Sony A7R IV

When you read, watch, or listen to reviews of Sony cameras one thing you rarely here them described as is inspiring. Technically excellent, capable of producing images as good as any other manufacturer. Yet somehow they are unexciting, labeled as functional and hence uninspiring. Yet it was my decision to purchase a second hand Sony A7R IV that rekindled my passion for photography and indirectly led to my current predicament of owning something close to 50 lenses and many more cameras than I have space for.

It was August 2023 when the decision was made to get back lock stock into photography. Like many others I had fallen too reliant on the smartphone to capture adequate (on the phone screen at least) pictures of my day to day life and my previous go-to camera, the aging Sony A77V, had seen less and less use until for reasons I can’t remember I decided to take it on my family holiday. It was taking some portraits of two young daughters using a manual focus Samyang 85mm f/1.8 and seeing the results that blew away anything my smartphone camera could produce made me begin the rabbit hole of investigating online – probably through YouTube the best way I could modernise my camera lineup without spending a fortune.

Having quite a few Sony and Minolta A Mount lenses the logical purchase for me would be a Sony mirrorless camera, especially when it became apparent that Sony had catered for those converting from Alpha to EF mount by producing a range of adapters that allowed the A mount lenses to work with autofocus on new camera bodies. The devil was in the detail though as to how successful this autofocus would be as it turned out that some cameras with some lenses wouldn’t work properly with any type of adapter.

The research dug deeper and it transpired that, at the time of looking, the only Sony camera that fell within my budget that broadly provided autofocus on any Sony or Minolta A mount AF lens with the LA-EA5 adapter was the Sony A7R IV. It was this that sold me the camera. I was somewhat oblivious to its enormous 60.2MP sensor although the more I read about it the more it appealed to me: opportunities to crop massively and still get superb resolution; and the ability to have more than enough 26mp images when using Super 35 crop mode which I would take advantage of as all my Sony A mount lenses were built around APSC camera bodies (The old Minolta lenses would be full frame compatible).

It also became apparent that that 60.2 MP sensor, although my camera had already been superseded by the A7R V, was exactly the same one being used in that camera. Indeed until the 66mp Sony A7R VI came out earlier this year, it was the highest resolution full frame sensor you could get, and the improvements in the more recent models didn’t affect the image quality, which was, by all accounts, excellent.

I ordered a 9/10 graded second hand Sony A7R IV from Wex Photo on August 29th 2023 for £1700, which at the time was excellent value and I think would still be great value for what you get, although I note you can pick up Good condition ones for not much over £1000, which I think makes it something of a neglected bargain in the camera world.

It arrived a couple of days later and I reeled off a few shots around the house testing the M42 adapter I had purchased (Did I forget to mention I had quite a few M42 mount lenses too – another strength of the Sony was its ability to have pretty much any type of lens adapted to it). The LA-EA5 adapter arrived the next day and I tested again with a few shots around the house. All good!

The original plan to use just my old Minolta / Sony / M42 lenses lasted all of two weeks as I purchased the Viltrox 24mm f/1.8. Then when I realised that a lot of the old Minolta glass that had, when I was last considered purchasing them back the late 00s / early 2010s, were prohibitively expensive, were now far more affordable, yet just as good on the Sony A7R IV with the adapter as they were on my old Alpha cameras. Indeed they would be arguably better as the higher resolution full frame sensor was far superior to my old cameras and the AF, even with the adapter and using near 40 year old lenses, was better than with my old DSLRs. I purchased the Minolta 100 f/2.8 macro, described by Ken Rockwell as the sharpest, most detailed, lens he had have ever tested. I can confirm that he was correct. I snapped up the 50mm version, bought another Viltrox lens (The 20mm f/2.8) having found out that since I last bought lenses the Chinese were beginning to produce superb lenses at a fraction of the cost of first party lenses.

My best purchase in those early days was the TT Artisan 100 f/2.8 bubble bokeh lens, that arrived just in time for Christmas and produced what are still some of my favourite pictures. By now I was hooked. In July I put just 50 pictures into my photo archive, which was actually one of the higher volume months of the year. In August there was 587, boosted by the summer holiday, 182 in September, 243 in October, 244 in November and then 1028 in December!

Since then I have continued to amass a much bigger collection of lenses that fit my Sony camera. I won’t go through the entire list. Suffice to say I think I now have a lens to cover just about every occasion, which is the main reason I started this Random Lens Generator website. In the three and a bit years I’ve owned the camera it has become my #1 camera in terms of edited images in my personal archive, currently sitting at just over 8,600. The camera it replaced – the A77 comes in next at just under 5,700 and I used that for thirteen years!

Looking at what I have edited from the camera, the vast majority of images are portraits. It is a superb portrait camera – as most of the pictures are of family and children I’m limited to what I am willing to put on here, but suffice to say I think it matches any of the professional cameras’ images that I have arriving to me with my day job. It can take wonderful landscapes too, it’s competent at action photography, I’ve used it for street photography, fashion photo shoots, pretty much everything except take it on my bike or out running with me!

It’s ultimately pretty good at everything. So, I ask myself, why have I since gone on to purchase or acquire another eight cameras since purchasing this one? If it can do pretty much everything, why have I felt the need to invest in other cameras?

There are, as you may expect, a number of reasons that I have used to justify my purchases. The much maligned menu system is not one of them. I actually think I prefer the old Sony menu system to the old one (Strange I know).

I bought the Sony RX100 VII and acquired the OG model as I wanted a small, pocketable camera with good image quality. The OM System TG-7 is a take anywhere camera that can survive all the abuse I throw at it – just today it survived unscathed when I tripped and fell out running with it in my hand. I bought the Sony A6700 because I wanted a camera that is capable of better video, has much better AF for sports photography, is a bit smaller to carry, and has smaller file sizes.

One of the biggest pros of the A7 RIV is the 61mp sensor. This means that it produces huge images that take up a lot of disc space (Not much of a consideration back in 2023, but in modern times a significant issue) and require a lot more computer processing power when it comes to some heavy editing, such as AI denoising. There is a reason why the likes of Canon have stuck at 24 MP for their sports / journalism based cameras like the R1 and that’s because their images take 1/3 of the time to transmit, edit and take up around 1/3 of the disc space. The first thing I do when I open up a Sony A7R IV picture is crop the entire image at R1 dimensions to make the editing process smoother.

I then went onto by my micro 4/3s cameras – the first being the Lumix G9 because I became intrigued by the prospect of having a camera system that can be small, lightweight, better weather sealed, offering the 2x crop factor, less depth of field (An advantage in some scenarios). This past year I’ve become more invested in micro 4/3s but for certain scenarios, such as when it is a shot I have to get right – it is the Sony A7R IV that nearly always comes out for action. I do agree with others when they say that if they want to enjoy photography, they pick up something like the Lumix GX9 or OM System Pen F; if they want to get the job done, they pick up their Sony.

So although currently in 2026 the A7R IV sits third in my edited pictures count, with almost half the total of the Lumix GX9, it is fair to say that I envisage the A7R IV continuing to see regular usage. There are scenarios, such as street photography, or a lightweight carry day, or holiday, where it is less likely to be picked than others for some of the reasons I have highlighted.

I will though for ever be grateful to it for being the camera that brought me back into the world of proper photography and not mobile phone mediocrity. I hope to use it for many years to come. I don’t see myself upgrading to the newer models anytime soon, this camera does everything I need it to and the extra 6mp of image size are meaningless when I habitually downsize every shot I edit to less than half its native size!