Originally posted by Chris Mak You are right, film had its limits, certainly at small format. I meant to say: film had a great latitude for keeping highlights. Blowing highlights has to me been a real downside to digital apsc,. The pentax k5 finally got to a point where that did not dominate digital shooting so noticeably. The Sony A7r is the best in this regard that I've had the pleasure to shoot with.
Chris
Agree with you. My understanding is film as more tolerance on highlight and digital sensor like K5 have more tolerance on shadows. So if you make an error in exposure on digital by overexposing, you have soon a problem.
Wit the K5 you only have a 77point metering sensor that is quite basic. A7r has 1200 point metering... And k3 has 80K+ point metering sensor.
An interresting view on A7r metering:
http://www.thephoblographer.com/2013/10/30/finding-wrong-sony-a7-a7r-far/
"However, Sony’s algorithms seem to be metering the overall scene and putting more emphasis on the highlights. In general, we’ve found that the system underexposes by a full stop–and in order to get anything nearly perfect we’re overexposing our images by a stop. The issue seems to be lessened when we use strobes though. However, metering is incredibly important overall."
That maybe why you get what you want out of the Sony... It does exposure to the right (and it make sense) but then some are not very happy with it. Maybe just under expose with the K5 by default (like 0.3 or 0.7) and you would get what you want !
Going from my K5 to K3 I did see an improvement with exposureand I guess you simply get the kind of improvement on A7r due to maybe better algorithms and also a better sensor.
For the kind of shoot you given through I never had problem. Maybe we would not see the same color. I was not on the scene... This is something to really check but for me that also just a rendering profile away. (So the test need something like DxO, raw and using same rendering profile for both camera to see if there are noticable colors differences).
Honestly I'am really happy for you, that you enjoy this A7r. My understanding you do manual focussing of some Zeiss with it and that perfectly fine. For this the A7r might be one of the best options !
Me this not what I'am after. There no enough lenses choices out of the box from Sony. All expensive, all zoom f/4, only 2 prime f/1.8 & f/2.8 worth. Many complain of lack of wide apperture lenses for pentax. Here it is worse. And the lenses are not that small neither. I'am sure they are very high quality, but there not much choice.