I’m following my usual route when I test new photography gear. I head downtown, start on Congress Avenue — which I featured yesterday — and continue to East 6th Street. These pictures are from April 2023, when I had just purchased the Sony A7C and 24mm f2.8 lens. It’s a compact full-frame setup optimized for urban landscapes and everyday use, with its smartphone-mimicking focal length.

This first photo reminds me of the lede photo from this post when I tested the compact Canon G7X Mark II back in 2018. The pictures are framed differently; I’m using 24mm focal length instead of 35, and I now often perspective correct my architectural images.

Technically, the two cameras are miles apart. The Canon G7X Mark II is a compact camera with a 1-inch sensor, and the Sony A7C is full-frame. The A7C’s sensor is over 7 1/2 times larger, and even in these small web-sized photos, you can see the image quality difference.

Monday night is dead on 6th Street, and I didn’t find many lit-up buildings. Some bars were open, and I shot inside.

I’ve tested many cameras on this stretch of 6th Street. The color, lights, and architectural details make it a practical test of low-light urban landscapes. However, I was surprised by an apparent weakness with the Sony A7C that I haven’t experienced with many other cameras. A higher-than-expected number of pictures were misfocused when shooting these stationary buildings at night. Sometimes, I would get a purple warning, which indicates focus failure. Other times, the camera thought it grabbed focus, but it was inaccurate.

I’m talking about a handful of images in total, so it wasn’t a high percentage. However, I didn’t expect this since Sony’s focusing system was supposed to be top-notch. And, from my tests with portraits, the face and eye tracking are fantastic. Unexpectedly, however, it did worse on stationary subjects than Fujifilm.

Sony has multiple focus area settings. I used Flexible Spot: S. Instead of a single unified focusing system; the camera works best when different focus area settings are used depending on the subject. I later learned that Flexible Spot: M might work better for these situations — the small focusing area did not find enough contrast to focus effectively.

I now use the Medium Flexible Spot, which does work better. However, it is still not as reliable as Fujifilm. When shooting stationary subjects with the Fuji or my older Olympus system, I never had to consciously worry about achieving accurate focus.

On the positive side, I was delighted with the reds captured in this image. In the past, Sony’s color science was lacking compared to other vendors, though it has steadily improved. And while I still prefer Fujifilm for portraits, I like how Sony renders these urban landscapes. The reds on Fujifilm, for example, have more of an orange-ish color.

As hoped, the Sony images are sharper and higher quality than those of the Fujifilm X-System. However, I need to double-check the critical focus for my A7C shots to ensure they are correctly focused.

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