Sony launched a new camera which sports flagship specs – sort of at least – while costing just around half. In other words, the new A7 III comes with a lot of features that had made the A7R III an instant hit last year while still limiting the damage to the wallet to $1,999.
What buyers get for that much of their hard earned money is a mirror less camera that boasts of a 24.2-megapixel sensor and a 5-axis optical image stabilization feature. Powering the new camera is a Bionz X image processor which Sony claims to offer 1.8 times the processing speed as on the A7 II.
That is evident in the A7 III’s capability to shoot still pictures at 10 frames per second in RAW or JPEG format. That apart, the camera is also capable of buffering 177 JPEG images, 89 RAW images, and 40 images in uncompressed RAW format. In all, the camera has the capability to shoot 710 shots on a single charge of the battery.
Other salient features of the new A7 III include its capability to shoot still images with 15-stop dynamic range while also producing 14-bit RAW files as well. Also, of course, it is capable of shooting in 4K HDR format, besides being capable of shooting 120 fps high speed captures in full HF format. The camera allows for video shooting in S-Log2 and S-Log3 color profiles as well.
Sony is also claiming a two-fold improvement in autofocus speed compared to its predecessor, the A7 II. Specifically, the A7 III comes with 693 AF points which can take care of 93 percent of the frame and is supposed to perform remarkably better in dim-light conditions too.
There is an AF joystick at the rear, along with 11 other buttons for ease in operating the camera. Plus, the ‘My Menu’ is user customizable so that users can club together the options they need the most. The A7 III also comes with a USB Type-C port, which makes transferring images to the laptop a breeze.
Unfortunately, the A7 III isn’t completely weather proof, which means extra caution to be exercised with the camera during adventure outings. The rear touchscreen too has limited movement in that it can only flip out and tilt while a blackout-free viewfinder as on the A9 is missing as well. But then those can be small irritants that can be ignored when the camera has the flagship-like performance to offer while saving users around a thousand bucks.
