SONY A7S III
There are many good reasons why Sony is racing to the top of the interchangeable lens camera market with its full-frame mirrorless system. A range of close to 40 FE-mount lenses is a good start, but it’s also nailed it with its current generation of Alpha series camera bodies. You want high res? The A7R IV is currently unbeatable here. You want high speed? The A9 II is the camera for the job. You want both high res and high speed? The new Alpha 1 ticks both boxes. You want something more compact? OK, it’s the A7C then. Video is your thing? The A7S III is optimised for pro-level shooting in either 4K or Full HD.
Sony has been realistically sober with the A7S III’s video spec, deliberately avoiding the hoopla of 8K that's still a long way off being usable anywhere other than in-camera. It will certainly give you ultra-high quality masters – albeit with massive file sizes – and some improvements in colour and detailing will remain after downscaling to 4K thanks to the oversampling of each pixel. But in terms of post-production, display and delivery, the professional video world is still largely dealing with the upgrade to 4K. Conventional over-the-air broadcasting in 4K is still a long way off and, while there are streaming options you’ll need the right internet connection to handle the increased bandwidth. 8K? Forget it. So Sony has concentrated on making the A7S III as accomplished at recording 4K video as is possible via a big selection of frame rates, codecs, compression and colour sampling… starting with UHD recording internally at 100/120p with 10-bit 4:2:2 colour and audio, while still retaining full autofocusing capabilities (see the Making Movies panel for the full story).
What’s interesting here, though, is that in the process of designing a hybrid mirrorless camera for the video purist, Sony has also ended up with a camera for the photographic purist too. Yes, forget 61MP, 50MP or even 24MP. How about 12MP? We’re becoming so accustomed to the ultra-high pixel counts that we’ve largely forgotten that, again in real world terms, 12 megapixels resolution is quite sufficient for a wide variety of applications. There are other, arguably more important, aspects of image quality to consider here, and less can indeed be more when it comes to pixel counts. The total pixel count is 12.9 million which, on a full-frame sensor, gives a pixel size of 8.36 microns… and this
