Sony A7S II Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Bright colors with typical hue accuracy.

Saturation. The Sony A7S II's mean default color saturation is 113.9% at base ISO or in other words, oversaturated by 13.9%. That's just a bit above average these day, but unusually, mean saturation actually increases with sensitivity up to ISO 102,400 where it reached a peak of 117.3% before falling to a minimum of 111.6% at ISO 409,600 (which is still above average). Cameras often reduce saturation at higher ISOs to reduce the appearance of chroma noise, but like its predecessor, the A7S II does follow that trend. As usual, reds and dark blues are boosted the most, but not as much as we often see. Most other colors are pushed just a bit, though yellow and light green are slightly undersaturated which is quite common. Overall, saturation levels are quite pleasing to our eyes, and you can of course tweak saturation to your liking. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. The Sony A7S II does fairly well with Caucasian skin tones when white balance is adjusted to match the lighting. Brighter flesh tones have a healthy-looking pinkish tint, though darker areas are nudged slightly toward orange. Still, pretty good results here. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. Like many cameras, the Sony A7S II pushes cyan toward blue, orange toward yellow and yellow toward green, but shifts are fairly minor. (The cyan to blue shift is actually fairly minor and very common among the digital cameras we test; we think it's a deliberate choice by camera engineers to produce better-looking sky colors.) With an average "delta-C" color error of 5.09 after correction for saturation at base ISO, overall hue accuracy is about average, with accuracy only moderately lower at higher ISOs. Hue is "what color" the color is.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Warm color with Auto white balance; Incandescent is pretty good, and Manual is very good. Average exposure compensation required.

Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, color balance is a bit too warm and orange with the Auto white balance setting. Results with the Incandescent setting are quite good, though, and only slightly warm, while the Manual setting is the most accurate. The Sony A7S II required +0.3 EV positive exposure compensation here which is about the average required for this shot, though images are little bright. (Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.)

Outdoors, daylight
Excellent results under harsh lighting, with very good handling of contrast, color, and exposure.

Outdoors, the Sony A7S II performed very well. +0.7 EV exposure compensation was required to keep the mannequin's face reasonably bright in our "Sunlit" Portrait shot, which is average among the cameras we've tested. Contrast is a little high as you might expect under such harsh lighting, but the camera did a great job of holding onto bright highlights and detail in the shadows, even without the help of Sony's Dynamic Range Optimization (DRO) feature. We preferred Manual color balance for the "Portrait" shot though, as Auto white balance produced skin tones that were a touch warm and yellow. Default exposure is very good in our Far-field shot (above right), with very few highlights blown or shadows lost, again with DRO disabled. The Far-field shot with Auto white balance also has good color, though perhaps just a touch cool. Overall, great performance in harsh lighting, especially considering DRO was off for these shots.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
~2,100 lines of strong detail from JPEGs, about the same from RAW files.

An in-camera best quality JPEG of our laboratory resolution chart reveal sharp, distinct line patterns up to about 2,100 lines per picture height in the horizontal direction and to about 2,100 lines per picture height in the vertical direction. Some may argue for higher numbers, but lines begin to merge here and mild aliasing artifacts occur even earlier, at about 1,800 lines. Complete extinction of the pattern doesn't occur until between 2,600 and 2, 700 lines in both directions. Adobe Camera Raw wasn't really able to extract more resolution here from a RAW file, but it produced a lot more color moiré both before and past the resolution limits, as it often the case. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Excellent sharpness, with few sharpening artifacts. Mild noise suppression visible in the shadows and areas of low contrast.

Sharpness. The Sony A7S II captures very sharp, crisp images overall, and it doesn't leave behind heavy sharpening halos around edges with high contrast that we often see, such as around the lines and letters of our olive oil bottle label crop (above left). Excellent results here. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows relatively mild noise suppression in the darker areas of the mannequins's hair. Only a small number of low-contrast strands are smudged together, while higher contrast strands remain distinct. Excellent results here as well. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

RAW vs In-Camera JPEGs
As noted above, the Sony A7S II produces in-camera JPEGs with sharp, crisp detail. Additional detail can often be obtained from carefully processing RAW files with a good converter, so let's have a look:

In the table above, we compare a best quality in-camera JPEG taken at base ISO using default noise reduction and sharpening (on the left) to the matching RAW file converted with Adobe Camera Raw 9.1 via DNG Converter 9.4 with some moderate but tight unsharp masking applied in Photoshop (250%, radius of 0.3 pixels, and a threshold of 0).

As you can see, the Adobe Camera Raw conversion does contain more fine detail, especially in the red-leaf swatch which so many cameras struggle with, though the camera does a little better at bringing out detail in the pink fabric. Color in the ACR conversion is also more accurate. And because the Sony A7S II produces very low noise levels, there's almost no additional noise to be seen when using ACR's default noise reduction, which is often not the case. Although the A7S II does a very good job at rendering most of the available detail without many sharpening artifacts (at least at base ISO), discerning users will likely still want to shoot in RAW mode to get the most out of the A7S II's sensor (as well as a lot more latitude for post-processing).

ISO & Noise Performance
Outstanding high ISO performance.

The Sony A7S II's in-camera JPEG images are very clean and detailed at ISOs 50 through 400, with almost no degradation in image quality as ISOs increase within this range. ISOs 800 through 12,800 show a nice, progressive decline in image quality, with pretty good detail left at 12,800 for such a high ISO. At ISO 51,200, luma noise starts to become prominent, chroma noise more noticeable, and image quality drops off rapidly from there, with the top two ISOs looking more like paintings than photographs. Still, outstanding high ISO performance that's very similar to its predecessor.

As always, see the Print Quality section below for maximum recommended print sizes at each ISO.

A note about focus for this shot: We used to shoot this image at f/4, however depth of field became so shallow with larger, high-resolution sensors that it was difficult to keep important areas of this shot in focus, so we have since started shooting at f/8, the best compromise between depth of field and sharpness.

Extremes: Sunlit, dynamic range and low light tests
Excellent highlight and shadow detail in harsh lighting. Very good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images in near darkness.

Sunlight. The Sony A7S II handled the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above very well. We preferred the +0.7 EV exposure here, as the +0.3 EV exposure is a touch dim in the face while the +1.0 EV exposure had too many blown highlights. Contrast is a little high, but shadow and highlight detail are both excellent. Despite the bright appearance, only a few highlights are blown in the mannequin's shirt and white flowers at +0.7 EV, though the red channel is clipped in some of the flowers as is often the case, as well as in specular highlights where you'd expect clipping. There are some dark shadows however they're quite clean, though very deep shadows are posterized as expected. Overall, excellent performance here.

See below for results with Dynamic Range Optimization and High Dynamic Range features enabled.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here. In actual shooting conditions, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown here; it's better to shoot in open shade whenever possible.)

Dynamic Range Optimization is Sony's name for their dynamic range enhancement technology. DRO divides the image into small areas, analyzes the range of brightness of each area, and adjusts the camera's image processing parameters accordingly to make the best use of the available dynamic range. Auto DRO is enabled by default on the Sony A7S II. You can also set the level manually, from 1 ("weak") to 5 ("strong"), or turn it off. As one would expect, DRO is only available for JPEG files.

The above thumbnails and histograms show the effects of the various levels of DRO on our "Sunlit" Portrait shot with no exposure compensation. Mouse over the links on the right to load the associated thumbnail and histogram, and click on the link to visit the full resolution image. As you can see from the thumbnails and histograms, increasing DRO progressively boosts shadows and midtones while leaving highlights essentially intact. The Auto setting produced a better overall exposure compared to the default exposure without DRO, and the five manual levels give quite a bit of control over the effect.

Above, you can see the effect of DRO settings on our Far-field shot. The default Auto setting produced a nicely balanced exposure, despite the harsh lighting. A useful feature.

High Dynamic Range. The Sony A7S II's HDR mode takes three images in rapid succession, one nominally exposed, one underexposed, and one overexposed, then combines them into one high dynamic range JPEG automatically. Lighter areas from the underexposed image are combined in-camera with darker areas from the overexposed image to produce an image with compressed tonal range. The camera then saves a single composite image, as well as the nominally exposed image. The overlaid images are micro-aligned by the camera, but it can only correct for so much movement. If the camera can't micro-align successfully, an icon indicating HDR capture failed will appear. For best results, the subject should not move or even blink, so it's not really intended for portraits. There is also a manual mode where you can select 1 EV ("weak") to 6 EV ("strong") difference in exposures.

Mouse over the links to load the associated thumbnail and histogram, and click on the link to visit the full resolution image. As you can see, the Auto setting did a pretty good job, with an effect somewhere between the 2 and 3 EV manual settings. The higher the manual setting, the more highlights were toned-down and shadows opened up, but as you can see higher settings can produce flat and unnatural results with this subject.

Above, you can see the effect of HDR settings on our Far-field shot. Watch out for ghost images from subject movement during the capture sequence, though, as can be seen in some of the shots above. Still, Sony has one of the better in-camera HDR implementations we've seen.

Dynamic Range Analysis (RAW mode). While we once performed our own dynamic range measurements based on in-camera JPEGs as well as converted RAW images (when the camera was supported by Adobe Camera Raw), we've switched to using DxO Labs' results from their DxOMark website. As technology advanced, the dynamic range of modern high-end cameras in some cases exceeded the range of the Stouffer T4110 density scale that we used for our own measurements. DxO's approach based on RAW data before demosaicing is also more revealing, because it measures the fundamental dynamic range of the sensor, irrespective of whatever processing is applied to JPEGs, or to RAW data by off-the-shelf conversion software.

In the following, we use DxO's "Print" dynamic range results, which are scaled based on camera resolution. As the name suggests, this scaling corresponds to the situation in which you print at a given size, regardless of how many megapixels the camera might have. (In other words, if you've decided to make a 13x19 inch print, that's the size you're printing, whether the camera's resolution is 16 or 300 megapixels.) For the technically-minded, you can find a discussion of the reasoning behind this here on the DxOMark website. Also note that DxO Labs uses a signal-to-noise (SNR) threshold of 1 when defining the lower boundary of acceptable luminance noise in their dynamic range measurements, which corresponds to the "Low Quality" threshold of the Imatest software we used to use for this measurement.

Here, we compare the 12-megapixel Sony A7S II to its predecessor the A7S, as well as to its sibling the 42-megapixel A7R II. The graph above is interesting, as it shows the Sony A7R II provides significantly better dynamic range at base ISO, with the A7R II managing 13.9 EV versus the A7S II's 13.3 EV and the A7S's 13.06 EV. But keep in mind this is Printed dynamic range, so the A7R II's significantly higher resolution puts it at an advantage when printed at the same size, since the higher resolution camera will have more of its noise averaged out when downsampled during the normalizing process. (And indeed, if we compare the "Screen" results, we'll see the A7R II's dynamic range drop down to values lower than the A7S II's.)

As expected, the A7S II's dynamic range is very similar to its predecessor at most ISOs, but curiously it's noticeably better at some sensitivities such as ISO 6400 (10.54 vs 9.94 EV) and slightly worse at others (such as 8.89 vs 9.05 EV at ISO 25,600). But where the Sony A7S II and A7S really shine is at high ISOs, where they both have an advantage of up to just over an f-stop (7.59 vs 6.42 EV @ ISO 102,400 ) over the A7R II. Click here to visit the DxOMark page for the Sony A7S II for more of their test results and additional comparisons.

Low Light. The Sony A7S II performed extremely well in our low light tests, producing bright images down to the lowest light level we test at (1/16 fc). Noise is practically nonexistent at ISO 100, and very low at ISO 3200. Some very fine luma and chroma noise can be seen at ISO 3200 with noise reduction minimized (right-most column), however it has a tight "grain" which isn't objectionable. As expected, noise is very high at the highest ISO of 409,600. We didn't notice any significant issues with hot pixels or banding (fixed pattern noise), however there could be a little heat blooming from the bottom left at the highest ISO. We say "could" because at such a high sensitivity, the red cast could just be side effect of slightly uneven lighting.

Auto white balance did a very good job here, producing a fairly neutral, just slightly cool color balance.

The Sony A7S II's autofocus system was able to focus on our target quickly and accurately well below the 1/16 foot-candle light level unassisted with an f/2.8 lens. (We estimate the lower limit is around only 0.007 foot-candles, which is equivalent to the light produced by a single candle a bit less than 12 feet away!) That's outstanding for a mirrorless camera and better than most DSLRs. The Sony A7S II however failed to autofocus at all with its AF assist lamp enabled in our standard lab test, as its very bright light overwhelmed the camera's autofocus system. Real-world assisted low-light autofocus performance will of course vary with lens, subject type, distance, etc.

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) Thanks to its large sensor and huge pixels, the Sony A7S II autofocuses in extremely low light, but you still shouldn't expect a quick autofocus lock with moving subjects.

Print Quality
High-quality prints up to 24 x 36 inches at ISO 50-400; Nice 8 x 10 inch prints all the way up to ISO 12,800; and usable 4 x 6 inch prints at a whopping ISO 102,400!

ISO 50 through 400 prints all look practically identical, with great detail and vibrant colors, and we see no discernible noise as the ISO increases up to ISO 400. Despite the rather low-resolution 12-megapixel full-frame sensor, we nonetheless find prints up to 24 x 36 inches look very good across this range of sensitivities. At this print size, we are pushing the limits of the 12MP full-frame sensor, and at close inspection, you can see some pixelation. However, at normal viewing distances for prints of this size, they look nice and crisp.

ISO 800 images begin to show an increase in shadow noise, which is quite visible at 24 x 36 inches, however backing down to 20 x 30 inches shows excellent results. Again, there's a hint of pixelation visible at close inspection, but a 20 x 30 print is quite large, and nevertheless looks great, with nice detail and colors at a normal viewing distance.

ISO 1600 prints show a bit more noise than ISO 800, but detail is still quite good. We're calling it at 16 x 20 inches for this sensitivity, however a 20 x 30 inch print might be usable for less critical applications.

ISO 3200 images look practically identical to ISO 1600, and therefore print to the same size and still display the same level of fine detail and great color rendition.

ISO 6400 prints show an increased level of noise, but up to 13 x 19 inches, prints look impressive with noise remaining under control. Visible noise is still mainly constrained to the shadows, and detail elsewhere looks quite good; even the tricky red-leaf fabric of our Still Life target still shows detail at this print size.

ISO 12,800 images finally begin to soften detail in the tricky red-leaf fabric, as noise becomes stronger. However, a nice 8 x 10 print is certainly possible at this rather high ISO level with lots of fine detail.

ISO 25,600 prints still show a good level of detail at similar print sizes to the previous sensitivity, but noise is visibly higher, forcing us to limit prints to just 5 x 7 inches.

ISO 51,200 images show just a hint more noise than the previous ISO sensitivity, but we're calling 5 x 7 inch prints as the limit for this ISO, too, as we can't see a significant impact on print quality.

ISO 102,400 prints are normally unfeasible, but the A7S II bucks the trend with a totally usable 4 x 6 inch print! Though a small print, a 4 x 6 at this sensitivity shows surprisingly nice detail and good colors.

ISO 204,800 and 409,600 images are both too noisy and lacking in fine detail to be considered usable for making prints.

The Sony A7S II, as with its predecessor, manages a fantastic performance in the print department. Though it only features a relatively low-resolution 12-megapixel full-frame sensor, the Sony A7S II still manages some rather large prints, especially at the lower ISOs. Up to ISO 400 the A7S II can print all the way up to 24 x 36 inches. While you see some pixelation at very close inspection, from a normal viewing distance for a print of this size, detail is crisp and colors are vibrant and pleasing. Raising the ISO sensitivity to levels where other cameras struggle for sizable prints, the A7S II manages a pleasing 8 x 10 print all the way up at ISO 12,800. However, what's truly eye opening is the fact that you can get an acceptable 4 x 6 inch print all the way up to ISO 102,400! We've yet to come across another camera that can pull this off. Going higher than this ISO sensitivity, however, we do find prints are too noisy and lack fine detail to make acceptable prints.