Sony A7r High ISO Test Sample Images

I only got the Sony A7r today around midday, by the time I finished charging the battery it was already early evening. So I thought with the light fading I might as well go out and test how this camera performs under low light using high ISO. I think this is going to be quite important for a lot of people (including me), since I am sure a lot of people are going to be using this camera to shoot street photography, which its size is perfect for. Without a tripod and needing to frequently increase the shutter speed to freeze subjects sharply you will end up using high ISOs often.  Personally I tend to find myself out and about shooting at night, so being able to produce good images at high ISOs is essential.

Sony A7r ISO 2000

All the images taken here were taken in RAW, but I did not apply any noise reduction or sharpening to them during post-processing.

100% Crop click on image and right click and select "view image" to view full size

Sony A7r ISO 4000

100% Crop click on image and right click and select "view image" to view full size

Sony A7r ISO 6400

100% Crop click on image and right click and select "view image" to view full size

Having seen the images I am sure most of you aren't "blown away". In fact compared to the ISO test I did for the Canon EOS M recently you could say that the ISO performance for the Sony A7r is only about the same, or possibly even slightly worse. Even though the Canon EOS M uses the same sensor as the 7D, which is famous for its low light ability getting the nickname "Lord Of The Dark", it has been out for a long time now and it is reasonable that you would expect a newly released camera to do better. To be honest though the results were about what I had expected (although I did secretly pray that it would surprise me and be better).

One thing you got to remember though is that comparing the photo at 100% for both camera might not be completely fair. The Sony A7r has many more mega pixels and at 100% you will be zoomed in much further. If you were to look at photos from both cameras at the same size, I think you will find that there is significanly less noise in the A7r's photos. The Sony A7r seems to retain more detail as well and I have tried applying noise reduction to the files with great results since you have so much detail to start off with you can afford to sacrifice some detail to get rid of a significant amount noise. So overall I am still happy with the results that I got.

Find test sample images with the Leica Summicron 50mm f2 E39 here

Find test sample images with the Leica Summicron 35mm f2 ASPH here

Find test sample images with the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2 Biogon ZM here

Find test sample images with the Voigtlander 12mm f5.6 here