Sunset Over Palm Springs & An Annoying A7rII

I pulled out my old Sony A7rII again. I had to take a break from it and focus on some of my Fujifilm lens reviews. I never did a full review of the Sony A7r II. Weird right? But there is a good reason . . . I don’t love it. And because I don’t love it, it’s hard for me to get excited enough to spend the time reviewing it. It’s almost a super cool camera, but a few things 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 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 must wait for 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 annoying, and nobody talks about this; why?

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

What else bothers me about the Sony A7rII is the battery. I’m okay with poor battery life; I have six batteries. But what’s annoying is that the camera is always draining batteries even when 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, it’s not a huge deal, but it isn’t very pleasant. 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, don’t do this.

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 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 a 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 used the Sony A7rII and the amazing 16-35mm f4 lens. I love that lens.

To process it, I did some quick Lightroom and 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.