[Digital Camera World] The new Sony A7R VI has the highest resolution fully stacked sensor yet (67 MP) – but that’s not even the biggest change
Posted by Iggydang@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 19 comments
I'm a bit late on this (camera was announced about 2 days ago) as my account was hacked and I just got it back, but this announcement is pretty interesting.
Some context: the camera industry saw a bit of a stagnation (ala 4c/8t in the PC world) in the 2010s with most manufacturers settling at around 20MP as a good balance between resolution providing detail and maintaining managable file sizes for editing/transport. Since the lower end of the dedicated camera market has been eaten by the fact that most phones tend to be good enough, manufacturers have started to push MP numbers back up to compete and to take advantage of the fact that modern lenses can be very good for cheap. This tends to now hover at around 24 - 30MP as a baseline standard, 45 - 50 for the "pro" cameras (higher MP helps to crop while maintaining detail), and anything above that for more specialised needs like landscape or being able to flex on the poors with their lowly twenty-something MP count. What's that, a phone?!
I was also bored and didn't feel like studying for my finals, so here's a quickly thrown-together table of a few manufacturers that I made with reference to Wiki:
DISCLAIMER: Don't take the labels too seriously. I made them up, sometimes inaccurately (the Canon 5DsR was not a higher-end 5D3, just a higher resolution one but you get both since it tells a better story) and frankly its not that accurate especially for the lower end cameras where there might have been cheaper ones.
| Camera MP by year |
|---|
| Canon |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
| APS-C |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
| Nikon |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
| APS-C |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
| Sony |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
| APS-C |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
| Fuji |
| Enthusiast |
| Consumer |
| Entry-Level |
A few interesting points especially for those not so much into cameras:
- Manufacturers love to share sensors to spread the cost out - if you see the same MP count it's probably the same sensor (see the 3 18MP sensors under Canon in the 2010s?)
- I personally see the race as mostly over, as storage starts to become a massive pain past 30/40MP or so for general use. Especially with the increased storage cost, I can't see manufacturers trying to convince buyers that they should fork out hundreds more in the current climate. Editing can be an issue as well, but it's not as bad as on the video side.
- Flagships tended to congregate around 20MP as they were sports/photojournalist cameras where resolution didn't matter as it was more important that the files were small for easier transport and a lot of the time the images got downscaled anyways. I had previously heard sports photographers at stadiums tended to shoot JPEG instead of the higher quality RAW file with the camera directly tethered to a computer (via ethernet) with someone quickly cropping the shot and getting it out as headlines or live news updates backstage in the stadium. Nikon is the only outlier here as their current sports camera (Z9) is 45MP while Sony and Canon hover around 24MP with the a9III and R1 respectively.
- Sony manufacture the sensors for 3/4 of the manufacturers on the list. It's not as bad of a situation as TSMC making most bleeding edge nodes, but...
HourBank2803@reddit
I mean its been the best camera since the dawn of time
WTFAnimations@reddit
Sony engineers are brainrotted confirmed
wimpires@reddit
The thing about the A7R or the R line in general is I think it's important to say that fundamentally it's not important or required for most photographers unless you need it.
Most people I've heard who have R's use it for giving them a lot of leeway in cropping in sports photography or for a decent crop in wildlife/bird photography when you are already at the end of your zoom range and still want a 20MP crop.
Outside of those use cases the extra resolution is more of a detriment/annoyance because of the bigger storage space and processing requirements
notam00se@reddit
Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paJqHPHLExo "But I have a 1d"
127-0-0-1_1@reddit
I mean, cropping is always nice. My go-to is still the a7cR because when I travel I can afford to have less range on the glass, since even a m4/3 crop still has plenty of pixels even for professional work.
It’s also nice just for chaotic scenes in general. Shoot wide and edit in the crop when you have time to think.
It’s not everything but resolution is a feature nonetheless. Certainly I imagine most people would be fine with the a7V.
mr_tolkien@reddit
Wouldn’t the S series be better for sport photographies with its 120fps shooting?
Tommy7373@reddit
Sports you're probably looking at A9 with a global shutter. These stacked sensors with high resolutions can have slow readouts, causing warped images as the sensor outputs data from top to bottom. The R6 is a lot faster than the ones before it (around 15ms vs nearly 100ms on R5/4 w/ electronic shutter), but still nothing like A9/A1 at around 2-3ms.
BandeFromMars@reddit
Stacked sensors inherently have less rolling shutter even on higher megapixel sensors. This new A7R apparently has a very high readout speed so its actually useable for sports now.
Tommy7373@reddit
True but it's still not close to something like an A9/A1, and not usable in most sports at a professional level. Something like baseball you still get very noticeable warping in any kind of action, maybe slower stuff like soccer might be usable, but if you're in the press pits you're buying an A9 anyways.
https://youtu.be/UMyqliNiu_0?si=CXc2Ebq79gFhFgk1&t=612
b84ui@reddit
But still significantly more rolling shutter than the A1II which reads out 5x faster, or global shutter in the A9III which has no rolling shutter.
The A7R was always usable for sports as long as you were fine with 10FPS with the mechanical shutter. While the new A7RVI's electronic shutter (30FPS) does read out faster, rolling shutter can definitely still be an issue with higher speed scenes. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0909713709/no-the-sony-a7r-vi-isn-t-a-cut-price-a1-ii 1/50s readout is still significantly slower than even the original A9 (~1/160s) or the Sony A1/Nikon Z9 (~1/250s) which are the only sensors with electronic shutters on par with mechanical shutter speed (~1/300s). https://horshack-dpreview.github.io/RollingShutter/ (Sort by "Photo" column) https://www.thewanderinglensman.com/2022/12/interesting-charts.html
Not saying the A7RVI isn't impressive since it's still reading out a 66.7MP sensor which is more MP than any other non-medium format sensor, but as far as readout speed is concerned it's still not in the same league as an A1 or A9III.
gelade1@reddit
It’s faster than a7rv which was insanely slow…But not exactly fast. I doubt any pro sport shooter will use this when other options exist.
https://m.dpreview.com/articles/0909713709/no-the-sony-a7r-vi-isn-t-a-cut-price-a1-ii
gelade1@reddit
S is generally meant for video in Sony's line up. You can use it for stills but pros often need to crop. More megapixels give more flexibility into fixing horizon and all that. You are thinking of A9 or A1 series for sports.
But really modern mirrorless are so advanced you can do w/e with w/e if you know what you are doing. Then again pros will use the best tools they can get to make their life easier
127-0-0-1_1@reddit
The real move out of “stagnation” was the prevalence of stacked sensors, allowing relatively high resolution cameras to be great video cameras, have high burst rates, and be electronic shutter only.
The a1 started it but the Nikon z8 really pushed the boundaries, being a medium/prosumer camera with quite insane specs due to its stacked sensor.
bunihe@reddit
The main thing about introducing higher resolution camera sensors previously is the quantum efficiency wasn't high enough (smaller photodiodes generating less electrons when a certain amount of photons hit it) and full well capacity is quite limited for smaller pixel pitches, on top of this the readout circuitry introduces its own noise. Smaller (and denser) pixels are the limitation for getting higher megapixels, but if SNR is sacrificed by too much the DR drops, which makes it a tradeoff. Then, the faster you read a sensor out, the more read noise you tend to see, and a higher noise floor reduces DR. You can see it with Nikon Z8/Z9's Sony IMX609 prioritizing readout speed but offering worse DR against the likes of D850.
This, however, is subject to change as quantum efficiency continue to improve and readout circuitry introduces less noise. On top of this, fast reading Full Frame sensors started to become cheap enough, and with the read speed comes an unique advantage: Dual Conversion Gain.
Prior to this, dual native ISO only reads through an exposure through a single gain. DCG allows it to be read out twice, high gain and low gain, so they can be merged afterwards to obtain more DR in the shadows. This comes at the cost of reading the sensor twice and combining the two, so Rolling Shutter worsens by a lot.
To mitigate this, the Sony sensor that Lumix S1ii uses takes advantage of Partially Stacked, but even then it is limited to 6k 30bit readout. The A7m5 uses a newer version of the partially stacked sensor that enables DCG but only with mech shutter in photos. A7r6 in particular does DCG in mech shutter too, and line skipped 4k 30fps oversampled from 5k, so the speed bottleneck is still there to make it feasible for higher resolution fast burst rate shooting, but at least we're going in the right direction. As of rn, bursts mostly rely on 14bit readout.
Smartphones introduced DCG long ago, but that's bc their sensors are tiny and stacked (to process readout on chip instead of over MIPI CSI) so it reads out insanely fast. To scan across a larger sensor takes more work.
-WallyWest-@reddit
I'll take 30mp over 60mp simply for the pixel size.
Tommy7373@reddit
Then don't worry get an A7V, or if you want even bigger get an a7s(I/II/III) but at this point I probably wouldn't and get an A7V from the processor and autofocus improvements. Most people use the resolution for cropping, since the target audience is slower moving outdoor anyways with things like birding, wildlife, animals, etc..
ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit
The only sensor maker you might be able to accuse of stagnating for a long time might be Canon (as you pointed out) because they were trying to milk as much out of their old sensor fab as possible.
There's no real need to push for 30-40 megapixels for most uses. The 24 megapixel 35mm sensors from 7-8 years ago still perform very well for photography and adding more is big a trade off between battery life, storage, and post processing time.
But even if absolute pixel count advances may have slowed, they haven't been standing still. They've been pushing other aspects of sensor design like auto focus, readout speeds, and video performance. Video performance has improved a lot over the past 10 years.
gelade1@reddit
Modern canon ff sensors are great. People still stuck at 5d3 era I guess
Iggydang@reddit (OP)
Table doesn't seem to have worked out. Posting it below to see if it's any more visible here: