Sony A7 III

[...] My 10 year old phone can track 8 people in camera app in real time, with no lag. My A7-III can remember faces, prioritize them, focus on mammals' and humans' eyes, track them and keep them in focus at 30FPS with a small DSP. Building these things is possible, but nobody cares about it right now, because AI Datacenters live in a similar state of ZIRP economy. [...]

[...] 30 minute recording limit is already lifted and advanced time-lapse is introduced alongside mammal eye tracking with a firmware update by Sony, and you can customize anything sans preliminary image processing steps, and by customization I mean the parameters of the algorithms or algorithms themselves. [...] Personally I wouldn't muck with a system designed to do image processing 30FPS even before taking a photo (A7-III) incl. [...] From what I understood, these cameras perform a nigh impossible dance within the limits of their hardware to maximize speed and reduce energy consumption. [...] Instead, I prefer to use the thing and get nice photos out of it.

Most professional cameras still use ExFAT and AFAIK Microsoft doesn't charge inclusion of ExFAT drivers on these devices anymore. [...] My Sony A7-III has an intelligent way of testing cards without reading/writing extensive data and reporting whether the card can handle particular video bitrates. [...]

[...] Instead, I managed to get a consistent-ish setup for scanning negatives using a Sony A7 III camera, though this was a case of digitising an existing collection, so I went through them all in one go with a 3d printed mask and feed mechanism. With the author lamenting about SD cards being awkward; it reminds me of one thing has been immensely useful with the A7 III is the built-in FTP auto-upload. This surprised me as reviews didn't mention it, and as a seeminly high-end consumer camera I wasn't expecting such a "professional" feature. [...]

[...] Well, time to throw your camera away, I guess... [...] Even an iron skillet can take good photos in ample light. [...] I take (sometimes) grainy photos with my camera, and smartphones just emit line noise from their sensors. The thing is, the camera can take multiple exposures at no cost, and then you can just discard the ones that you don't need. Who says I don't shoot consecutive photos when required? A7III can track an object and keep focus on it at 30FPS, and shoot at 10FPS. Higher end cameras like A9 can go up to 120 AF corrections per second. [...] Sometimes I shoot and share from camera directly. Sometimes I process on my phone. Sometimes I let the photo sit and process post-trip. [...] These cameras have dedicated DSPs to handle these tasks. They are not bound to their processors, so a camera doesn'

A7III has a dedicated DSP for focus & tracking, plus it has a computer vision model which can detect eyes and focus for them (even when you have sunglasses it can spot eyes perfectly), moreover you can give 5 faces to it with focus priority, and if it finds any of these faces in the frame, it focus to that one (lower the number, higher the priority). [...] Latest, highest end Sony cameras do it at 120FPS, plus it can track whole body after losing the face, so they can track the same person in the frame after latching to it.

[...] No buildings, no water, just two sandy tire tracks through the desert [1]. [...] I took this photo as a single 8s exposure on just a sony A7iii [2]. Then a few months later I drove the Canning Stock Route, the world's most remote road [3]. [...]

A side project I've been neglecting is controlling autofocus on Sony Alpha cameras (specifically the A7ii and A7iii which I have) for the purpose of focus-stacking: shooting a few dozen shots with minimal-step focal differences and blending them all in photoshop later. [...] Whether or not the focus motor steps properly seems to be based on how busy the camera is at the time... [...]

Why should I do that instead of the camera? [...] The camera should. [...] The camera should do exactly as I say. [...] Camera should be a blunt instrument, and should completely get out of the photographer's way, shall become transparent. It's not the camera's interpretation of the scene. It's the photographer's interpretation through the camera. [...] If you feel lazy, many mirrorless cameras do that, but the results are may not fit your taste. Sony A7III's Auto-HDR is nice, but it's not exactly what I want, so I merge mine manually. You know, the thing that phone cameras have been doing for a decade or so. I have quite a few cameras: A Canonette 28, a Pentax MZ50, a Nikon D70s and a Sony A7-III. [...] All of these cameras have metering, and all of them are excellent for their era. [...] A7-III sometimes struggles in colored LED (sodium yellow-ish) environments, so you again set custom WB. That machine was the most accurate camera in terms of color when it came out. [...] However, the same software can do so much more when coupled with a big sensor and a good optical system. The thing is, photographer's don't want the software. They want what they exactly see recorded in a file, and that's more of a dynamic range thing more than a color thing, and it's directly related to sensor hardware (regardless of its size), not software. [...] What I want is total control over the camera hardware, regardless of its form factor.

[...] I cut my teeth with a Pentax MZ-50, so I have experience with understanding the camera, its light meter and how to compensate for it. [...] The reason I still love my D70s is it behaves like an analog camera very much, from its light meter correction needs to ISO response of the sensor. When compared to it, shooting with A7-III still feels like cheating sometimes. [...]

I realize it's easy to think or assume this is a bug affecting everyone but for what it's worth, I've had zero issues importing photos from my Sony a6000 and a7iii for the past eight or so years. Tens of thousands of photos at this point. For the longest time my process while traveling was importing onto my iPad or occasionally my iPhone since I didn't have a personal laptop, just a Mac Mini at home.

[...] My Sony A7-III doesn't have that, for example. [...] So if you are going to use your camera for production which you'll earn money, you need to pay commercial licenses for your cameras. [...]

[...] I bought it used in 2019 for $500 (iirc) Daily Final Cut Pro 1080 video editing, lightroom editing in a catalogue with 5000+ images from a Sony a7iii, web stuff, lots of document writing. If it could edit 4k video, I would have no reason to upgrade, but I've been eyeing used M1 prices lately...

Even KDE's Digikam can run "somewhat expensive" algorithms on your photos without melting your PC and making you wait a year to recognize and label faces. Even my 10(?) year old iPhone X can do facial recognition and memory extraction on device while charging. My Sony A7-III can detect faces in real time, and discriminate it from 5 registered faces to do focus prioritization the moment I half-press the shutter. [...]

My Sony a7iii can definitely upload to FTP by itself, JPEG and RAW. That is my primary means of getting images off of it. I would have appreciated if it did WebDAV though, then I could make it push to Nextcloud directly...

All of these were surprisingly taken on my phone! I have an S23 Ultra but my usual camera is a Sony A7 III :3