A7RV Photo Shoot - Melbourne Ironman (Patreon)

I managed to borrow one of the three, heavily in-demand, pre-production A7RV cameras in Australia for a one-day shoot last weekend. I was keen to use one of the new cameras at a sporting event where people are crowded together and the ambient light is not very bright. The Ironman event I covered started in the pre-dawn light where I was shooting at ISO 16000 (the shoots I did for my initial review only saw the ISO climb to ISO 5000).
Sony Australia is still waiting for stock of the production camera to arrive (ones that will be running the version 1.00 firmware instead of the 0.11 version I have been using). When I get hold of one of these production units (hopefully by the the end of the month) I will be able to start creating the A7RV eBook that will be shared via this Patreon site. Hopefully I can make this available in December before I leave for my India trip in January.

I have been asking Sony Japan for some years to supply me with a production camera earlier, so that I can have the eBooks ready when customers take delivery of their new camera. I am still waiting for this to happen.

If you would like to see 6K versions of the files I captured at the weekend (complete with EXIF data) then head over to my Flickr pro gallery of this event: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAf81F
The images at the end of the gallery are the ones that were captured at very high ISO values.

Note > I am still processing these A7RV files from the JPEGs as Lightroom still does not recognise the ARW files. The JPEG files have had High ISO Noise Reduction applied in camera, and for most of the images that were captured at ISO values higher than ISO 5000 I have used Topaz DeNoise AI to further suppress the noise.

Initial Conclusions for High ISO Noise Performance of the A7RV > It's probably still too early to pass a final verdict without seeing the Raw files in Lightroom, but I think the camera performs well up to ISO 5000/6400 and starts to lose fine detail beyond that point quite quickly. This should give the A1 at least a one stop advantage in the area of high ISO performance.

New AI AF Performance > I noticed the human figure subject detection (Body/Head/Eye) was working well in exceptionally low light. I still used my standard Portrait/Action settings workflow for capturing these images and didn't really need any of the improved AI AF that I found more useful at the zoo.