It’s been a long five year wait between the A7S Mark II and the newly announced A7S Mark III. It’s the newest in Sony’s full-frame line of mirrorless cameras. With competition in the prosumer video sector ramping up, it’s shaping up to be an interesting comparison to other similar cameras.
The first and foremost competitor to the A7S III is the Canon EOS R5. Both cameras being heavily video orientated, the R5 being able to shoot up to 8K, while the A7S Mark 3 has focused on being able to shoot 4K really well. Other cameras in the same space are the Panasonic Lumix S1H, and possibly the Nikon Z6/Z7 with the ProRes RAW update.
Starting with the headline feature of the A7S III, the ability to shoot 4K at 120 frames per second. Not only can you finally get some slow motion 4K footage from an A7, Sony has improved the recording quality with new codecs, and faster bitrates with more efficient encoding.
With the new BIONZ XR processor there’s an increase to over 15 stops of dynamic range, while shooting in 4:2:2 10-bit. You can also record 4K at 60p in 16-bit RAW externally, which for this price range is a pretty high spec.
The rolling shutter has been heavily reduced by 3x compared to the A7S II. This is a huge improvement as any panning video or video shot from a moving instance is heavily disadvantaged by slanted straight lines.
On the photography side, although we highly doubt anyone will be focusing on stills with this camera, the A7S Mark 3 can shoot 10 frames per second, but with a 1000 uncompressed RAW image buffer. That’s with full autofocus and auto-exposure as well. A new format joins the standard RAW and JPEG file types; HEIF format which sits in-between the two. It contains more data than JPEGs, yet is twice as efficient. It won’t beat RAW files, but it’s a space efficient format if you don’t want to shoot RAW all the time.
If you’re mostly shooting video and do some photography on the side or for leisure, this is the camera to get. Send us an email, call us or chat with us through Facebook if you have any questions about the A7S III or other models.