Sony a7 IV Review

For four years this has been the default answer to the question of which camera to buy, and the reason is that it refuses to be bad at anything. Thirty-three megapixels is the right number: enough to crop hard on a wedding frame, not so much that cards and drives become the hobby. Autofocus inherited real-time tracking and eye detection from bodies costing twice as much, and it holds a face through a crowd with a confidence older mid-rangers never had.

The mechanical shutter runs to ten frames a second, the buffer is deep with a CFexpress Type A card, and the dual-slot, full-size body carries the controls a working photographer expects, including a dedicated stills and video switch that stops you rolling in the wrong mode. Video is where the compromise lives. 4K30 is oversampled and lovely, but 4K60 crops to Super35 and takes an APS-C-sized bite out of every lens you own, and rolling shutter at full width is bad enough to warp a whip pan. It is also five hundred dollars more than the camera it replaced. Still the safest purchase in the category.