Review: Sony A7V Mirrorless Camera

Perhaps the most anticipated new camera of 2025, Sony's new A7V mirrorless camera just squeaked onto the scene before the end of the year. The A7 series is Sony's all-around camera. It lacks the resolution of the A7R cameras and the video focus of the A7S cameras, but in some ways offering enough of the best of those to make the plain A7 the best choice for most people.

The A7V is no different and is one of the best hybrid still and video cameras I've tested, offering excellent dynamic range, crazy-fast shooting capabilities, and plenty of resolution for everything short of billboard-size prints.

What’s New

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

First, background and context. The Sony A7 series was my intro to "serious" digital photography. I skipped the whole digital SLR stage, sticking with film for an absurdly long time and carrying a Micro Four Thirds mirrorless for digital shots. That all changed with the original Sony A7. I bought one and never looked back. Well, that's not strictly true, I did look back and start shooting film again, but I've never purchased any other digital camera. I upgraded to the A7II, then the A7RII, and I have shot with every A7 and A7R now except the A7III.

All that to give some context to this statement: The new A7V is the best all-around camera Sony has ever made. It has 95 percent of what the top-of-the-line A1II offers, for half the price.

Let's start with the new sensor. The A7V uses a fully backside illuminated, partially stacked 33 megapixel CMOS sensor. The partially stacked bit is new from the A7IV, and it means faster readouts, which translates to higher burst rates and less rolling shutter. The same partially stacked tech is also in the Nikon Z6 III, but the Sony A7V offers 33 megapixels to the Z6 III's 24.

The new sensor is paired with the new Bionz XR2 processor, which means the A7V has the most sophisticated autofocus system in the A7 lineup, with subject recognition for six types of subjects (human, animal, bird, insect, car, train, and plane), as well as an extra auto mode that you can configure. More useful in my testing than the strict tracking capabilities is the human face and eye recognition, which has been hugely improved over previous A7 models.

Once you lock on to a subject, the A7V is eerily good at tracking them through all kinds of situations, including in a crowd of other people. It can even re-find them quickly after they disappear from view. This is useful for photography but really comes into its own when shooting video.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

To go along with this, there's a new feature called AI Smart Reframe (because it's 2026 and nothing shall be released without AI in front of it). First, let's back up and talk video specs for a second. The A7V is limited to 4K, where some competitors can do up to 6K. But the good news is that that 4K comes downsampled from the full 7K sensor (with no binning). That makes for sharper video than you'll get from a straight 4K sensor, but it also enables the new feature.

Smart Reframe works by first locking on to a subject, and then zooming and panning around the sensor to keep the subject centered. There are limits—the camera can't pan itself—but for filming yourself, it's actually very good and allows you to move in such a way that gives the illusion of having someone behind the camera, making it very handy for solo vlogs.

To round out the video specs, the 4K can be had at up to 60 frames per second with the full sensor capture, and there's 4K 120 fps with a 1.5X APS-C crop.

The A7V gains the pre-burst capture feature from the A9 III when using the electronic shutter. This allows you to capture images for up to one second in the interval between initiating the AF and pressing the shutter. If you've ever used this feature on a GoPro, the A7V's is very similar. It's great for wildlife photography, among other things. The classic example is a bird on a branch. If you want to capture the bird taking off, even with 30-fps RAW capture, you have to press the shutter button in time to capture the moment the bird lifts off. With pre-burst capture, you're taking pictures before you fully press the shutter, which means you get the image of the bird lifting off that happened in that split millisecond before you actually got the shutter pressed.

Also on the electronic shutter front, there is less distortion when using it. It's still not quite to the point where you can shoot fully electronic, but it's good enough that turning it on for burst mode and getting the max capture speeds out of the chip isn't a huge trade-off.

What’s Best

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Those are most of the headline new specs, but for me there are three fairly minor upgrades that make the A7V so much nicer than its predecessors. The first is the rear screen. It's bright and sharp and one of the first screens I've used where I actually came to trust it well enough that I was comfortable shooting from the hip or lower. Changing your angle to the scene is a big part of composition, so anything that helps with this is a huge win to me. The A7V's rear screen makes this so much easier, and it flips and rotates just about every way you could imagine, so you can shoot from any angle and still compose on the screen.

The second big upgrade is in ISO. I am one of those people who will shoot up to 25,000 ISO if I need to to maintain my shutter speed and aperture where I want them. Maybe this is an old-guy film-shooter thing, but changing ISO still seems like a miracle to me, and it's my favorite thing about digital photography—when it works. With the A7V, I was completely comfortable pushing ISO as high as 32,000. With the noise-reduction algorithms in postproduction software these days, the images still look great even at these insane ISOs. And yes, I try to keep ISO down when I can, but it's nice to know that I can go that high if I need to to get the shot.

The third upgrade is not so much an upgrade as a change for the better. Sony's color science has improved dramatically, especially with skin tones, which are much truer to life across the range of skin tones in this world. Auto white balance is also significantly better, though I am still a fan of shooting in good old sunlight white balance 95 percent of the time.

Finally, a bonus thing I loved. I've always wanted to get better at bird photography, but that generally requires expensive lenses and extensive time in the field. It still requires both of those things, but with 33 MP to crop into, and the pre-burst capture, and 33 images-per-second RAW capture ... even someone like me, with next to no wildlife photography skills and only a 200mm lens, can get some pretty decent images, which was fun to experiment with.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The one thing that still sucks about the A7V and has sucked about every Sony camera I've ever used, and it's only getting worse: the menu system. They are disorganized, confusing, and difficult to navigate. The only thing that saves you here is the number of programmable hardware buttons, which allow you to control things the way you want to without having to dive into the menus. Sony, seriously, hire a UX designer and fix this. Even better, steal Leica's menu designer.

Is the A7V worth the upgrade? Yes, if you're coming from a camera that's below the A7IV. If you already have the A7IV, it's less compelling. The new features are impressive on a specs table, but whether you need them depends on what you shoot.

If you're a wildlife or sports photographer, it's worth the upgrade to get the pre-capture and higher burst rates. If what you shoot doesn't benefit from those features—say you mostly shoot travel images, landscape, street—the A7V is a less-compelling prospect. It's incredibly nice for all those scenarios, but if you already have the A7IV, it might not be worth the money to upgrade for a bunch of new features you won't use.