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How's the original A7 for a start to full frame?


akaikitty
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hi- on a very limited budget and wanting to hop from 16mm-ish that my g7 gave me to full frame, getting sick of the limited dof with fast lenses and the low light wasnt too good.

i will be using an external recorder if i wanted to shoot pretty much uncompressed anyways and i have access to the ursa mini and gh5 for pro shoots anyways, and don't want to move to canon becuase i havent had good experiences with their cameras or go to aps-c again.

i know it's not the best in low light and has moire issues but is there anything else to look out for? it's the cheapest for full frame and if i'm buying a body i'd rather it be new and it's really cheap with the 28-70 kitlens that i'll ditch anyways and use my samyangs and old m42 and pentax lenses on and adapt more stuff too in the future.

i don't need mad bitrates internal and from what ive seen making it flat in camera is best bet and doesn't work that bad? as there's no s-log on the old A7 as far as i know? the a7ii has better internal recording and IBIS but i can't spend more of the money as it's all i can get at the moment lol and imo it's not much worth spending $500 more for.

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A7S is the cheapest decent fullframe you can buy now. A7 is no good for video.

If you absolutely need the shallow focus buy a 25mm 0.95 lens. Very shallow. In many ways I regret buying into the Sony system but I love the audio quality.

Psss. You can buy a m43 Kaxinda (I think) which is a rebranded Meike 25mm 0.95 for under 200 at aliexpress. 

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Buy the A7s, I never did like the A7 for video at all. Now if you are wanting to do a lot of photo stuff the a7r is better at that, but no better video wise than the A7, actually probably worse. And the A7s takes better pictures even at 12mp than you think.

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You'll be stepping down video quality too much on original A7. It barely looks like 720p and has moire.

The A7S is much better in 1080p internally. No 4K. What are you recording externally to? It does 4K via HDMI.

The A7S is very old, but still not *that* cheap used.

There are cheaper nice 1080p full frame cameras around these days.

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I had both an A7 and A7s.    I loved both but not the A7 for video though it was just ok for my limited video needs.   I ended up selling the A7 as it was not being used so much and I love taking low light photo and occasional video and the A7s was my all time favorite until it died.

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On the 28-70 kit lens, it I actually a pretty good lens and including for video (at least with an A7s).    I used it pretty much as a constant f5.6 and it is close to parfocal, focuses silently and reasonably quickly (in a limited range for video) is stabilized and light so a good choice for the A7 and A7s.     It is very good in the centre and ok at the edges.     Apparently there is some copy variation but mine was quite good.

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9 hours ago, akaikitty said:

hi- on a very limited budget and wanting to hop from 16mm-ish that my g7 gave me to full frame, getting sick of the limited dof with fast lenses and the low light wasnt too good.

16mm-ish? No, the G7 (especially with a focal reducer) is nearer to Super 35mm than 16mm. 

And if you're on a tight budget then definitely don't go with an a7 mk1 just simply to "have full frame"

Get yourself instead a BMPCC4K or X-T3 (or even X-T30), with a focal reducer.

7 hours ago, inde said:

If you absolutely need the shallow focus buy a 25mm 0.95 lens. Very shallow.


This. If you haven't tried out F0.95 lenses on MFT then don't bother jumping systems yet

6 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Buy the A7s, I never did like the A7 for video at all. Now if you are wanting to do a lot of photo stuff the a7r is better at that, but no better video wise than the A7, actually probably worse. And the A7s takes better pictures even at 12mp than you think.


If someone does lots of photo work then a Nikon D800 can be picked up for a song! Or even better a Nikon D750 for not much more

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Here's a few shots from my 17.5mm f0.95 lens on MFT.. It's equivalent to a 35mm f1.9 lens on a FF sensor, so it's pretty fast.

Not sure which of these are wide open or not, but you can definitely get shallow dof if you want to.

Japan6_1_86.1.thumb.jpg.4919101d3460765cad18a2ff0d2475fc.jpg

Japan5_1_32.1.thumb.jpg.abc5d39be93d7932d2947aebdff0a68a.jpg

1002543976_ScreenShot2018-12-29at10_06_52am.png.48651f26fa53a0899babde2cce5089de.png

People talk about f2.8 mft lenses like they're fast, but they're really not. You need to have things around f1 for them to start using that phrase.

Also remember that the dof is related to the aperture, which is proportional to the focal length, so a 25mm f0.95 has shallower dof than my 17.5mm f0.95, so if you're using longer lenses then it's easier to get that FF look.

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Yeah but a Lot of the D800's had focus problems. Upper left side on most. I am always afraid to buy a really cheap one., It has a good chance it is a dog focus wise. Plastic focus box was the problem on them. The 800E's didn't seem to be as bad focus wise. The D810 cured it. Nikon has had a Lot of screw ups as of late. D750 is a time bomb to buy also.

But Canon had the 1D mk III focus screw up big time. So no virgins in the bunch.

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5 minutes ago, webrunner5 said:

Yeah but a Lot of the D800's had focus problems. Upper left side on most. I am always afraid to buy a really cheap one., It has a good chance it is a dog focus wise. Plastic focus box was the problem on them. The 800E's didn't seem to be as bad focus wise. The D810 cured it. Nikon has had a Lot of screw ups as of late. D750 is a time bomb to buy also.

So the whole frame doesn't focus evenly? Weird

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Somehow the body moves and the new composite focus box they used just wasn't aligned properly, or cast properly. They even let you send them in and they may come back even worse lol. It was a mess. Whats funny a ton of people jumped ship from Canon because the 1D mk III was so F ing bad, and then the D800 came out and they were jumping ship Back to Canon. It was funny.

You can't blame them though. You Have to have a camera that can focus right, especially if you are a Pro making a living doing it with a lot of money to spend. You are going with a camera that Works, at least for a week or two you hope lol.

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don't want to go to nikon again- all my F glass is beat up- i.e 14mm that isnt recognised because the chip is damaged and the front element is badly scrathed and visible wide open, or just plain bad and their bodies aren't too good for video with past experience. 

the a7 is cheapest possible for full frame and yeah i get the pitfalls but i may still pull ahead as i don't want to buy refurb or used because of bad experiences in the past. at least the HDMI out is clean, but any other a7 is too much for me (750 pounds is limit because of money but i do want to move on from mft as i just generally haven't got along with MFT using the gx80, hacked g3 and my g7, and thought the d3300 that's now dead was too limiting with aps-c and wide angle lenses- and i can get the a7 with the kit for as much as a decent aps-c dslr body like the d7500 body only, hell even the 7d mkii or whatnot but dont like canon from experience.) and i want a little thing that's full frame and cheap for personal use, lol.

if i wanted decent images i always have access to the ursa mini, sony fs500 i think and the jvc hd110 with the f1.4 zoom, as mismatched as a 4k camera and 720p HDV2 is i deliver in 720/1080 most of the time and i havent got any bad reception about video quality, even with the stuff with the main shots from the JVC.

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2 hours ago, akaikitty said:

 i don't want to buy refurb or used because of bad experiences in the past.

Don't flush money down the toilet because of a couple of turds. Always buy used. 

Used A7 in store with six months warranty surfaces for sub $300 here at least once a month.

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