the last word

We saw in the previous post that the long exposure noise reduction (LENR) option in the Sony a7RII reduced the precision from 13 to 12 bits. We have previously seen that some 12-bit modes bring spatial filtering to the a7RII. Is LENR one of them? Here’s the spectrum of a 1000×1000 sample from the center… [Read More]

I’ve had a couple of questions about the long exposure noise reduction (LENR, aka dark-frame subtraction) in the a7RII. I’ve had to do some research, since I never have used this function in any alpha 7 camera. It’s not that LENR is useless, just that its usefulness is limited, and that the kind of photography… [Read More]

The Sony alpha 7 R Mark II (a7RII) has a new autofocus system that combines contrast-detection and phase autofocus with about 400 (the mind reels — how do they cover these up in the raw files?) phase detection autofocus points. The new system has eye detection added to the old face detection, which I never… [Read More]

In this post, we saw a pronounced self heating effect in the dark noise of successive 30-second exposures with the Sony a7RII. I repeated the test with the predecessor camera, the a7R, and found far less effect. A reader postulated that the difference might be lower thermal conductivity between the sensor and the camera chassis… [Read More]