so october 2015 sony releases
the a7s2 and the world goes crazy
because it was a small compact mirrorless camera
relatively affordable that could just destroy
any camera in low light and for years we
here at LMG were using the a7s ii as our daily driver camera until we
switched to our reds even till recently nothing has really
beaten the a7s2 in terms of low-light flexibility
and performance until today because sony
after five long years has finally announced
the a7s3 so let's begin funny thing is
it's july 2020 right now and
cameras are just coming out left and right we have
the canon r5 at the beginning of the month we have the blackmagic
ursa 12k that's coming and shipping in september
and then this camera whoa
okay this box is uh very non-descript
so i assume that this is not what you're gonna get when it comes to factory
packaging this is a i think a prototype model and then they
also sent along one of their tough 64 gig sony sd cards
because the data rates on this thing are
insane and we will get into that in a second
sony was gracious enough to send us a couple lenses for testing
i believe i requested a 24-70 f 2.8 and
a 35 1.4 andy are you ready oh yeah
let's see this is basically a camera box
we have a little HDMI like cable
lock thing not interesting
okay oh you know what i'm not gonna take the camera out first i'm gonna i'm gonna go through the rest of the box
and then i'm gonna take the camera out so let's see what else is in here
we have a power plug a type c cable because this camera has type c which is
amazing okay we have a battery um
we have a charger i can't take that for granted fuji didn't include a charger in
their camera so like thank you sony for not being crazy and not including a
charger properly uh camera strap which no one uses
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wow i have our original a7s2 right here
and you can tell right off the bat that the grip has
increased in size quite a bit which i
appreciate because again on on the a7s ii the grip was always a
little bit on the small side it was better than the a7s one but besides that i mean when you look at
the top of the camera they haven't changed that much there's a dedicated
record button on the top of the camera look at this top of the camera dedicated
record button look at the record button that was on this camera it
was on the side and it was like mushy and weird i always remapped it to
the shutter button just because that's way better
so on the back of the camera you can tell they haven't drastically changed
anything but they have added very nice additions
the dial that's on the a7s2 which is like under the top of the camera is now
just like completely exposed it again the little things like this
where you can just kind of reach this dial from any angle
that's nice and the height adjustment of it makes it easier to access
they've also added a joystick and the a7s iii has a touch screen
if you've been watching me unboxing anything on ShortCircuit recently you'll know
i am a very big fan of proper flip
out screens i think that was one of the biggest downfalls of the a7s2 is the
monitor on the back of the camera was just not very flexible you could do
certain things with it but it was just a pain to use if you were
able to build the camera up if you were okay with that kind of setup it was way
nicer to always add your own monitor after the fact they have fixed that
and they added a proper flip out display
look at that full articulation canon has
been using this screen design for a while fuji followed suit i was really happy
when i saw that and i'm also really happy that sony's doing it
these doors are nice this door is not perfect
but the doors on the a7s
too they just kind of like flop there like
they were so annoying and they also flopped down so then whenever you had
something like whenever you had a cage or something near the camera on the side
it would get in the way because you just have these like two things hanging there like i would love to have just cut these
off i should have just cut them off okay so i o wise we have
a microphone jack a headphone jack
type c nice and then a micro usb
and a full size HDMI now HDMI is not
perfect but when you compare it to the
micro HDMI that was on the a7s2
i am very thankful that sony made this adjustment while i would have still
preferred sdi ultimately this is still a mirrorless camera it's a compact camera
i bet that there's a version of a camera that one day might exist that will have
sdi in this form factor you could argue that the komodo is that
camera not quite the same thing but guys this HDMI port can output
16-bit raw there isn't even an external recorder
that can fully record 16-bit raw yet i'm sure they'll come but
it's nice that sony has designed this with the future
in mind and so when recorders come out that can take in
that output that's great one of the coolest things that i saw on
the spec sheet for this camera and now that i'm finally seeing it in person i'm really excited about is that this camera
has dual sd card slots but not just dual sd
card slots it has dual cf express
type a slash sd card slots you could have
two sd cards or one sd card
one cf express type a or
two cf express type a that's a lot can
you can someone come up with a better name for that card type than cf express type
a that essentially gives you the option to have two sds two cf's
or interchange the two okay let's talk about the sensor
there it is full frame 12 megapixel sensor
but it's significantly improved the processor in the camera
is eight times faster than the one in the a7s ii
and the pixels themselves are larger
which just allows better dynamic range lower noise
higher low light performance overall and
sony has also done a lot of work on the actual sensor itself they've basically
changed the order in which they layer the sensor which
allows them to read data off the sensor faster so when they pair that
with the faster processor in this camera you get the ability to have fatter
codecs because this camera can record up to 600
megabits per second the iso range on this camera the maximum
iso is 409 600.
you would never use an iso that high
the fact that the sensor is capable of doing that is in itself amazing
i would have to admit that compared to other touchscreens on cameras that i've
used this feels not bad
the one thing i don't like right off the bat though is that the menu button
is the back button so you have to press menu
to go back it's not preferred to do that
though i would have loved a back button like right here around the joystick area
or the control dial area the menu seems to also have improved significantly
though because again if anyone has used a sony menu
like the a7s2 this menu is a bit of a nightmare
let's put lens on this guy
so sony sent the 35 1.4
this lens does not have image stabilization but thankfully
the camera itself has five stops of image stabilization
let's put in one of these tough sd cards
unable to use memory card slot one huh
why so we figured out the sd card issue
we were having we can't shoot at the highest bit rate 4k that this camera can shoot at
but we can still shoot at 4k and i want to just do a quick autofocus test
jonno's sitting behind the camera so he's going to walk towards me i'm rolling now
that looks pretty good it looks like
in terms of autofocus the r5 has quite the contender
with this a7s3 there's andy
len's case andy
len's case and there's very little
hesitation i just have to press
and it goes for it i've had the camera on for about
five minutes now and i was just rolling maybe three different clips just now and
i can feel the camera is warm sony has stated
that this camera can roll at 4k 60fps
for a full hour with no overheating whatsoever
you're generally not rolling one single clip for an
entire hour so in theory
even as the camera starts to warm up it should never
overheat to the point where it turns itself off
s-log 3 typically has a minimum
iso for example the fx9 when i was using the fx9
in s-log three the the minimum iso you use on that camera is a thousand
so even with the built-in nd i needed more nd if i wanted to shoot it like f2
f one point four so i'm going to choose s log three on here
and let's see if you're limited
by iso at all
guys what
i'm at iso
160 in s log 3 s scan it cine that is awesome so you
get the full benefit of s-log's dynamic
range and color profile with no downside
because now you have the choice to use whatever iso you want
from 160 and up that's amazing the
rolling shutter that played the a7s2 is not
visible on the a7s iii the rolling shutter i'm gonna roll the camera right
now and i'm just gonna like shake it again
this is not a realistic use of a camera you would never do this
but it does show you how good
the rolling shutter can be and i'm holding this handheld
not really being that careful about how steady i am
and it's pretty good guys
knowing what the a7s2's rolling shutter looked like even off of the evf
this is significantly better they fixed all the tiny little issues
that were plaguing this camera like if you do travel vlogs and you want to
throw your camera out the window to get the scenery
that's flying by it doesn't have to look diagonal the
entire time anymore how great is that
it would be a disservice to you guys to not
show you some footage and we'll even try to include a download link so that you
can see the clips for yourself even though this sd card can't record at
the highest quality 4k that this camera offers we
are still with a 128 gig cart only gonna get an hour
and 47 minutes of 4k off of this camera as it is right now
but the nice thing about that one hour and 47 minutes of 4k
is that you could shoot it all in one clip because yes this thing has no limit on
the record time so for anyone who has owned an a7s2 who
still uses an a7s2 who wants a b cam that's small for an fx9 or even
maybe a venice in certain situations sony's finally delivered five
years later great autofocus image stabilization
faster better low light full frame sensor 15 stops of dynamic range and a body
that is not much bigger than their other cameras in their lineup
good job sony i'm excited to review this
but for now i'm really stoked
that after five years this camera is finally here so i hope you guys enjoyed
the video if you have any other questions about the a7s iii
i hopefully will answer them in the review let me know in the comments
if i should do a review on LTT i probably will regardless but you know
let me know if you think it's a good idea see you guys later