Sony Alpha 7R

Imagine: A body that mimics the looks of DSLR, but in a size more akin to a Leica M, with resolution on par with the best full-frame cameras. And weighing about half as much as its closest competitor, the Nikon D800. What you get is the Sony Alpha 7R.

This new 36.4MP flagship interchangeable-lens compact ($2,298, street, body only), along with the concurrently announced 24.3MP Alpha 7 ($1,698, body only), sports the same E-mount as Sony’s NEX line of APS-C-format ILCs. As the E-mount has a much shorter mount-to-sensor distance than the company’s A-mount DSLR lenses, Sony also introduced a whole new line of optics for these full-frame ILCs. Carrying the FE moniker, they roll out this January with a 55mm f/1.8 ($998, street), 35mm f/2.8 ($798), 24–70mm f/4 ($1,198), and 28–70mm f/3.5–5.6 (only in a kit with the A7); a 70–200mm f/4 is due later in 2014. (We used the 55mm in all lab tests.)

In the Test Lab
Until now, the only way to get this much resolving power, short of going to medium format, would be with Nikon’s D800, which is about 0.7 inch wider, an inch taller, and more than an inch deeper. Given its small size, we expected the Alpha 7R to produce noisier images with less resolution than the D800. We were right, yet quite surprised to see how close this Sony came to matching the Nikon’s amazing image quality. It garnered an Excellent rating in overall image quality from its lowest sensitivity of ISO 50 through ISO 400, only one stop short of the D800’s range.

In our resolution tests, the Alpha 7R turned in 3325 lines per picture height at ISO 50—within 200 lines of the D800’s 3510. It jumps to the top of the ILC heap, well above Sony’s own NEX-7, which produced 2740 lines in our December 2011 test.

The A7R earned another Excellent rating in color accuracy—but just barely, with an average Delta E of 7.9. The D800 hit that rating with more breathing room, for a score of 6.5.

In noise testing, the A7R produced cleaner images than the D800 at their two lowest sensitivity settings. But from ISO 200 on, the D800 shows about a one-stop advantage, with Low or better noise up to ISO 800 versus ISO 400 for the Sony; following the same pattern, the A7R reaches an Unacceptable rating at ISO 3200, while the D800 gets there at ISO 6400.

As always, you could add more noise reduction to bring the A7R down to acceptable levels at ISO 6400, but this would erode some of the resolving power, which the camera retains nicely as sensitivity increases. At ISO 400, it lost 300 lines of resolution versus ISO 50, but it dropped by only 100 lines at ISO 1600, where it captured 2925 lines. At the its top sensitivity of ISO 25,600, it maintains 2625 lines, still Excellent by our rating standard—and better than the 2470 lines the D800 turned in (though the Nikon beat it in resolution across most of their sensitivity ranges).

The A7R has no anti-aliasing filter over the sensor, while the D800 does. (We haven’t yet tested the Nikon D800E, which also omits the AA filter.) Although we saw some signs of minor aliasing in our lab test images, we didn’t notice any ill effects from the A7R’s lack of an AA filter in our field test images.

In the Field
Sony didn’t scrimp on the Alpha 7R’s body. The weather-sealed magnesium-alloy chassis makes it fit for rigorous use. A 2.4-million-dot OLED electronic viewfinder provides a wonderfully detailed view of the scene, and you can overlay a leveling guide or various grids to help you compose. The 921,600-dot, 3-inch LCD tilts up and down to make shooting from high or low angles easier.

For an ILC, it has a well-sculpted grip. A cutout for your middle finger has a nice ridge atop it to provide leverage when tilting the camera, while a divot on the inside of the grip gives it a more secure feel. Three command wheels let you control shutter speed, aperture, and ISO independently when shooting in manual mode. A fourth wheel is dedicated to exposure compensation, with click stops for +/–3 EV of exposure compensation, but if you assign exposure comp to one of the other three wheels, you can get up to +/–5 EV.

We always like to be able to see camera settings before turning the camera on, but after some time field-testing the A7R, we ended up wishing that the exposure comp wheel were just another assignable command wheel. As we did most of our shooting in aperture- or shutter-priority, we used one wheel for either shutter or aperture, the second for exposure comp, and the third, located toward the bottom of the camera back, for ISO.

Sony Alpha 7R