I keep encountering the conundrum of whether to upgrade camera or lenses first, and there’s occasionally a comparison of a high-end camera paired with a low-cost lens, against a low-end camera paired with a high-end lens, as if that’s a dilemma anyone is actually having.

I had a similar problem lately, when I decided I want to buy the FE 100-400mm GM lens, because I wanted to make a certain profile of pictures with it, but I of course understood that the autofocus on my camera isn’t capable of utilising the lens properly, and there’s our solution: camera and lens need to be seen as a unit that is combined to produce a certain result. This means that you can’t have bottlenecks that limit the effectiveness of the system as a whole, for instance you can’t have only one part of the fast autofocus system, because both camera and lens need to work together.

Also, the realistic conundrum isn’t whether to get the most expensive lens and pair it with the shittiest possible body, or vice versa. Realistically, it looks more like “should I get the 70-200 f/2.8 or 85mm f/1.8 for the portraits”, because “cheap lens” is often a fast prime, and “expensive lens” is often a zoom, where the cheap lens might actually give you better results; also, with the body it’s “do I need faster autofocus for portraits and weddings”, because that’s where the difference in price is today. If you’re shooting macro, you don’t need a body with the best autofocus, you need a great macro lens and, probably, additional lights. So, basically, the answer is to see what you actually need, where the bottlenecks of your process are, and then remove those bottlenecks. Someone else will have different problems to solve, and different money pits to fill. Sometimes the solution is counter-intuitive, for instance getting the expensive new camera body and cheap used lenses of otherwise very high quality, which looks like putting cheap lenses on an expensive camera, but in this case price is not an accurate measure of quality obtained. In any case, the lesson is to avoid formulaic thinking when solving practical problems.

It was a nice springy day today so I’m showing off my new gear a bit. 🙂
ps. WordPress compressed the files on upload so sharpness is much, much lower than on the originals. 

I discovered something when testing the new camera and lens today. It works best for taking the kind of pictures I normally take, only of things that are inaccessible because they are far away.

Also, I’m still in a B&W mood.

I’ve been having interestingly contradictory thoughts recently. On one hand, all kinds of disasters are looming. On the other hand, the largest percentage of my consciousness is preoccupied with transforming karmic substance from global sources. And on the third hand, I’m preoccupying myself with various things in order not to go crazy. So, apparently, it’s photography’s turn now. The weather here on Hvar is gloomy and not really conducive to creating colourful imagery at the moment, so I’m doing what I can and shooting black and white gloomy stuff:

The new A7RV camera and the FE 100-400mm GM lens are in the mail and should be here in a day or two, and then I’ll be able to say what I think about them, but honestly, it’s not like I’ve seen any telephoto motives lately. It’s the most dour part of what passes for winter on the normally sunniest Adriatic island. So, I’ve been walking with A7II and the Zeiss 16-35mm, and I really like the results.

Speaking of which, what made me upgrade to the A7RV? Essentially, it’s not that I really planned it much. I looked into the recent developments in photo equipment, and by “recent” I mean the last 8 years or so, and I was amazed at how far some things progressed. So, when I decided to go for the telephoto lens, I also decided it’s time for a camera upgrade, because if something manages to impress me, it’s really good. Ignoring the cameras that specialise in video at all cost, and speed at all cost, I wanted something that had the best resolution and dynamic range I can get on the 35mm Sony platform, and also the fastest, smartest autofocus. This narrowed it down to A1II (50MP) and A7RV (60MP), which I already found super impressive earlier, and I decided that for my specific case of “photographic quality first” the A7RV is slightly better, and the fact that it was also less expensive didn’t hurt. I was considering the older model too, the A7RIV, because it has the same sensor and thus the same image quality, but eventually decided against it because all the other electronics were seriously improved on the newer model. Also, the new model gives me the option to shoot 26MP RAW in cases where I don’t need resolution greater than what I already have now, which is a good option to have because it saves storage, and if I’m shooting hand-held closeups where most of the image is blurred out, 26MP is already an overkill, because the super-resolution files are something I would need for shots with lots of high-frequency detail, such as wide-angle landscapes, that would benefit most from being printed large. So, this versatility appealed to me, because it’s not like my current camera suddenly became outdated with its 24MP; I fully intend on using it as a second body for the wide-angle in cases where the A7RV is married to the telephoto. Anything I take with it can be printed quite large, and in other respects (meaning colour and the dynamic range) it should be identical to the new body.

PS. the new acquisitions arrived:

On the left, the A7II with the 16-35mm Zeiss. On the right, the new A7RV with the FE 100-400mm GM. Everything works, but other than configuring and cleaning them I didn’t have a chance to do much, since it’s a nice day finally and fresh fish arrives on Wednesday, so something had to be done about that. 🙂

The first experiences are that the grip on the new camera is more comfortable and bigger, which was one of the main problems with the old one. Also, the AF seems as fast as on the EOS 3, from what I could see; everything is exactly as heavy as I calculated from the online numbers, but manageable. The birbs are very quick and mostly hidden in the trees so I couldn’t score any quick wins, but that is not unexpected. The fish was tasty.

There are all sorts of misconceptions about image quality in digital photography. For instance, people commonly believe that the resolution, or the number of megapixels, define image quality.

I’ll illustrate this with a screenshot from dpreview’s comparometer:

As you can tell, the top left image is from Sony A7II, the one I’ve been using since 2016. The bottom left is from the one I just ordered, the Sony A7RV. The top right is from the Canon 5d, the camera I’ve been using since 2006 and which Biljana was using until very recently. The bottom right is from the Pentax 645Z, the medium format camera.

As you can tell, other than some white balance differences, they are all basically the same image with different amounts of magnification. This means that the difference in resolution determines how big you can print the image without perceivable loss of fine detail.

This means that doubling of the resolution means that the image is printable on double the paper size, and we happen to have a standard of paper size measurements, in fact two, A and B:

Basically, every larger size (smaller number) is produced by mirroring the smaller size along the longer side, thus doubling the surface.

If, for example, a 12.7MP image from Canon 5d can produce a high quality B2 print (which I have done), an image of double the resolution, 24-26MP, can produce a B1 print of same apparent quality. This, of course, assumes that everything else, like noise and the amount of actual resolution measured in line pairs, scales equally.

Other than printability on large paper sizes, image quality is not affected by sensor resolution. There are, however, several other factors that determine image quality: noise, color depth, and dynamic range. Noise is obvious – it can degrade the image in appearance if it is excessive. Dynamic range is also easy to understand – it’s the ability to resolve greater number of brightness levels. In essence, one ev (exposure value, or aperture value) is twice the amount of light. With every ev of dynamic range, there’s a 100% increase in the level of brightness. This means that the dynamic range is 2 to the power of n, the same way binary numbers are defined by the bit depth of the variable type; 8-bit means 256 possible values, 16-bit means 65536 and so on. Today’s sensors can resolve over 14 ev of dynamic range, where slide film resolved 5 ev, and best BW and color negative emulsions resolved 10 ev. This means that everything above 10 ev is excellent, but using it in a real picture might require tonal compression in processing.

Color depth, however, is somewhat less clear as parameters of image quality go, but I would define it the same way I would dynamic range, because it’s the same thing: the ability to define gradient of primary colors, where every pixel is defined by three binary components of certain bit depth, for red, green and blue. 8-bit color depth means a color gradient of 256 shades for each of the 3 components. 16-bit color depth means 65536 shades for each of the 3 components, and so on; again, it’s the 2 to the n-th power. Of course, the ability to convert a signal from the sensor into a n-bit format doesn’t mean there’s actuall n-bits of data in the source, assuming the analog to digital converter doesn’t introduce its own issues. You can read the analog data from a small smartphone sensor into the 16-bit numberspace, but there won’t be 16 bits of color data in there. So, the ability to define discrete shades of colors across the large dynamic range is what differentiates between sensors with “thin” and “thick” colors. The difference in color depth is visible at any image size and is much more important for the perception of image quality than resolution, which only becomes relevant when you enlarge the image. So, the luminance and chrominance dynamic range is what defines the number of brightness levels and color tones a sensor can capture. When we introduce the noise, which contaminates both luminance and chrominance data, we get all the parameters of image quality.

So, what does this mean, translated to the world of actual cameras? It means that the pictures from my current A7II and A7RV will look exactly the same, unless I decide to print over a meter wide, in which case the A7RV images will look more detailed if you come so close that you no longer perceive the whole picture. As for the color depth and dynamic range, there will be no perceivable difference, because both cameras are extremely capable.

The difference is that the autofocus on the new A7RV is extremely capable, while the autofocus on the A7II is rudimentary and unable to deal with things that move. Also, the viewfinder on the A7II is adequate, while the viewfinder on the A7RV is excellent, which contributes nothing to the image quality, but should reduce my eye strain significantly, which matters to me since my eyes are not what they used to be. Also, the fact that A7RV has 60 MP resolution means that it has 26MP of resolution within the APS-C circle, which means I can magnify the telephoto range by the factor of 1.5x and still retain the same print size that I have on the A7II, which is a much more tangible functional difference than the ability to print larger than a meter in width, which I almost never do. The ability to turn 400mm of range into 600mm is extremely useful.

Now for the drawbacks. The old camera is free since I already own it, while the new camera cost 3500 € used. This is a significant cost, since all of my lenses probably cost less than that; alternatively, I could get several GM grade lenses for that amount of money. This means that I needed to have very good reasons for the upgrade. Also, the new camera produces bigger files, and more of them because it’s faster, which means greater requirements on memory cards and storage drives, not to mention computer processing power. My computers and storage drives are already adequate, but I had to buy an extremely expensive cf-express memory card, which is a NVMe gen-3 1 lane drive. Yes, they now have memory cards that are NVMe drives, because apparently you need that in order to record video and clear the buffer quickly. In essence, all the drawbacks are a matter of money, while all the benefits are a matter of user comfort and the ability to actually get the kind images that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to get, for instance by turning a 400mm 35mm system into a 600mm APS-C system temporarily and tracking a bird in flight so accurately that its closer eye is continuously kept in focus.