My top 5 reasons the Sony a7ii is better than the Canon 5Diii

I want to share with you my top 5 reasons why I believe the Sony a7 Mark ii is a better camera than the Canon 5D Mark iii. Quick little bit of background. I have shot with a Canon 5D Mark iii since its introduction. I shot with Canons before that. The 7D, 50, 30, 20, you name it. Rebels, film Rebel. So I’ve been a long time Canon shooter, long time. 25 years of shooting Canons. I love Canon image quality. There is no question. With resolution they are almost the same. Close enough that we won’t even count it. Color depth is a big deal. I did not realize what I was missing. Everybody talks about dynamic range, dynamic range. It was significant enough for me to realize after my first few shots that, oh I was missing something and it’s truly amazing the image quality that comes out of this small full frame camera.

Reason number two, image stabilization build in the body of the camera. So this image is a Sony 55 mm 1.8. No image stabilization. But it doesn’t matter. I have 5-axis image Sony 55mm 1.8 stabilization built into the bottom of the camera. Any lens that I can get mounted on this camera is stabilized and that’s pretty awesome. For video people, that can’t be beat. To give an example of what they may look like, we will record this and I have to say it’s pretty crazy how steady it is. A lot more steady than the iPhone 6 Plus, if you’re going to compare the two in my opinion. Although you probably shouldn’t iPhone 6 plus since one is a phone and one is a camera.

Reason number three, lens selection. Not only do I get the nice Sony native lenses, I can mount any Canon EF lens to this camera that I want. Either with a dumb adapter or a smart adapter like the Comlite, Metabones, and a few others. FotoDiox to name another. Comlite、Metabones

So I can adapt Leica lenses, Minolta glass, Sony A-mount, Canon EF, Canon FD. You can
get some really good finds on eBay when you’re using FD glass. It’s older, but there’s nothing wrong with it and it’s stabilized. So it’s a great feature in my opinion. So lens selection is awesome.

Reason number four that goes along with lens selection is focus magnification. You are going to hear a lot of people talk about focus peaking where the screen turns a certain color. In my case, red, what’s in focus. I don’t find focus peaking to be this great big deal breaker. I just don’t find it to be a good feature as everyone makes it out to be. It’s okay, but it’s not the end all be all. Focus magnification on the other hand is flat out awesome. So let’s say I’ve got this camera. I flipped it up. I’ve got it in manual focus mode. I’ve got my customizable buttons in one. I click it three times. It does zoom in at 11.7x it tells me and I can flat out take a picture in focus of anything I want.

Nail somebody’s eyes, not nail their eyes. And why is that important? Why would I ever want to use manual focus. Well, here’s a good reason why you would want to use manual focus. When you are using Canon FD glass, maybe you want to use Leica lenses, maybe Canon FD you have some other rangefinder glass out there. Rokinon or Samyang, whichever one you want to call them. All these lenses, all these great lenses are manual focus only lenses and the good thing about that is manual focus only lenses tend to be a lot cheaper than lenses without a focus. In that case, we are going to go with it and we are going to say focus magnification. So, whether you’ve got an auto focus lens like this but maybe you want a manual focus. Maybe it’s really dark and you want to manually focus. As a side note, I do not find the night time or low light auto focus on this camera to be as bad as everybody makes it out to be. I think it is perfectly acceptable. Is it a 5D Mark iii? No. Is it close? Yes. But we’re getting off track. Focus magnifier is pretty simple. We are going to defocus it. So here we go. We are going to click, click, and do it one more time so that I can get in really close that quick and take a shot. There you have it. Focus magnification. Excellent, excellent option on this camera. 

Finally, reason number five is weight. I know this is going to be a big deal for a lot of people. They’re gonna be like, oh wait you’re talking about weight, what does it matter? I’ve carried a 300 mm 2.8 and a 1DX all day long, two of them, and two monopods and extra lenses and it never hurt me on vacation. Well, I’m here to tell you this little light package is nice. If you do not want to carry a lot of weight or if you have problems carrying a lot of weight. Some people have back issues and some people just don’t want to carry a lot of weight. If I can carry 1 ounce of camera, I will carry 1 ounce of camera. This obviously isn’t 1 ounce. I believe it is somewhere around 560 grams for the body, but it is significantly lighter than a Canon 5D Mark iii. You may not think that is an advantage, but after you have hauled one around all day, it's an advantage. Notice, I don’t have a camera strap or neck strap for this because it’s so light I do not feel I need one. Went all around New York City, no camera strap. So there you have it. My list of top 5 reasons why the Sony a7 Mark ii is better than the Canon 5D Mark iii. Your opinions may differ. I would love to hear your comments and why.