Things Are Shaping Up

The a7s III has lots going for it: superb eye detect autofocus in video at up to 120 fps, an articulating touch screen LCD, indisputably the best EVF of any mirrorless camera, edit-friendly codecs with tiny file sizes, the red frame that surrounds the image in the LCD when you’re recording video, a full size HDMI port (along with some of the annoyances I mentioned in my hands-on post, mostly concerning ergonomics) – but by far the single greatest feature is 10-bit video. Not that I push my grades to the limit or anything (though banding was a real thing with 8-bit), but because at last I’m able to dabble in HDR video. And what I’m seeing – in both RAW and and in S-log – are colors that don’t require hours of fiddling around with in post to get them looking pretty darn good. Now that 10-bit and RAW are commonplace, workflows are simplified and displays are cheap, there’s never been a better time to delve into HDR. I really can’t see why so many are clinging to SDR – a technology still shackled to narrow color spaces and dim brightness levels which, to a great extent, are nothing more than remnants of seventy year-old CRT technology. Anyhow, here’s my first test of S-log3 in HDR with the a7s III.