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Home โ†’ Reviews โ†’ Cameras and Lenses โ†’ Sony A7R II Review

Sony A7R II Review

By Nasim Mansurov 30 Comments
Last Updated On April 11, 2020

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ISO Performance at low ISOs (ISO 100-800)

Let’s take a look at how the Sony A7R II performs at low ISOs. Here are some 100% crops at ISO 100, 200, 400 and 800:

Sony A7R II ISO 100 Sony A7R II ISO 200

Sony A7R II ISO 400 Sony A7R II ISO 800

As expected, images look very clean and low ISOs. At ISO 800 we can see a bit of noise in the shadows, but it is not distracting by any means.

High ISO Performance (ISO 1600-25600)

Let’s see what happens when ISO is boosted to much higher levels:

Sony A7R II ISO 1600 Sony A7R II ISO 3200

ISO 1600 adds quite a bit more noise and this time we are starting to see noise impacting other areas of the image. At ISO 3200 we start to see chroma noise, but the colors and the details look good and perfectly usable once downsampled, or cleaned up with noise reduction software.

Sony A7R II ISO 6400 Sony A7R II ISO 12800

As ISO is pushed higher than 3200, we see far more noise all over the image. Both chroma and luminance noise are very noticeable at ISO 6400. At ISO 12800, we see loss of detail and the noise levels are already too high to make the image usable.

Sony A7R II ISO 25600 Sony A7R II ISO 51200

Although ISO 25600 falls within the range of the native ISO on the A7R II, you can clearly see that it looks quite bad and completely unusable. Even downsampling such an image and running noise reduction would do little to help. And ISO 51200 is far worse in comparison, with most details getting mushy.

Sony A7R II ISO 102400

Lastly, I really don’t see the point of providing ISO 102400, since it looks like garbage.

So what can we say about the noise performance of the A7R II? It is certainly hard to say how good or bad the performance is without direct comparisons to other cameras, so let’s see how it fares against other high-resolution cameras. Select the next page below.

Table of Contents

  • Overview and Specifications
  • Camera Construction and Handling
  • Image Sensor
  • Autofocus Performance and Metering
  • ISO Performance
  • Camera Comparisons
  • Summary
  • More Image Samples
  • Reader Comments
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