Also, now camera allows one to see the photos in the buffer while buffer is flushing to SD card.



After I was spoiled by zooms during ancient A-mount era ( I had Sony 16-50 F2.8 lens - it was quite sharp in the center and versatile) - here I bought loved by many Sony 24-105 F4. It was well worth it - even sharper and obviously slightly wider zoom range. Size and weight is probably maximum suitable for casual travel. F2.8 full-frame zooms in my view are only for professionals who used to lug a lot of equipment.

Fake RAW/star eater issue is still there. You can read more here, and sign a petition to Sony here. I was also able to reproduce PDAF striping issue under very exotic lightening conditions - but this is a topic for a separate article.

At the end, I really like the camera. It will definitely stay with me until 60+ megapixel full-frame cameras with 4K/60P full sensor readout are available. We might have to wait until 2022 for that...