Sony a7V_ Sony's Best Camera Yet! (Side By Side Comparison vs a7IV and A1 II).

I am here in the desert of central Utah to bring you one of the most anticipated new cameras of 2025, the brand new Sony Alpha 7 5. This thing is extremely cool. I've got some of the most unique and exotic landscapes in all of the United States behind me. I'm going to travel around the desert, I'm going to check this thing out, I'm going to tell you exactly how good or maybe not good it is. And is it worth the upgrade from the 7 4? Let's get into it. So right off the bat, I want to say this is a little bit of a sentimental release for me. The A7, the original one was my first ever full frame digital camera. I never shot DSLR. I went immediately to mirrorless. It was the first A7. I was shooting with the A7 2 when Sony asked me to join the ambassador team. I was there for the release of the A7 3. I've owned the A7 4. So coming up with the A7 5, it's just another progression in my career. It feels very sentimental. I love these cameras. I think they are the perfect middle ground of price and performance. If you don't want to spend the money on the Alpha 1 Mark 2, but you don't want one of the more beginner cameras like the A6000 or even the A6700, these are perfect. If you want full frame, you want affordable, you want good features, this thing's incredible. So I'm really excited to try it out. Now, right off the bat, we have to talk about the sensor. There was a lot of chatter online that this was going to be using the same 33 megapixel sensor as the A7 4, and it's not. Sony has told us that this is a brand new sensor. It's fully backside illuminated and partially stacked. So that makes it honestly one of the better sensors in the entire Sony lineup. The A7 4 sensor was backside illuminated. It was not stacked at all. So what that means is faster sensor readout speed, which gives you higher burst rates and less rolling shutter. So that makes this basically like a mini Alpha 1 2, but for less than half the cost, which I think is really cool. They said up to 30 frames per second burst speeds. But what I'm most excited about is that they said that there's significantly improved dynamic range and significantly improved ISO performance. Native ISO up to 51,200, which if you remember is half as high as the A7S3. So if this has even half the low light performance of the A7S3, that will make this legitimately one of the best budget purchases in the entire camera kingdom. Ecosystem? Camera? Phylogeny? What's the word for that? Speaking of high ISO, I went out last night for some astro, and although I did get a bit skunked with clouds, it was a great way to test the ISO performance. Keep in mind, these are JPEGs since this is a pre-release camera, so I don't have the same editing latitude as I usually would with RAWs. Now these images are very noisy, but it's worth mentioning this is basically the worst case scenario for image quality. Dramatically underexposed on a moonless and overcast night, and then the shadows are recovered from almost completely crushed back up to visible. Since it was so dark without any moon or stars, the only way to get a visible foreground was to stack multiple 30 second exposures. Doing this yielded an incredibly usable result. There are a surprising number of hot pixels here, but that's not a huge surprise since, again, I'm editing JPEGs and not RAWs, so that's probably just a compression artifact. I wanted to take a look at the ISO performance in a scenario that's slightly less extreme, so I went out the following night to shoot some test photos during blue hour. Here we can see that even at ISO 3200, the image is delightfully clean, and compared to a JPEG shot with the exact same lens and settings on the a7 IV, I think the newer a7 V appears to be a substantial improvement. Just for fun, I also compared it to Sony's flagship camera, the Alpha 1 II, and the quality looks nearly identical to me, which is astonishing considering the a7 V is less than half the price. I also got real silly and pushed both cameras to the maximum native ISO for the Alpha 1 II of 12800, and I have to say I actually think the a7 V looks a bit cleaner, which is incredibly exciting. And just for poops and chuckles, I also compared the a7 IV and a7 V at their maximum ISO of 51200, and honestly for both cameras I would say this is more or less unusable, at least as a JPEG, which is pretty unsurprising. I am eagerly anticipating the ability to edit my RAW images, though, and I'm excited to see if that changes my mind. Even shooting JPEGs with absolutely no foreground light at all, the low light performance on this camera really impressed me, and on a later night I was able to get a fantastic time lapse that I am super happy with. Despite the generally dreary weather, I was fortunate to get several mornings of really nice light, and this camera absolutely shines for landscape photography. Sony claims this new sensor has a dynamic range up to 16 stops, and while I'm not going to do studio tests to find out exactly how accurate that number is, I'm mostly just interested in seeing how that plays out in a real world scenario. I shot these two images with a 4 stop difference in exposure, and I'm able to edit them to look nearly identical. It is incredible shadow recovery, although on the overexposed shot I will say the very brightest highlights do seem to be cooked beyond salvation, but that's to be expected with pretty much every digital camera these days. I almost always shoot half a stop underexposed to protect my highlights, so this feels like a non-issue. It's mostly just incredible how much shadow detail was able to be recovered, and just how incredibly clean the image still is when recovering nearly four stops of underexposure, even as a JPEG. So the a7V got a huge upgrade in its video capabilities over its predecessor. It can now and I can film all intro, which is something like a 1200 megabit per second data rate. Incredible professional quality, but for me, what I think is the coolest part is that that's downsampled from a 7K full sensor image, so you get incredible detail and sharpness that you wouldn't get from just a standard 4K sensor. You can also shoot 4K 120fps, that does have an APS-C crop, that doesn't really bother me because in general if I'm shooting 120fps in my 4K, it's for action sports or wildlife or something like that where a little extra reach tends to be what I want anyways, but I think the coolest thing that they added to this camera is something called the AI Smart Reframe, where it takes that 7K sensor image and it actually will crop into the image and track your subject automatically as they move around the frame. Case in point, this kind of looks like I was filming with a friend who's helping me track around the frame. It's actually, this entire talking head was filmed on a static tripod. That's pretty cool, and it kind of eliminates a lot of the problems that you have as a solo filmmaker, and in my opinion, that is a pretty good use of having a 7K sensor filming 4K video. I also wanted to check the video quality, so I filmed a silly little clip of myself here, and I think it looks great. Compared to the a7 IV, I'm not sure I can really tell a difference, except when zoomed in 200%, I think the a7 V does seem to retain a bit more detail and sharpness even at identical settings, which is pretty cool. Compared to the Alpha 1 filming in 8K, the two actually look shockingly similar. I do think the Alpha 1 looks a little bit sharper here, which isn't surprising, but considering one of these is full 8K resolution and the other is technically 4K resolution, downsampled from 7K, that's really impressive performance. I was curious if the impressive ISO performance carried over to video, so I did a little comparison in Blue Hour, shot at ISO 6400 on all three cameras, and I am quite surprised to see that the a7 V looks substantially worse than the other two options. This camera performs incredible in regular video at base ISO and in stills at high ISO, so I'm not sure I understand why high ISO video would be so dramatically bad. I ran a test back home and found that there is a second base ISO at 8000, where the image gets substantially cleaner. Unfortunately, my time with this camera was extremely limited, and so testing in this category is going to have to be saved for a future video. Also, this is a little bit silly, but they did upgrade the a7 V with the same fancy flip screen that's found on the a7R V, the Alpha 1 II, and the a9 III. Not a huge upgrade, but it is something I am actually personally pretty excited about because I find that screen very useful. The real headline of this new partially stacked sensor is blazing fast readout speed, which should dramatically reduce rolling shutter, so to test that out I headed to the world-famous Swingarm City to try and find some dirt bikers, but after a week of terrible weather I found myself completely alone. I refused to take no for an answer, so I devised a much less photogenic but more efficacious test, which I call Swingarm Shitty, using my incredibly beautiful van as a guideline for straight lines, and I simply shook the camera back and forth to see. The Alpha 1 II unsurprisingly performed the best and is still much faster than the a7 V, despite having the same burst speed. The a7 V actually performed pretty well, with rolling shutter only visible on some of the frames, but the a7 IV... well let's just say that I think the upgrade is pretty obvious in this scenario. Eventually a dirt biker did show up, so I got to test the 4k 120fps video, which was awesome. Now since the marquee feature for this camera is 30fps still shooting with no EVF blackout, I went mountain biking with some friends when I got back home, and I was absolutely blown away by how good this camera is for sports. This is almost literally a mid-range version of the a1 II, which is so freaking sweet, I absolutely cannot wait to buy one. Now in my opinion, one of the most interesting updates for the a7 V is that Sony has opted to ditch the micro USB port, which has been found on every single predecessor of this camera, in lieu of a second USB-C. Now this second USB-C port will be USB 3.2, 10 gigabit per second data transfer rates, very fast, but most excitingly they told me that you can actually power the camera through that port while using it, which has not been possible in the past. You've been able to power the camera through the port to charge the batteries, but it hasn't been able to actually power the camera for shooting. So in order to test that, I have a battery in there that is at literally 1%, an external power bank that I know provides enough juice to actually power the camera, because I've used it with a dummy battery to run time lapses before, and I'm gonna set up a time lapse, I'm gonna run it, we're gonna see if when that internal battery hits zero, does the camera keep shooting using the external power, or does it simply turn off like every other camera that I've ever used. Let's find out. So great news, it's been shooting for 25 minutes now, we're at almost 350 images, the internal battery still says 1%, but it's been shooting for almost half an hour, so clearly that external power through the USB-C port is working. I wanna test one more thing, I'm gonna take out the battery that's inside, and see, oh, that turned it off, okay, well, fair enough. So, uh, that's, I guess, a little bit unsurprising. That's the issue that I've had. A lot of the predecessors have had similar capabilities, where they say that you can power through the USB-C port, so I'll have a fully charged battery inside, and then a backup battery outside to run long time lapses, but it used to, these cameras used to prioritize the internal battery, and then when they died, it would simply turn off, it didn't matter if there was external power, once the camera's off, it would charge the internal battery, but you'd still end up with a ruined time lapse. So, it's fairly nice out here today, so that at 1% stayed where it is, but I think if it was cold out, and that battery had gone from 1% to 0%, just due to cold, not due to discharge, the camera would have turned off, I would have had a lost time lapse. So, that's one of those things that I feel like is maybe improved, but more testing is necessary. With no battery in there, can I turn it on with the external power? No. Okay, so, it's once again, I'm gonna try both of them, we're here testing, right? Yeah, that's doing nothing also. So, once again, the USB-C port is basically for charging an internal battery. It appears as though it charges basically at the same rate as it discharges, so you basically will end up with a null equation here, it'll shoot for however long your big dummy battery capacity is, rather than your internal battery, which is an improvement, but it's not a backup, it's not a failsafe, I would still continue to use one of the dummy batteries that plugs in under here, it just feels safer, although it's worth noting that my internal battery now says 3%, so just in that brief moment where I had it powered off, I did gain a little capacity. A little disappointed with that result, if I'm being fully honest, but it's exactly the same as every other Sony camera that I've ever owned, so I already have my workarounds figured out. Despite a few small hiccups, overall, I was very impressed with this camera. It feels like a perfect natural progression in Sony's mid-range line of A7 cameras, and it is a magnificent step up from its predecessor, the A7 IV. I like this camera so much that despite already owning two Alpha 1 Mark IIs, I am going to order an A7 V the second it's available, and I cannot wait to add it to my lineup.