Sony A7RV Real Life Test! Worth the $$$?

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel. Today I'll be testing out the brand new Sony A7R5 for you. I would like to mention this video is not sponsored or influenced by Sony. I just got the camera lent for me for a day to play around pre-release. Let's start with some basic stats. The new Sony A7R5 is packed with 61 megapixels full frame sensor. As you can see the R5 body is less like the R4 and more like the Sony A7IV that was released earlier this year. This includes a separate video menu and the record button at the top instead of at the back of the camera. The biggest and the most exciting update is the brand new 4-axis multi-angle LCD monitor. It gives you even more angles than the Sony A7IV and is a significant update from the A7R4 pop-out LCD. Another major update is the camera's autofocus system. Sony has introduced an AI-based autofocus with advanced real-time tracking. It has 693 points high-density face detection AF. In the next few clips you'll see me testing the focus out with Taliya first thing in place but using her hands and hair to distract the focus. As you see other than a slip-up or two it was pretty spot-on. In the next clip I got her to walk away and towards me to see how sticky the focus is when moving around and yet again it was an A-plus performance. The focus stayed on her back when walking away from me and would immediately switch to eye-out focus as soon as she turned. It's definitely a major upgrade from the A7R4 system. The new AF also gives you an advanced subject recognition and lets you lock onto the specific subject. All you have to do is go to the menu, find the face memory option and take a photo of the subject like so. I have to say I was pretty impressed with how well the tracking stayed on my model even with me popping in and out of the camera. There were a few slip-ups but overall it was pretty accurate. The autofocus was equally impressive when it came to capturing the video. The eye tracking was super sticky on my model and even with movement and obstacles like hair blocking the face the eye was still pin sharp. The A7R5 now offers 5-axis in-body image stabilization. As you guys know I'm never super impressed with the camera stabilization as it can be quite wobbly. Based on this clip of the model walking and me following her I can definitely see the upgrade. However, it's still far from perfect but that being said it's probably the best camera stabilization I've seen so far. Something that's worth mentioning, I'll preface this with saying that I'm much more familiar with photo than video stats so I'll keep it pretty simple. The camera offers you 8k footage as well as 4k footage in 60 and 25p. When shooting in 4k 25p you get full frame and when shooting in 8k or in 4k in 60p you will end up with a slightly cropped version of the frame about 1.2 of the crop which to be honest is not a big deal for me as you see there isn't that much of a difference. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that will help you make your dream website, portfolio or an online shop become a reality. Squarespace has hundreds of beautiful templates so you'll definitely find something that suits you and your personal style. You can build a professional portfolio website in a matter of hours and you'll be able to customize it every step of the way so it's so you that nobody can deny it's not. As we all know social media presence is power and with Squarespace you'll be able to auto post all your content to Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr with proper tags and descriptions. Finally, Squarespace helps you with the marketing, they help you with SEO as well as some plugins for Instagram stories and so on as well as share buttons so your followers can give you some juicy shoutouts on their social media. If that sounds like something you'd like to try make sure to go to squarespace.com for a free trial and once you're ready to go use my code squarespace.com to receive 10% off your first purchase. This was actually just a little side test. Bear in mind that because I was testing the camera pre-release there was no way for me to view the RAWs or edit them in any way. With that being said I took a few shots in the subway with less than ideal lighting conditions. As you see it was super bright outside and the inside of the train was actually relatively dark. I was really pleasantly surprised when I was able to bring back the highlights in this JPEG I was working on. I'm super excited to see how much more dynamic range there is in the RAW files. Next I wanted to test out the ISO. The R5 offers up to 32,000 ISO for movies and 102,000 for stills. I personally don't think I will ever need to push it this far but I did go ahead and test it out up to ISO 6400 and I have to say it was relatively very little noise in the image and video which I was pleasantly surprised with. Finally I wanted to play around a little and see how the camera handles low light and slow shutter speed. For the next look I dropped my shutter down to 1 1⁄4th of a second and took some portraits of Talia with the moving subway train behind her. I was interested to see if she was still going to be relatively sharp on such a low shutter speed and she was. As I mentioned I only currently have access to the JPEGs but I'm pretty happy with how the skin tones and colors in general look. I was able to color grade my images with ease and looking pretty close to what my color graded RAWs would usually look like. Overall I think the camera is a pretty big upgrade from the Sony a7R IV. I am really excited about the new pop-up screen, the improved AI focus and upgraded subject recognition. What I'm not super excited about is the close to 4000 price tag that comes with the camera but that's to be expected for an upgrade this big. Okay guys that's it for today. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to follow Talia. She's going to be linked in the description below and I'll see you guys in the next one.