Finally I "upgraded" from Sony A7 to Sony A6300, not quite an upgrade in terms of sensor size, but the A6300 just beats A7 on almost every other aspects.
Firstly, the reason I bought A6300 is for the video capability. The three years old A7 simply can't compete with recent cameras on video shooting options. The best A7 can do is 1080p 50 frames per second and the image quite soft. I wanted a camera that shoots 4k, yes I've been considering A7RII, A7SII and A6500 but they are all way beyond my budget, when I get that money to get A7RII everybody would already have shot 4k. Luckily, there's A6300, perfect budget 4k camera capable of handling both video and still.
Yesterday I went to Venice to take some test shots. To save money, I didn't get the kit lens, so I just used my full frame lens SEL28-70(kit for A7), I heard that full frame lens on crop body won't bring out the best of the lens, actually it largely compromise the sharpness of the lens, according to Tony Northrup's video.
I looked up on DXOmark myself for my lenses, a Samyang 85mm lens that's as sharp as 39 megapixels will be reduced to around 10 mp if it's mounted on a crop body. My little kit lens will bet set back to 8 MP and my 50mm f1.8 Sony lens will become only 12 MP sharp. But 8MP is well enough for 4k video recording.
As for the photo image quality, here are some samples I took last evening, I don't think they look bad
After all 24 MP is more than enough for display on regular monitor or phone screen. Most of the time people don't really need a high megapixel photo as it takes much more space to store, and not everyone like to magnify a picture to examine the sharpness.
I like the color produced by the camera, I chose picture profile "Cine4" and edited in lightroom, I wouldn't tell the difference between these images and any photos taken by my A7.
Now talk about some other noticeable differences between two cameras
Focus: A6300 has very fast auto focus, the shutter button is much more tighter, there's less space between half press the button to focus and full press to take the picture, so when I first got my hands on the camera I often accidentally take multiple shots instead of only one.
Camera body is smaller but not much less heavy than A7, very nice grip and material.
The screen is smaller, viewfinder doesn't seem as sharp as A7's it's a little more difficult for me to find or confirm focus on A6300. Also the viewfinder position is kind of awkwardly on the far left, one of the things I don't like as A7 shooter.
Buttons layout is quite different but I'm sure anyone used A7 can get used to the new one very fast, I customized the buttons to a similar state as my A7 and it's quite nice.
In body flash is really convenient in emergency situations.
11 frames per second continuous shooting is simply ridiculous.
Silent shoot is perfectly silent, absolutely no sound made.
Battery life seems similar to A7, I have 4 batteries in total so I never worry about that.
Shot 59 4k video clips during the evening, in total less than 10 mins long I think, I put them together into a 5 mins long video
Firstly, the reason I bought A6300 is for the video capability. The three years old A7 simply can't compete with recent cameras on video shooting options. The best A7 can do is 1080p 50 frames per second and the image quite soft. I wanted a camera that shoots 4k, yes I've been considering A7RII, A7SII and A6500 but they are all way beyond my budget, when I get that money to get A7RII everybody would already have shot 4k. Luckily, there's A6300, perfect budget 4k camera capable of handling both video and still.
Yesterday I went to Venice to take some test shots. To save money, I didn't get the kit lens, so I just used my full frame lens SEL28-70(kit for A7), I heard that full frame lens on crop body won't bring out the best of the lens, actually it largely compromise the sharpness of the lens, according to Tony Northrup's video.
I looked up on DXOmark myself for my lenses, a Samyang 85mm lens that's as sharp as 39 megapixels will be reduced to around 10 mp if it's mounted on a crop body. My little kit lens will bet set back to 8 MP and my 50mm f1.8 Sony lens will become only 12 MP sharp. But 8MP is well enough for 4k video recording.
As for the photo image quality, here are some samples I took last evening, I don't think they look bad
After all 24 MP is more than enough for display on regular monitor or phone screen. Most of the time people don't really need a high megapixel photo as it takes much more space to store, and not everyone like to magnify a picture to examine the sharpness.
I like the color produced by the camera, I chose picture profile "Cine4" and edited in lightroom, I wouldn't tell the difference between these images and any photos taken by my A7.
Now talk about some other noticeable differences between two cameras
Focus: A6300 has very fast auto focus, the shutter button is much more tighter, there's less space between half press the button to focus and full press to take the picture, so when I first got my hands on the camera I often accidentally take multiple shots instead of only one.
Camera body is smaller but not much less heavy than A7, very nice grip and material.
The screen is smaller, viewfinder doesn't seem as sharp as A7's it's a little more difficult for me to find or confirm focus on A6300. Also the viewfinder position is kind of awkwardly on the far left, one of the things I don't like as A7 shooter.
Buttons layout is quite different but I'm sure anyone used A7 can get used to the new one very fast, I customized the buttons to a similar state as my A7 and it's quite nice.
In body flash is really convenient in emergency situations.
11 frames per second continuous shooting is simply ridiculous.
Silent shoot is perfectly silent, absolutely no sound made.
Battery life seems similar to A7, I have 4 batteries in total so I never worry about that.
Shot 59 4k video clips during the evening, in total less than 10 mins long I think, I put them together into a 5 mins long video
I was a little surprised that my laptop could handle the footage, the windows movie player doesn't play my footage in 4k, but VLC media player does. When editing in Premier Pro CC there's no problem dragging along the timeline to inspect each frame but the clips won't play and I didn't want to wait for the computer to process and play the clips, so I simply edited it by dragging around the needle to see where to cut. Color grading is quite slow on my laptop, everytime I make a change on adjustment layer I have to wait a while for the effect to show up. No fancy effect from me, for now.
Exporting video took me hours, it said 3 hours but it might have taken longer because I render the video at midnight before sleep. Update: I'm editing another video right now off my internal hard disk and the 4k video clip plays just as smoothly as any video in Premiere Pro CC, previously I edited on external SSD, I think that's why it was slow... it's great to know that my PC can totally handle 4k, but on the other hand it's sad that the SSD I bought for editing performs this bad.
Update 2: I shot some clips that's size of about 20 GB within an hour and no overheating issue at all, the body is warm but far from hot. Shot 4k 60MB using S-log 2.
Update 3: Just shot some video clips in 1080p with A6300, it provides much more advanced video record setting, choose XAVC S HD you can find 25p 50M which is significantly sharper than the best A7 can offer -- 25p 24M/ 50p 28M, pretty much twice as many information. The difference is very visible. The slow motion option on A6300 is also very neat, at 100p 100M the image quality is obviously worse than 25p 50M but the slow motion is simply wow. Even if I don't shoot 4k with A6300, it's already a huge step forward from A7's video capability.
Low light video: Although it's APS-C sensor, technically it's worse than full frame in low light, but Gosh the new technology handles it perfectly, I ran a little test last night in my apartment corridor, almost pitch black except the light came through the door glass from living room, it's just barely enough light to see what's in the corridor. I tried to shoot video with both cameras in same focus length and aperture, the full frame A7 obviously gets more light, but the image comes out of A6300 is so much smoother. Video image at ISO 256000 with A7 is very very visibly dirty and pixelated but on A6300 is just smooth, oh, A6300 has twice as high maximum ISO as A7 as well. Amazing technology.
Same price level but A6300 advances so much and definitely will be my choice if I had to keep only one camera. But in the end A7's still image is really great, I will never replace it with A6300, so they are perfect complimentary to each other, can't wait to use them both in the field.
That's my first impression so far, great camera, worth every penny, it serves perfectly as my secondary still camera and primary video camera, due to the crop factor, I can get more focal length range out of my lenses, also because most of my lenses are prime lenses, having two cameras just save me so much trouble switching lenses. There are so much to explore, especially the picture profiles, I'll come back to update once I learn something new.
Here's a link to a technical comparison between A7 and A6300
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