Review: Sony A7C R Full Frame Camera

Sony is no stranger to producing impressively small full-frame cameras. The original A7C took the innards of the larger A7 series and stuffed them in a more compact body. The ZV-E1 went further, with a tiny body that looks positively comical attached to long lenses.

These smaller bodies always involve feature compromises. No one wants a heavy camera, but some features mean physical limitations. While the sensors may be the same, the viewfinders are smaller, and other features were sometimes absent.

Enter the new Sony A7C R. In my experience testing it for several weeks in North Carolina's Outer Banks, it comes closest to providing everything you need in a camera and nothing you don't. The impressively small body is nevertheless comfortable to hold and carry around all day, and has most of the features even a pro would want.

Two years ago, I tested the original Sony A7C and found that while the compact, rangefinder-style body was perfect for traveling, the viewfinder was too small and the 24.2-MP sensor was a step back from the 40-MP sensor in my Sony A7RII. It was tantalizingly close to everything I wanted, but not quite there.

The A7C R solves at least the sensor problem, and gets much closer to the ideal travel camera. It's still plenty small at 4.9 inches wide, 2.8 inches tall, and 2.5 inches deep. It weighs just under a pound at 15.2 ounces (430 grams) for the body. With the FE 28-60mm F4-5.6 lens Sony sent along for testing, the total weight came to 21.1 ounces.

Photograph: Sony

The 61-MP CMOS sensor in the new A7C R is the same sensor you'll find in Sony's A7R V, released a few months before the A7C R. It's one of the best sensors I've tested, capable of excellent detail, with great dynamic range. The low-light performance is impressive as well, with very little noise even well up into the five-digit ISO options (the A7C R can shoot all the way up to ISO 102,400, but as you would expect, those images are very noisy).

There's nothing about this sensor that I can think to complain about. It's fantastic. The resulting RAW files are large—around 65 MB per image in my testing, with low light images being the largest. You can get this down to around 45 MB per image if you opt for compressed RAW, but at the time I was testing, no software could open these files (Lightroom and others have since added support).

Along with the impressive sensor comes the same processing engine you'll find in the A7R V. It has improved subject detection, including human body, face, and eye detection, along with body and eye detection for animals and general recognition of insects, vehicles, and aircraft. While all that is useful for photography, where the camera really shines is in video. The A7C R very rarely missed focus in video, and along with the A7R V, offers some of the best video autofocus currently on the market.

While there are some similarities to the A7R V, they're not the same camera by any means. The A7C R isn't nearly as capable at video. The A7C R can shoot up to 4K/60p with a roughly 1.2x crop, but that's as high as the resolution gets. That's pretty good for such a compact body, but it will be noisier footage than you'd get from the oversampled footage of Sony's larger cameras, like the A7R V and A9.

If you are looking for primarily a video camera, you're better off with the A7R V. The size trade-off isn't worth losing the sharper, higher-quality oversampled video that camera offers. If, however, you're primarily wanting to shoot still images, but have solid video capabilities should you need them, the A7C R will get the job done.

My main gripe about the original A7C was the tiny electronic viewfinder (EVF). On this score, the A7C R delivers only a modest improvement. It's better than its predecessor, which was virtually unusable for me, but it's still cramped and low-resolution (2.36M dots) relative to its competition, both within the Sony lineup and the larger camera market.

The good news is that the brightness has been cranked up, and what you see is clearer than it was in the original, with a slightly higher 0.7x magnification. It's a step up from the original's 0.59x magnification, but I find even the A7C R's viewfinder too small to be comfortable. It works—I can compose well enough—but it's not a joy to use by any means. This is part of the trade-off that comes with size, and to be fair, there isn't anything better out there for this size camera.

Photograph: Sony

The rest of the body is well thought out. The camera is comfortable to hold and operate with one hand. I found it very easy to use, and the camera never got in my way when I was shooting. The hand grip matches roughly what you get with the rest of Sony's full frame Alpha 7 cameras. There's a mode dial on top, making it simple to move between Manual, Shutter-Priority, Aperture-Priority, and Program modes, and it comes with three programmable presets. I found I could adjust this dial easily with either forefinger or thumb, but it remains stiff enough that it never changed in my bag. There's a dedicated video record button just back from the shutter button and switch that moves between video and still modes.

The rest of the button set is on the back of the body and offers everything you'd expect in the modern mirrorless camera. There's an impressive amount of customization available too, so you can set up the buttons pretty much as you want them. There's no AF joystick-type controller like you'll find on some cameras, but you can use the rear touchscreen or directional pad to accomplish the same thing. The rear screen is fully articulating, meaning you can position it just about anywhere, including my favorite position: off, with the screen facing inward.

Battery life is great. Sony claims 470 images using the LCD, and 520 if you stick to the EVF. I found the EVF claim to be accurate; I did not shoot with the LCD enough to test that aspect. Pros will not like that there's only one SD card slot, but I've yet to have an issue with just one card (pardon me while I knock on wood). The A7C R supports a UHS-II SD card, which you'll need to handle the 4K/60p video.

The Sony A7C R is well balanced with the FE 28-60mm F4-5.6 lens Sony provided. I also shot extensively with my own lenses—mostly legacy Nikon glass—which worked great with an adapter.

I spent two weeks testing the A7C R and found it very capable. There's something a little uninspiring about the design, but that's true of all of Sony's cameras. They're like Lenovo laptops. No one buys them because they're cutting-edge; they buy them because they're great devices that have the good sense to get out of your way and let you do what you want to do.

If you want a lightweight kit and don't need the absolute top-of-the-line features that only pro photographers really need, the Sony A7C R is a fantastic camera. The viewfinder isn't the best—I'd suggest trying it out in person at your local camera shop to see what you think of it before you invest—but if you can get past that, this is an impressive camera in an impressively tiny package.