When I was at Kando last week, I tested all the things
that bugged me about the Sony a7 III
on the new a7R IV to see if any of them were fixed
and I'm happy to report that many of them were
and this has me pretty excited about future Sony releases.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald undone.
And all I want is the perfect camera?
So this is just going to be a short little video updating you
on some of the well-known Sony quirks.
I've made a lot of videos on these quirks,
but I also had the opportunity to talk to the design team
and give product feedback when I was at Kando about some
of the things that I'd like to see fixed in future revisions
and during that feedback session.
I went through the a7R IV
right in front of them to see if I could recreate
the things that annoyed me about the a7 III
and see which ones were fixed and which ones still remained.
And here's my report. First up, those little, silly,
dangly flaps on the side of the input/outputs are gone.
Now, they just open from the side and this is much better.
Not only apparently are they more weather sealed,
but the layout is better now too because on the previous edition
they were really a pain in the butt if you're trying
to use a cage and sometimes you couldn't even open them
if you had a cage on. Well now that's a lot better
and the layout pairs the headphones, the microphone,
and the HDMI cable all in the same section.
so you might only need to actually open up
the one flap instead of having all three dangle down.
The only feedback I provided about this
was to continue to strive to fit a full-size HDMI Type A port
in there if possible. But otherwise great work.
The new SD card compartment is better now too with both slots
being UHS-II and with a more logical order
with card one being on top instead of on the bottom.
They've also made the grip deeper on the a7R IV
which I appreciate because I have big hands,
but most of the people that I talked to at Kando agreed
that it did feel better in the hand
regardless of their hand size.
Now let's talk about a major improvement
that has me extremely excited for what it means for future
releases like the a7S III. You guys know
I don't like camera rumours, but I think it's safe to say
that this is likely a good indication
of what we'll see in that future mythical body
and hopefully any other cameras to follow as well.
When you connect a monitor to the a7R IV
over HDMI and you're recording 4K internally.
The face detection does not disable itself anymore.
You can still use it. And what's better
is it's not just face detection.
It's also now active eye-tracking in video as well.
And when you do start recording
Neither screen blacks out. Remember how I made that video
demonstrating that if you record with
an external monitor that the LCD on the camera
turns off and you can only see it on the external recorder
when you're recording? That doesn't happen anymore.
You can record to both the internal card
and the external recorder at the same time,
keep both screens on, and have face
and eye detection while doing it.
This is huge and I'm really glad to see changes like this.
But while we're on that topic, there are still
a few software issues that do persist in the a7R IV
that I did bring up and demonstrate
during that product feedback session.
First, the face detection does still turn off
when you have proxy recording enabled
which makes me think that might also
still be the case with having the app connected.
I wasn't able to test the app portion of it.
But those are two things that would disable face detection
in the previous cameras when you had
an HDMI cable going to a monitor
would be if you enabled proxy recording
or had the app connected and so far my test
on the a7R IV show that those problems still persist.
Another one is that you can't use HDMI
info display when in 4K, so if you set your camera
to 4K recording and then you go over to HDMI options
you can't turn on info display, which is the ability
to display your on-screen display and your menus
and that kind of stuff on the external monitor.
You can't do that in 4K, you have to be in 1080P.
That still persists. And the other problem
is that when you do have HDMI info display
put over on the monitor, the LCD screen turns off.
So if you're showing your menus or your on-screen display
on an external source, your main camera screen
is no longer active. It's just black
Those problems still persist as well. And I explained this
in the product feedback session that it's kind of annoying.
Because that means if you're using your monitor
slightly removed from the camera,
you can't actually see both sources at the same time
because this screen is black. You have to peek around
at the monitor which means two people can't really
view the same thing in two different places
if both are going to have the on screen display.
So they seemed to document that down and hopefully
they'll work on that in future releases
because I would like to see more versatility
with the HDMI info display output options both in 4K
and with having both screens on concurrently.
And hopefully it's doable because they were able
to fix that for the recording not having a blackout.
So maybe they can do it on an info display as well.
Lastly another issue that still persists
that I brought up that annoys me quite a bit
is the inability to set a custom white balance when you're on
one of your memory states, like one, two, or three.
If you set it to "M," manual, on either photo or video
then you can go into white balance and take a capture
of a white balance card and set a custom white balance.
But if you're in one, two, or three
that option is greyed out which means
in order to set a custom white balance, if say
you were on two, you had all your favourite settings on two
and that's how you shoot. But now you want to set
a custom white balance, you have to go back out to M
then set the custom white balance
and then re-register those settings to two in that case.
This is a big waste of time where most other cameras
you can set a custom white balance while you're in
their saved memory states, so I brought this up
in the feedback session and hopefully
they'll address that because it's just a time waster
and in my opinion seems unnecessary. Seems like
just a little bit of changes in software
should be able to fix that. So that's pretty much it.
There's other little minor things that I'm going to test
when I get my copy of the camera, but those
are the major things that I wanted to check to see
if they were fixed during the limited time that I had with it.
I was also pretty excited by the new 35mm f/1.8 lens,
which I got to test for a couple hours
not long enough to give you my full impressions of it,
but it does seem pretty good.
But I'm gonna be making a full length video on that
and comparing it to the other 35mm f/1.2 option
from Sigma that's coming out for Sony as well
and just make a full comparison video of those two lenses,
but the 35mm f/1.8 does seem pretty promising
for the couple hours that I had it.
Also, you'll notice that I was showing some Instagram
story footage during this video and that's because
all of these updates were posted to Instagram
while I was at Kando while I was discovering them.
So if you're not following my Instagram yet,
I highly recommend that you do
because often I post these little peeks of what I'm testing
before I get the opportunity to make a proper YouTube video.
Overall, I'm happy with these changes.
There's still some improvements to be made
but Sony is definitely on the right track
and I'm excited to see what they come up with next
whether that be the a7S III or something else,
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
helpful or at least entertaining and if you did
make sure you leave the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already,
but if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.