Why I Chose The Sony A7III
Yes, I realize from the get-go how bandwagon-esque my title is. So let me lay a few ground rules that I will abide by.
I will not bash Canon
I will honestly criticize Canon
I will not be a Sony fanboy
I will try not to sound like one too
My very first digital camera / faux SLR was the Konica Minolta Dimage Z2 — and I really loved that camera. I took a lot of pictures with it that I was very proud of. I learned about bokeh, I cut my teeth on Photoshop, and I even bought the accessory wide angle lens for it. Unfortunately, at my college graduation my father was bumped coming out of the restroom and dropped it on the ground. The battery door was a latch much like current digital cameras, however the door also served as the contact for the batteries, and the locking mechanism was broken which meant the contacts could not be maintained. Sad day.
I won’t spend time on the upgrade to the Z6 (which I still have) because the Z2 was in my opinion, a superior camera for that type.
A year or two later my friend and I drove out to Las Vegas and on a whim, I purchased the Canon PowerShot SD800IS — this is my first Canon product ever. The camera worked amazingly out of the box. Photography is photography for the most part, so all the little tips and tricks I learned on my Minolta could translate when running it in manual. We took pictures of the Nevada sky against the Valley of Fire, and it was during the review of those photos that the famed/fabled Canon color science was first explained to me.
Fast forward to 2014, my wife and I were expecting our first child. She tells me that she wants to get someone to take pictures of us when the baby arrived, and of course my idea is to let me do it. She complies, and I purchase the Canon 70D kit that included the EFS 18-55 STM (really good lens) and the EFS 55-250. The following year I acquire the EF 50 f/1.8 and my life changed. In 2017, I got the EF 24-70 f/2.8L II and my life changed even more with the faux 35mm I could achieve using the APS-C sensor.
Bear in mind at this point, I am 100% all-in for Canon gear. The 24-70 alone is a major investment at nearly 3x the cost of the 70D body.
That is up until 2019, five years after I bought the Canon 70D. During this time Canon came out with the 80D, and then the 7D Mark II. I was excited about both of these releases and anxious to see what new features and improvements that Canon was going to come out with. The 80D was only marginally (not worth upgrading to) improved over the 70D, and had at least three years of development to be something more than marginal. Next up, the 7D Mark II — now this was going to be a game changer from the original and beloved 7D, and it was everything and more — if you were upgrading from the original 7D. So as a consumer, from 2014 till 2019 I had zero reason to purchase new gear*
I compared specs of the 80D and the 7DM2 as I was looking to upgrade and I realized again how marginal these improvements are over the 70D. These are not professional cameras, at best they are considered to be ‘prosumer’ varieties. In a way I felt like these in particular if not professional grade, should get a little more in the game-changing, ever evolving land of digital photography. In a way they did, but Canon does not really make clear what their ultimate goal is because they are very quickly becoming a niche brand and we the consumer are left to wonder if they even know?*
Let’s move to the 5D saga (which is a professional-grade). I scoured the internet for this, and the level of vitriol (to be expected online) against the 5D Mark IV was intense to say the least, for the same reasons I had for their prosumer line: lack of perceived innovation. Some time later, a friend of mine that is an actual professional wedding photographer and fellow Canon enthusiast had a serious discussion with me (it felt like someone was telling me they were about to break up with someone) about how they were seriously considering making the switch to Sony’s mirrorless platform.
Prior to this, I had no idea what the big deal was with mirrorless. I was in league with what had arguably been the most prolific camera maker for people like me, and also for people (not me) who relied on this equipment to make their living.
The money matters, but I am not trying to make any here, I am looking for an opportunity to spend.
As it is with anything late and great, you start to compare your current gear with it. I researched opinions online, read spec sheets, gauging my needs and wants, calculating the expense of switching platforms… absolutely none of it really justified whether or not I should switch. On the one hand, I was grateful to be going into the sixth year on a platform that remained consistent. On the other hand, I wanted something to look forward to sooner than later because like any consumer, I am looking for the next item to feed my hobby. The money matters, but I am not trying to make any here, I am looking for an opportunity to spend.
Then the Canon EOS R came out. This was it, this was the mirrorless I was waiting for to keep me exclusively within the Canon family.
Except it was not. It was marginal improvements over their mirrored platform, with not much else to really sell us on for its price point vs. the A7III. We the Canon consumer finally saw what we have been dreading to be true, and that was Canon being forced to catch up to competitors. In our Canon fan brains, Canon was supposed to be the leader of the pack when it came to innovation. The capabilities that the Sony mirrorless line was already known for with tack sharp autofocus, full lineup of video modes, the first Canon mirrorless either forgot or just put in the most basic effort in offering. This is not to say that the EOS R has zero worth and cannot do a job, but it does say that for the money — the value may be in a competitor. Canon’s history of firmware updates created even more ‘buyer beware’, and Canon has not exactly alleviated those concerns. We Canon fans have a trust in Canon that they know the industry in which they have made their place. That trust is what has been at stake here in the last few years.
We have watched Sony literally steal our brand loyal friends away and we cannot justify our disappointment against their outstanding results.
At the time of release, the EOS R was selling for almost $100 more than the comparable Sony A7III. It also performed either on par, or at subpar with the Sony A7III (depending on who you ask). This created conflict for me as now I was faced with the question of value over specifications. Firmware 3.0 for the Sony came out and added new features that were not marketed in the original unit. Interval shooting, animal eye AF (which mattered because I have dogs, and their noses are difficult to avoid). These are all features that I as a Canon fan looked at and said, ‘Canon would have put this in the EOS R Mark II in 2022 for all we know and it would have been the only tangible improvement.’ We have watched Sony literally steal our brand loyal friends away and we cannot justify our disappointment against their outstanding results.
So I chose to go down the pathway of Sony by acquiring their A7III with the 28-75 kit lens. This will have been my first full frame DSLR, and my first mirrorless. The lens is nothing to fawn over in particular, but let me just say that the motivation to get the 24-70 G-Master is mild at best. Instead, I am eyeballing the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8. Autofocus is ridiculously fast and sharp. As a Canon hobbyist, I would have to speed shoot multiple frames and hope that one of those was both in focus and a great capture. I used to joke to my Canon friends about how I would take 30 photos just to make sure I had the one that mattered. They didn’t laugh, it was actually our way of life.
Enter the Sony A7III and I have broken that habit. The picture I want is within immediate grasp, I no longer have to shotgun blast my shutter and hope that there’s a good one in the bunch.
Sure, I may harbor a little bit of a saltiness toward Canon but it is not because I hate them and love Sony. I still prefer the Canon menu system over Sony’s. Sony packs a lot into their UI (which is actually a nice indicator of how much they want to pack into a unit) but Canon’s is very straight forward, and if you work it enough you could essentially navigate it blindly. Canon’s fabled color science — I do not have the depth of knowledge to see what this is really about at this level, so I can’t speak to it. What I can say is that I have been entirely happy with the colors I am getting out of Sony while shooting in neutral. If you shoot RAW, the world of color is vast enough for someone like me. Video however, there may be some critiques there but seeing 4K on my 4K UHD of my family living life, the quality is absolutely amazing.
I do not regret the Sony A7III one bit.
*Canon might still be run by older executives that put stock in their product lasting a long time vs. emphasis on innovation. There is nothing wrong with this, and I don’t want to criticize this as being a negative — but the contention we have with Canon is that we wanted them to through feedback and getting to know us, lead that innovation vs. the current feeling where we feel they are reacting to a competitor instead.
Canon was a company that set the bar for its users, and in doing so set the bar for their competition. It used to be a world that asked ‘What will Canon do?’ as an expectation of something amazing is coming. These days it feels more in the context of how bad will we be disappointed this time?
Sony has created a different scenario, much like we have in personal computing where we ask the question of whether or not we will be forced to upgrade.
