Sony has just announced the a7 III, a feature-filled 24-megapixel full-frame mirrorless camera combines many of Sony’s latest technologies (things found in the new a9 and a7R III) into a compact body.
At the core of the a7 III is a new 24.2-megapixel back-illuminated Exmor R CMOS Sensor. It has an ISO range of 100 to 51200 (expandable to 50-204800), 14-bit RAW, and a 15-stop dynamic range at low sensitivities.
The sensor “is paired with a front-end LSI that effectively doubles the readout speed of the image sensor, as well as an updated BIONZ X processing-engine that boosts processing speed by approximately 1.8 times compared to the a7 II,” Sony says.
The camera has a continuous shooting speed of 10fps with both the mechanical shutter and while silent shooting with the electronic shutter (up to 40 uncompressed RAW photos, 89 compressed RAW images, or 177 standard JPEGs). When in live view, the camera can shoot at 8fps with minimal viewfinder and LCD lag. There’s full autofocus and auto-exposure tracking while shooting bursts.
And even after filling up your buffer and waiting for the camera to finish chewing through your shots, a number of critical functions on the camera will still be functional — things like the Function (Fn) button, the Menu button, image playback, several menus, image rating, sorting features, and more.
The autofocus system features 693 phase-detection AF points that cover 93% of the frame and 425 contrast AF points.
Autofocus is reliable down to EV-3. There’s also Eye AF for tracking subjects’ eyes and keeping them in focus. Sony says the a7 III can autofocus twice as fast in low light and track twice as fast compared to the a7 II.
5-axis in-body image stabilization provides 5-stops of shake compensation.
On the back of the camera is a new joystick for adjusting focus points. There’s a 2.3-million-dot OLED electronic viewfinder above a 3-inch touchscreen monitor. Both the EVF and the monitor have “Standard” and “High” display quality settings.
On the video side of things, the a7 III can shoot 4K video with full pixel readout and no pixel binning across the full-width of the sensor (capturing 2.4x the data necessary for 4K before oversampling it).
The camera can also shoot 1080p at 120fps and up to 100 Mbps. Other video features include Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG), S-Log2/S-Log3, Zebra, Gamma Display assist, and proxy recording.
If you like long battery life, the a7 III is the camera for you: Sony says it has the longest rated battery life of any mirrorless camera on the market, shooting 710 shots per charge.
Other features and specs include dual SD card slots, USB Type-C, an Anti-flicker function in fluorescent and artificial lighting, a My Menu feature that lets you register up to 30 menu items for instant recall, and Wi-Fi.
The Sony a7 III will be available starting in April 2018 with a price tag of $1,999. It’ll cost $2,199 when bundled with the FE 28‑70mm f/3.5‑5.6 kit lens.