Stop just short of infinity

Stop just short of infinity

I’ve built a good few of these blogs around what you might call ‘interesting cameras’ – the sort of thing that you may have seen once in a large secondhand window, or perhaps an eccentric friend had one once. (I am that eccentric friend: and it was me that caused it to leave the display window down the side of that shop…) Here’s one more to add to the list…

It is seven or eight years old, and it was one of those weird and eccentric things – back when Sony were a second-string manufacturer of cameras, although they made sensors for a large number of better-known companies, including Nikon and Pentax. They’d started playing with full-frame mirrorless, years before anyone else thought of it, and even more weirdly, they used the megasensor they had produced for the Nikon D800 in one of the two versions.

An insightful salesman in Jessops told me that Sony could afford to bring out new models simply as a testbed for sensors and ideas – the real profits came from sensor sales elsewhere. So they were, effectively, Beta-testing with early adopters. Even though I accepted this, and had decided that I wanted to have consistent delivery from my cameras, I bought a secondhand Alpha 7R a few months after getting my Alpha 7: the sheer quality attracted me.



They wouldn’t get away with it now. Perceived value is a very strong idea in consumer goods, and even the most basic consumer-grade devices must have heft and feel like a million dollars. Making one of the most expensive bodies in your range slightly plastickly and stripped back is not good marketing. And the downsides didn’t stop there…

All the DSLRs and translucent-mirror cameras in the Sony range had image stabilised sensors, but the first-generation Alpha 7 bodies didn’t, and the Sony range was notably short of IS lenses. The initial offerings of native E-mount glass were a weird mix of the truly lamentable (the kit zoom had IS, but not much else going for it) and the fabulously costly Zeiss optics. I suspect that most of us shelled out a couple of hundred quid extra for an adaptor to allow us to use older Sony and Minolta lenses.

That adaptor’s an interesting thing in itself. Effectively, it’s got the AF mechanism from an Alpha 900 DSLR in it, offering a 9-point AF array, fed through a translucent mirror, and coupled to an electric motor to focus the lenses. By the standards of 2013, the performance wasn’t impressive – but it was a cheaper way in than the Zeiss stuff… And the system grew on you, slowly.

Meanwhile, things were developing elsewhere. The fact that there was no mirror box meant that the lens mount was far closer to the sensor than in anything else on the market, and the space meant that it was possible to put an adaptor in the gap that would allow absolutely any electronic DSLR lens to sit on the front of a Sony. Metabones were very happy to sell Canon and Nikon users clever little devices that let their owners upgrade their sensors – remember that at the time, 22mp was Canon’s limit – and cut weight massively.



Just like Volkswagen Passats, successive generations of Alpha 7s have put on weight and features (does anyone remember the earliest Passat? A lovely, well-made and functional car, but with rather basic features, modest performance and a rather tinny feel?) The original bodies actually look small compared with the latest generation, and while there aren’t a lot on the market, I don’t think the rarity is driving the price up.

For landscape and studio work, where high ISO performance (mediocre) and fast AF don’t matter, an original 7R simply offers stunning resolution and sharpness. As with any camera, you learn to work around the slightly random ergonomics, and I’m finding that I can us mine as a works horse and backup to the more modern cousins that occupy my photographic front line. And if you’re on a tight budget but need that massive quality, maybe you’ll see one around. Take a serious look – you may be delighted with the results.