Sony A7R IV vs Nikon Z7 vs Canon EOS R5 – Is Sony still the king of Eye autofocus?
Aug 17, 2020
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Much has been said over the years about Sony’s Eye Autofocus system and it was one of Sony’s biggest selling points for portrait photographers for a long time. Even after Canon and Nikon finally jumped into the world of mirrorless cameras, Sony still seemed to be on top when it came to their autofocus system.
But now that Nikon and Canon have had their systems out for a while and they’ve been working on them, does the same hold true today? In this video, Jared Polin (AKA FroKnowsPhoto) puts the Canon EOS R5, Sony A7R IV and Nikon Z7 mirrorless cameras to the test to see how they stand up in a head-to-head comparison.
While the EOS R5 is somewhat newer than both the A7R IV and Z7, the latter have both received a number of firmware updates since their release to improve their autofocus capabilities. All three cameras were set to their default AF modes and mounted side-by-side using 85mm lenses (for all tests except one) set to f/1.8 (to match the slowest lens in the lineup).
The video is 21-minutes long, so it’ll take a while to get through. Most of it is dedicated to actual testing and analysis of the results, though. If you want the whole story, watch the video, but in short, the Nikon shows significant improvement from where it was at launch, although it still seems to lag behind Sony. The EOS R5 on the other hand actually looks like it might have the edge over both of them.
None of them appears to be particularly terrible, though.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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4 responses to “Sony A7R IV vs Nikon Z7 vs Canon EOS R5 – Is Sony still the king of Eye autofocus?”
Sony eos r5?! ??
Oops! Fixed (just waiting for Facebook cache to update, hah)
The Nikon looks like it’s about on par with the current EOS R and way behind the R5 and Sony. I suspect the current Nikon cameras don’t have the CPU power to match the Sony and R5, presumably the ones that are coming soon will.
The internet has taken over my brain so hard that I keep reading ‘as fck’ instead of autofocus