Introduction

This Sony A7 II is Sony’s best buy in a full-frame camera because it’s half the price of the mostly identical A7S II or A7R II, and this A7 II has the optimum resolution of the three.

The A7 II is smaller and lighter than most, but not all, DSLRs, but when you add full-frame lenses to it, it loses most of the weight advantage. With a 50mm or 55mm f/1.8 lens, some full frame DSLRs like the Canon 6D actually weigh the same or less.

The A7 II shoots and autofocuses very quickly. Everything works very quickly and very well.

Many buttons are programmable, so if you have the patience to wade through the menu system, you can get it to work extremely well.

It has two memory recalls on its mode dial, 1 and 2, so it’s easy to set up one for people pictures (standard color with +1 Saturation and continuous shutter mode), and the other for landscapes and things (Vivid picture with +3 Saturation, single shot).

Overall

The Sony A7 II is a great camera. Once programed, it shoots fast, focuses and shoots in any light with ease.

While it has slower handling than a DSLR and not my choice for serious work (it only has one card slot for instance), as a fun hobby camera, it’s awesome.

Presuming you shoot it with the best new ZEISS FE lenses and Sony GM lenses, the system works great. The biggest negatives are a limited selection of native lenses (adapted manual focus lenses aren’t a good idea if you care about image quality or convenience, but definitely fun for hobbyists), and Sony’s user interface is too sloppy to handle well under pressure for news or sports, but hey, use the right lenses designed to take full advantage of this mount, and it’s awesome.

Autofocus

Autofocus is great: it’s fast and accurate. A zillion little green boxes magically fly all over your subject and the camera just focuses on it.

Face recognition works great in all focus modes, but only if you turn it on in the Camera 6 menu! When it sees a face, the little green boxes become big green boxes over each face.

The Continuous AF mode (AF-C) also works great for tracking motion. Ultimately it’s still not as good as a DSLR, but way better than mirrorless cameras have been in the past.

Individual Face registration is hidden in the Gear 5 menu; I don’t bother with that.

Set the DMF focus mode with the Fn button to allow manual focus override during autofocus. It’s so smart that it will magically zoom into faces as you turn the focus ring!

Manual focus works much better once you assign the focus magnifier to one of the programmable buttons, otherwise the magnifier comes and goes as it likes.

Finder

The electronic viewfinder (EVF) is excellent.

It’s sharp, bright and colorful, and it’s always the right brightness day or night.

It stays in focus because the finder focus wheel is where it’s not likely to get knocked.

The only gotcha is that the dioptrometic adjustment optics can lead to some astigmatism (lowered sharpness).

Shutter

The shutter only moves at the ends of exposures, so there’s no vibration.

This works by default; there’s no need for any prerelease modes for autonomy or other vibration-sensitive shooting.

Ergonomics

It’s easy to knock the power switch on or off by accident; it has no lock and it’s right where it’s easy to hit.

All the buttons are on the right side where you can reach them while shooting with one hand, except for the MENU button on the left.

Unlike a DSLR, it always takes a moment to turn on or to wake up.

The A72 has essentially no knobs or levers. It has two dials, and the rest is all pushbuttons — and a lot of fiddling in menus. Its only lever is a clever one around the AF/MF and AEL button: the lever selects that button’s function. Otherwise, all the actual shooting controls are a few clicks away hidden behind buttons and menus— just like the cheapest Canon SL1 or Nikon D3300. For mirrorless, the Fujis are way ahead with their dedicated dials and levers for actual photography settings like ISO, shutter and aperture — all sorely lacking on this Sony.

It doesn’t warn clearly if exposure compensation is set, so it’s easy to overlook until you start wondering why all your pictures malexposed and discover that exposure compensation is still set from the day before! The finder display of exposure compensation doesn’t call more attention to itself when set away from zero.

It automatically resets itself to use only the APS-C section of its sensor if you mount an APS-C lens. Use the tiny APS-C PZ 16-50mm OSS or Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 and the A72 acts like a great 10 MP APS-C camera.

It has two real memories on the top mode dial.

The A7 II has a nice grip, but it’s too small for my American hands.

The movie button is very well placed, it’s out of the way of getting hit by accident.

The card door works great on the side of the camera, away from the battery door on the bottom.

Auto ISO

Auto ISO is only partly useful because you can’t program the minimum shutter speed. It the camera’s auto-selected speed based on focal length is what you want, great, but if you depend on Auto ISO to set the camera for you as I do, I prefer the much more adjustable A7S II or A7R II.

Auto White Balance

Auto White Balance is typically great under most light.

High & Low ISO’s

High ISO performance is superb, and ISO 50 is even sharper than ISO 100. Bravo!

The A7 Mark II looks great at just about any ISO; use whatever ISO you need to get a sharp picture.

I let my Auto ISO run all the way up to ISO 25,600.