Autofocus / Manual Focus Performance and Metering
The Sony NEX-7 has the original contrast-detect autofocus system, which later was replaced by a “hybrid” AF system on the NEX-6. This unfortunately means that the AF speed is limited by the speed of contrast-detect, which cannot really compete with phase detection autofocus. In my experience, the NEX-6 got a pretty good boost in AF performance when compared to the NEX-7, contrary to what some other photographers have experienced. When I compared the AF speed between the NEX-7 and the NEX-6 to see how much faster the new AF system was in good light conditions, the NEX-6 seemed to acquire focus about twice faster. Note that I specifically highlighted good light conditions – if you want to compare the two, you must do it in bright light, or the hybrid system will automatically fall back to contrast detect. So if you want to shoot moving subjects or need to acquire focus fast, the NEX-6 will be a better choice over the NEX-7. Now I am not trying to say that the AF system on the NEX-7 is terrible – it is still pretty snappy for contrast detect. But in my experience, the hybrid AF system on the NEX-6 is faster.
Because of contrast detect, you might also notice odd behavior when using the camera in AF-C mode. The camera will continuously try to acquire focus back and forth, and this repeats in a loop and never ends. This is normal behavior, because contrast detect “probes” for focus continuously. If you come across this behavior and it irritates you, the best thing to do is switch to AF-S mode.
The advertised 10 FPS speed can only be achieved when using a special “Speed Priority Continuous” mode, where the camera’s exposure and focus are locked and live view is cut off. The camera buffer fills up quickly after about 15 images in JPEG mode, slowing down to approximately 2 frames per second. If you want to see what you are shooting in live view between frames, then you will have to use the “Continuous Advance” mode, where the camera slows down to approximately 4 FPS.
The Sony NEX-7 is a very friendly camera for manual focus operation. If you choose to use third party lenses with an adapter, you will love the focus “peaking” feature (can be found in the camera “Setup” menu). I found focus peaking to be a very useful feature, because you do not have to guess anything when shooting in MF mode. The camera will automatically detect sharpness and paint it with a chosen color, making manual focus operation a breeze. In addition, the two zoom levels (4.8x or 9.6x) let you get much closer to the focus area and really nail focus. I used the 9.6x zoom and selected a desired area to focus on and got great results, both when shooting on a tripod and when hand-holding the camera. This MF implementation is the best I have seen so far on a mirrorless camera – the MF operation on the Nikon 1 and Fuji X cameras is much worse in comparison (although the split screen focusing on the X100S is pretty cool).
As for exposure and metering, I was rather pleased with the accuracy and of the camera exposure and metering system. In most cases it provided accurate results, minimizing the use of exposure compensation (I primarily shot in Aperture Priority mode).
Movie Recording
Every new camera that comes out seems to have impressive movie features and the Sony NEX-7 is no exception. It can record full 1080p HD movies at 60 fps (AVCHD 2.0) for smooth playback, which is very impressive. You can also pick lower resolution MPEG-4 format and slower rates (down to 24 fps) for smaller movie files. Another advantage of the movie mode is that you can fully control the exposure while recording movies – you can easily adjust aperture, shutter speed and ISO when shooting videos in Manual mode. If the scene you are recording is too bright or too dark and you are in one of the P/A/S modes, you can also use exposure compensation to adjust the brightness level. The camera LCD will reflect these changes and you will see exactly what you are capturing. As for Sony’s Optical SteadyShot image stabilization, it works pretty well when recording videos, but you have to be careful when panning the camera with SteadyShot turned on, because it will occasionally bump the camera up or down. This is normal behavior and the same thing would happen if you were to pan while taking stills.
Dynamic Range / HDR / DRO
A big advantage of a larger sensor is its ability to produce images with more dynamic range. Compared to the Nikon 1’s much smaller sensor, the Sony NEX-7 1.5x crop factor sensor is capable of producing higher dynamic range. Sony consistently scores the highest among different brands and it provides impressive dynamic range – something to be expected from such a superb sensor. As with all digital cameras, increasing camera ISO also decreases dynamic range, so shoot at base ISO of 100 if you want to preserve the most amount of information on your photographs.
A neat feature of the Sony NEX-7 is built-in High Dynamic Range (HDR) capability, which allows capturing multiple images and then combining them into a single JPEG image. While I personally like to shoot HDR photographs in manual mode in RAW format and then process them to my liking using specialized HDR software tools, the built-in Auto HDR mode can produce rather good results. I am not a big fan of the HDR Painting feature (especially the “HIGH” setting), because it produces ugly/unrealistic tones that many photographers seem to be obsessed with today. There is also a B&W HDR capability, but I did not spend much time experimenting with it, since I do not like in-camera B&W conversation.
Like on all recent Sony cameras, the NEX-7 also has a feature called “Dynamic Range Optimizer” (DRO), which is similar to Nikon’s “Active D-Lighting”. DRO applies a tone curve to images and does a decent job at recovering shadow details. This is only truly useful for JPEG images though, because the tone curve is not applied to RAW images.
Let’s see how the camera does in ISO performance against other cameras. Choose the next page below.