Sunset Over Palm Springs & An Annoying A7rII

Sony A7rII – ISO 500 – f5.6 – 1/60

I pulled out my ol Sony A7rII again. I had to take a break from it for awhile and focus on some of my Fujifilm lens reviews. You know, I never did a full review on the Sony A7r II. Weird right? But there is a good reason . . . I don’t really love it. And because I don’t love it, it’s hard for me to get excited enough about it to spend the time reviewing it. It’s almost a super cool camera, almost, but there are a few things that really bother me.

I’ll explain.

The memory card write speed is way too slow. I know I obsess over this but it’s really really really bad in this camera. Unacceptable. Every time you take a shot and you want to hit play to review it, you have to wait for the buffer to clear. When you want to zoom in and check your focus, you have to wait on the memory card bottleneck. It’s not a huge deal when looking at it at face value, but after using the camera all the time, it just gets really annoying, and nobody talks about this, why?

I don’t know if a lot of people that read my website are into gaming, (I make video game trailers for a living) but Sony to me is like Dice. Every time a new Battlefield game comes out, it’s just totally broken, we all love it, but it’s broken, for like six months. Except Sony cameras stay that way, just not working as well as the competition.

What else really bothers me about the Sony A7rII is the battery. I’m ok with poor battery life, I have six batteries. But what’s really annoying is the camera is always draining batteries even when it’s turned off. Go to bed with a battery at 50%, wake up the next morning, it’s at 10%. So pretty much every time I pick up my Sony A7rII the battery is dead. Again, not a huge deal, but it’s just annoying. Update: I think I’ve figured this issue out. Only some of my official Sony batteries are doing this. I think the older batteries have a constant drain. The new ones, like the one that shipped with my A6300 doesn’t do this.

So although the camera is great, it’s just the most annoying camera I’ve ever used, yes, even more annoying than the GoPro Hero5. I absolutely love my annoying GoPro Hero5 though.

Sunset Over Palm Springs | Sony A7r II

This shot was taken from the JW Marriot resort. The sunset turned into this giant beautiful monster and I wanted to grab a quick shot of it with the palm trees in the foreground. So I stepped onto the balcony from my hotel room and shot a few single exposures handheld. I was using the Sony A7rII and the amazing 16-35mm f4. Love that lens.

To process it I did some quick Lightroom, a touch of Photoshop and I ran some filters in Color Efex Pro 4. Very quick process, I’ve been busy, but it turned out pretty cool so I thought it was worth sharing.