Sony α1 II (ILCE-1M2) Review | A Better Flagship?

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I am here on, yes, yet another snowy day to give you my long-term
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review of the Alpha 1 Mark II. Now, I ended up purchasing the original Alpha 1 shortly after reviewing it back in 2021
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And I found at that point that it was a really exceptional camera that I actually replaced two cameras
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I replaced my A9 and then also my A7R Mark III with that camera because it could shoot at a faster burst rate than my A9 and it recorded at higher resolution than my A7R Mark III
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and so things have changed obviously at this point and I waited a while before upgrading to the
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Alpha 1 Mark II but I did purchase one in fall of 2025 and so now I have been using it and using
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it primarily for filming on this channel along with still's work as well for the last four plus
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months at this point and so I'm ready to give you my long-term review and I like to take my time
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with these particular cameras because they're such a huge investment they're they're very very
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expensive and there certainly is a reasonable question to be asked as to whether or not the
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Alpha 1 Mark II represents a large enough upgrade for you to spend the money that would take to move
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from the Alpha 1 to the Mark II and then of course if you haven't owned the Alpha 1 whether or not it
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is worth spending all of that money to acquire. I hope to at least help you to answer that question
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in today's review and we're going to be examining all the different aspects of performance from the
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you know the build handling and feature what you're getting for your money to the autofocus
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and the buffer depth the video performance and then of course the sensor itself and to give you
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a conclusion after all of that i do want to thank the people at camera canada that i purchased this
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camera from they're always great to accommodate me and if you happen to live in canada they're
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great people to deal with and thanks to them for helping me in acquiring this and so without further
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ado, we're going to dive in and explore whether or not the Alpha
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One Mark II is the new camera for you. Let's take a look
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All right, let's dive in and take a look at the build and handling and the body here
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First thing is that while the flagship for Sony is much smaller than opposing cameras
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what it is not is cheaper than opposing cameras. This retails now for an eye-watering $7,000 or about $8,500 Canadian here in Canada
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that is a lot of money. However, this is a camera that does pretty much everything well
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We do have an updated body here. And what you're going to find is that they're
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while all of these Sony cameras, they're still on the small side. And frankly, I would take them a
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little bit wider and a little bit taller. So I have a little bit more room on the grip. This is
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about as good as I've ever seen on a Sony grip. It is thicker through this section. It has much
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more of a decent grip to it, which makes it a much better match if you're using it with
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you know, larger, heavier lenses. So that's great. What we mainly have is a little bit wider body
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It is 136.1 millimeters in width now. Height is right under 97 millimeters, and that depth is
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right under 83 millimeters. And you can see from this comparison from camera decision that
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the grip is much more robust looking than what was found on the Alpha 1. I would still take a
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little bit more room again in width for space between my knuckles and lenses, particularly if
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they're thicker lenses, but we are getting better. I haven't necessarily noticed my knuckles actually
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rubbing as I have with previous cameras. The weight is up a little bit, which is to be expected
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with a slightly larger body, but still it's very lightweight for this level of camera, 743 grams
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or right over 26 ounces. And that is with the battery and the memory cards inserted
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One of the major improvements here is, at least for me, is the fact that we have their upgraded
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both tilt and flip screen here that just gives you all the versatility. We first saw that on the
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a7r5 and so it just gives you the ability to basically put the screen in whatever position
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you want which i really love it is also larger 3.2 inches versus 3 inches and higher resolution
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at 2.09 million dots it's a great screen and i will note that sony has gotten to the place where
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all of their you know their menus are very easy to navigate by touch and so that's great i wish
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that finally Fuji would get on board. They're kind of the last holdout and not having touch capability in their menus
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Now, the raw specs on the viewfinder remain unchanged, though it is improved in a key way
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that I'll get to in just a moment. This is a very high resolution, 9.4 million dots
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It has 0.90 times magnification, and it has a refresh rate up to 240 frames per second
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The big improvement here is that you can display at 120 frames per second at the full resolution without the resolution
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dropping. You also have a couple of different options as far as the viewfinder cup here
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I've got the larger, deeper cup that just gives you a number one. It's a little bit better
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ergonomically. It's softer rubber, but it more thoroughly blocks out outside light. So it's
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going to make the camera a little bit thicker, but I find it to be well worth it because that
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just makes the camera more usable, particularly in bright conditions. The viewfinder is good for
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Sony, although Sony's viewfinders are not my favorite out there. But I do appreciate the fact
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that this one doesn't go quite as squirrely when you got the shutter held halfway down. Just
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something that I've not loved at all about Sony's viewfinders. This one does seem to be better. It's
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just still not fantastic. We do have the addition on the front because of that wider body of a C5
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button, just another custom button here on the front that is much appreciated. Also appreciated
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is now that we have this dual layer control here that allows us to have a completely unique
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configuration for either stills video or slow and quick. And so you have the option of selecting
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that and that means that all of your custom buttons and custom settings and menus can be directly assigned to each of these values So You can have dual control schemes for stills and video for example It just makes a lot of sense and it was one of the things that was missing from the original Alpha 1
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On none of Sony's e-mount cameras do we get a top-mounted LCD screen
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They pack a lot of controls on here instead. What we do have is on this side of the viewfinder stack, we have this dual layer control here that's only found on the Alpha 1 and the A9 series
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We have on top, we have our drive mode and then underneath, we have a focus mode dial there that will allow us to directly control those things
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Very welcome. You know, nice, keeps you out of the menus and ability to physically control that
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I do like Sony's control scheme because they give you lots of control wheels here
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including this one around the like okay or set button. This is a camera with a lot of connectivity
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I also appreciate the fact that we actually have doors that open and lock into place as opposed to
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just flaps that, you know, fall, you know, and just hang there. And so I do like everything that's
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here. Although I wish, obviously it's wish casting because at the time they hadn't come up with the
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idea of having dual USB-C ports. So we do have one USB, micro USB kind of multi-port here. But
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outside of that, everything is great here. We've got, you know, microphone, we've got headphone
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USB-C for charging. We've got full-size HDMI. We have got an updated LAN port that has faster
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protocols. And we do have a dedicated flash sync. Everything here is very nicely sealed
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The actual camera body itself is all magnesium alloy and full of weather seals, as you can see
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in this diagram. The shutter is designed for 500,000 accuation. On the A7-5, I said 5,000
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which a lot of you corrected on. It's 500,000, which was the same on the A7-5. It's also true
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here on the Alpha 1 Mark II, though most of us don't use that mechanical shutter all that often
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Anyway, as with the Alpha 1, we have two dual ports here for our memory storage, which will allow you to either use CFexpress cards, Type-A cards, or to use SD
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These are UHS-II rated SD cards. I recommend if you're going to use this camera, use the faster protocol as far as the CFexpress Type-A, just so you can help move data through there quicker
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You'll be glad that you did. Up top, we have the updated, what they call it, the Mi Shoe interface, where it can not only do for flash, but it can also do digital audio recording through there
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Power comes from the same NP-FZ100 battery we've been seeing for a long time in Sony cameras
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In this case, it's a little less efficient than the Alpha 1. We drop a bit to where we're rated at 420 shots through the viewfinder or 520 shots when using the LCD screen
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that's about 90 minutes of you know high resolution video recording one major update here is to the
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in-body image stabilization which is upgraded from just 5.5 stops to 8.5 stops in the center
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seven stops in the corner and so vastly improved it's also better now with telephoto lenses which
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i really really appreciate we've got options like pre-capture now there's pixel shift which was there
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before, but, you know, continues to be improved. We also, as before, have three different raw sizes
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We got a small, medium, and large. Medium being about 21 megapixels, which is very useful
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And we have the different compression options. We have the uncompressed, lossless compressed
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and then we have a lossy compressed raw. Sony is touting the environmental packaging
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but frankly, it just feels insulting. It's basically a very plain white cardboard box
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and some things like the extra eye cup are literally just in like a folded slip of paper
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The whole thing feels as cheap as you could possibly get. And when you're spending this
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much on a camera, let's say that this is the opposite of Apple packaging. It does not feel
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like you have made a great investment. I know that Sony is trying to virtue signal with this
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but when I'm spending this much money, Sony, you can go virtue signal on your own dime
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So let's talk autofocus. As with a lot of the things with the A1 Mark II, there is not on paper a lot of difference here. We still have somewhere around 759 autofocus points that are spread over about 92-93% of the frame
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We also continue to have the ability to have full tracking up to 30 frames per second all across the frame and that blackout free viewfinder
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All of that is, of course, fantastic. But there are some core improvements here, namely that the original Alpha 1 was missing a later Sony technology in the form of the AI chip
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So we now have that dedicated AI chip that makes it much more efficient when it comes to tracking human subjects, animal subjects, and a variety of other subjects from infants to automobiles, planes, trains, a variety of subjects like that
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When it comes to tracking humans, they say that because that AI chip can not only detect faces, but it can also just detect poses, the shape of the human body
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And so it's going to pick it up and acquire it even if it doesn't have a face on frame
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and on top of that they say that it will track about 30% more efficiently with that human subject
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but then when it comes to a bird or animal they say that that tracking efficiency is improved by
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up to 50% and so that AI chip does make a really noticeable difference in the quality of focus in
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what was already a fantastically focusing camera and so there's really not much to complain about
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here and what I have found is that for example when I was testing the Tamron 25 to 200 millimeter
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It's a variable aperture zoom, nowhere near the most efficient tracking lens out there
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not a dedicated sports lens at all. But even with that, you can see in this burst out doing some bird and flight testing
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I mean, autofocus was basically pretty much perfect all throughout those sequences and
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just nailing focus. Frankly, these cameras are so good at this point, it feels pretty much like cheating
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that it's just pretty effortless to acquire and track subjects, even in difficult
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circumstances. And I just find that the camera basically doesn't miss. I can shoot in low light
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I can shoot in difficult circumstances. I can shoot with more obstructions in front. And because
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of that AI, it is just more intelligent in avoiding foreground objects, for example, and
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you know, focusing on the actual subject itself. And so there's just so many good things that are
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going on with the basic autofocus when it comes to stills. On the video side of things, basically
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all of those benefits apply on the video side as well. All of the AI tracking, the same amount of
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autofocus points. And this is a camera that immediately replaced my A7R Mark V for my main
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video recorder for my channel. It's just a little bit better, a little bit more efficient
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It's got a few extra things going on here. And so when it comes to autofocus, whether it's stills
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or video, I've been delighted with its performance. And at this point, it really is just effortless
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It is, for me, you know, as I'm filming for my channel
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I can set up a shot where I got a lot of stuff in the foreground because I wanting to create depth to the shot and I just step into the frame I usually use this remote right here which I love from Sony
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to start the actual recording, and it just does the job. It is truly effortless, and so I have
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nothing but praise for the A1 Mark II when it comes to autofocus for either stills or video
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Okay, let's talk about the shutter here, the burst rate, and then the buffer depth. Obviously
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this being an action-oriented camera. Those things are all really, really important. Now
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the RAW specifications are not very different here from the original Alpha 1. What we have is
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the same burst rates and same conditions for those burst rates, but we do have slightly better
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buffer depth. And so what remains unique about the Alpha 1 is that you can shoot at 30 frames
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per second with 14-bit RAW, though the caveat there is that you are dropping to a lossy compression
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but still shooting raw at that kind of speed. And that remains unique for a camera
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that is pushing this kind of resolution. I own the Nikon Z8, for example
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It's 45 megapixels. It can also shoot up to 30 frames per second
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but the caveat there is when you shoot 30 frames per second, that is JPEG only
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You want to shoot raw files, you're going to drop to 20 frames per second
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And obviously, that's slightly lower resolution as well. And so this remains really fantastic in that regard
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It's just not necessarily better. You do able, when you're shooting, if you want to shoot in that lossless compressed RAW or uncompressed RAW
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you're going to drop to 20 frames per second and not get that same kind of blistering speed
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And as always, I have to give the caveat that that 30 frames per second or even 20 frames per second is reserved for shooting with a Sony branded lens
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If you're shooting with a third party lens, for example, you're only going to get 15 frames per second
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and that's one area, for example, where my Nikon Z8 is able to surpass this
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What you're always going to get, however, is a blackout free viewfinder experience
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This is a fully stacked sensor, and so that means you never get any blackout
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which means you're able to just stay in the action much better, and it makes it a better sports or high-speed action camera
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Now, this is really built around an electronic shutter, though it does have a mechanical shutter
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The mechanical shutter can shoot up to 10 frames per second. No improvement on that front
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Here's what that looks and sounds like. The shutter speed limit is 1 8,000th of a second
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Now, what is impressive is the flash sync speeds. You can get up to 1 400th of a second flash sync speed
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and if you're shooting in APS-C mode, you can get 1 500th of a full shutter sync
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without having to go into high-speed sync mode at that point. So that is still a very impressive spec
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Again, it's not improved, however. The electronic shutter, you can get that 30 frames per second, and here's what that looks like
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You can get a maximum shutter speed of 1 32,000th of a second, so significantly higher
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Flash sync speed is lower in electronic shutter, though still very good for an electronic shutter
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You can get up to 1 200th in full frame mode or 1 250th of a second in APS-C mode
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This remains one of the fastest readout speeds that we have ever seen in any electronic shutter
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camera. It is only 3.8 millisecond is what it's rated at, and so it's extremely fast. That means
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rolling shutter is very, very low. It just eliminates a lot of the penalty for shooting
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with a fully electronic shutter. And so you're able to drill off a lot of images very fast
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and able to easily track action and stay really locked on it
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thanks again to that outstanding autofocus that we've already talked about. Now, when it comes to the buffer depth
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that is going to be pretty largely dependent on the quality of media that you put in there
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So if you're just using SD cards, obviously you're not going to achieve the maximum buffer depths
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And the faster the card you have in there, the more you're going to be able to accomplish
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I have a card, my primary card in here is a chip fancier
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that I have reviewed on here previously. It can read and write up to 1,750 megabytes per second
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So that's a really good and good fast card. I was able to definitely exceed the rated buffer depth
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And so in the sequence that I showed with the shutter itself, I got about 150 full raw images in that burst
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And then the speed slowed, but it was still clipping on at a really good rate there
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Just the rated specs for JPEGs is over 400. And again, with a fast card like this, I'm sure you could exceed that
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I wouldn't say that your buffer depth is ever going to be an issue with the Alpha 1
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It certainly hasn't been for me. And owning the original for four years, I never had any issues with buffer
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And I expect to see even less here with the Alpha 1 Mark II
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One feature that has been added is the pre-capture mode, which if you have that enabled for the first, you know, basically half second when the shutter is
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depressed, before it's fully depressed, it will start taking images. And so to help you to not
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miss that shot, you can get up to 30 frames before the shutter is fully depressed. And so it just
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increases your chances of nailing something when the action comes really quick
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Even this shot, this doesn't, maybe doesn't show it off the best, but I was zooming by on a
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in a Chinook helicopter. I went up with an army friend and, and so I was turning really quickly
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because we were going over this river. And I mean, just nailed that shot really, really quickly
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So that certainly can be a very useful feature, particularly if you are a sports or wildlife photographer
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And so in all of this, I'm very impressed, continue to be very impressed
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even though there's no major improvement here. This is a fantastic camera when it comes to
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the design of the shutter, the buffer depth, and the way that it all works together
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So how about video? When the Alpha One came out, it was originally
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it was one of the first cameras, at least that I own, that was doing 8K video, doing 4K 120, things like that, at least in terms of cameras that were in
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this class. You fast forward to 2024, late 2024, and early 2025, and now 2026, and the basic
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specifications of the Alpha 1 Mark II are less impressive. And in terms of changes in resolution
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or codecs or the addition of things like open gate video, they're not here yet. The ability to record
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actually internal raw again not here yet but what we do have is some increased sophistication we've
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already talked about the autofocus side of things but on top of that one of the big things for me is
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the ability to have an articulating lcd screen where you can monitor from the front we now have
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the ability to use custom luts and to upload those to the camera to have that lut applied on screen
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for monitoring and I've become a big fan of Gerald Undone's LUTs that I've been using a lot
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recently because they just give you a you know just a nice basic picture look you know that
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doesn't require a whole lot of tweaking afterward I'm actually filming with that on at the moment
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you obviously have the ability to shoot in log formats which is not surprising at this point
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that's you know pretty pretty universal however I do find that the S-Log3 it just gives you a
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good versatility. It's easy to grade. I have no complaints with it overall
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As far as some of the other things that we have got here we obviously have more AI type tracking So one of the options that Sony has added to the Alpha 1 Mark II is what they call their AI auto framing
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And so you've seen what constitutes normal framing. And so if I am to select my face on that, and so now that it tracks me
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it will start to zoom in to my actual face. and as I move around for example it is going to track me and give the appearance of having a camera
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operator. So for some people that's going to be gimmicky obviously it is something that I
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as a creator will make some use of for situations where I like to add maybe in a particular segment
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something that's a little less flat and a little bit more dynamic instead of trying to add those
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things in post. One of the other core improvements for the video recording is when it comes to
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stabilization. They've added their active stabilizer mode, which allows you to get more
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stable handheld footage. If you're wanting to do run and gun type footage, you can activate that
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and it will allow you to just get a little bit more stable, a result right out of camera. And so
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I mean, at the end of the day, what we have is 8K, but only at 30 frames per second. They've added
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no 8K, 60 frame per second option. We also don't have the ability to, again, to shoot open gate
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But that 8K footage, it's very good. It's down sampled from an 8.6K resolution. And so it is nice. We also have the ability to, if you're shooting in the Super 35 for 4K, it is going to be down sampled from, I believe, a 5.8K source. And so you're getting a really, really nice amount of detail and resolution out of that footage there
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you have the ability to shoot up to 120 frames per second at 4k which can be very useful on a
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freezing day like yesterday when i threw water hot water into the air and it turns into this
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obviously that's going to be useful i do find with the 8k footage while there isn't a lot of
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practical application for actually sharing 8k footage it can be very useful to give you more
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cropping capabilities and so that you can take a variety of shots out of one you know that means
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you can zoom all the way out into 200 for example and still have 4k resolution so i mean that's
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that's obviously going to be very useful in certain kinds of circumstances so at the end of the day
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we've got a lot of good things going on but nothing revolutionary here and so if you were looking for
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things like internal raw recording or open gate video unfortunately not going to happen
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let's take a look at the sensor now on paper here we have the same full frame stacked 50.1
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megapixel Exmor RS CMOS sensor that was found in the Alpha 1. Though with some tweaks, which Sony
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often does in their second generation using a sensor, that improve the performance across the
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board. And according to places like Photons to Photos, which we'll also see in our real world
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test here in this review, there is significant improvements over the original Alpha 1, making
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this really probably the strongest high resolution, high speed sensor that we have got out there
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Definitely better in all of the available metrics over sensors found in the Nikon Z8 or the Canon R5 Mark II, which are the two highest competing fast sensors out there
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Resolution here is 8,640 by 5,760 pixels. We do have an APS-C mode of 5,616 by 3,744 pixels or about 21 megapixels
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And you can see here from this shot that even zooming in to 100%, there's still tons of resolution and detail here to work with
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And I'm reminded that I shot for nearly a decade with the Canon 6D, which had only 20 megapixels of resolution, so less even than this camera in the APS-C mode
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So there's plenty of resolution here for you to do deep crops, for example, if you're wanting to emphasize a certain part of an image or just give a completely different framing
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This is from my review of the 100mm GM macro and you can see that this lens is very capable of producing very high detail images with lots of room for cropping
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Here you can see that beautiful detail that's being captured there and obviously lots of pixels to work with
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It's amazing how much you can get out of such a fast sensor. This is actually a stacked image to give us a little bit more depth of field
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But you can see again just how extraordinary the detail is and the capability of getting it from this camera
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What's more, of course, you can get great detail even on the wings, so to speak
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And to get all kinds of images throughout your burst that are all high resolution, highly detailed images
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It's very impressive for that. Now let's talk color. I have found that Sony's color science has just slowly but steadily improved
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improved ever since I started testing Sony going back into the a7R Mark II days. And at this point
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I think that the color science is as good as what I'm seeing out of anything, whether I'm shooting
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landscapes or when it comes to faces, it doesn't really seem to matter. You know, I can get a
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variety of, you know, different skin tones, including, you know, very, very pale here
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This is a recent one of my what's left of my family that's still in the country at the moment
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shot of me here and another one of my daughter. This is a young man is Indian. You can see just
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with a variety of different skin tones, it's producing nice, accurate color. And so I have
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zero complaints about the color science out of the Alpha 1 Mark II. So let's talk about ISO
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performance. Here is our base image. This is ISO 100. And I'm going to give you a quick peek at
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you know, closer examination to show you what it should look like. And so what we're looking for
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is nice inky background there. In these color swatches, we're looking to retain color accuracy
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and to avoid color shifts. Sometimes in the black here of the grip
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is where I also start to see some color shift. And just in general
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we're wanting to retain as much consistency as possible. So jumping right up to ISO 1600 on the right
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comparing to base ISO on the left, you can see that there is a very, very slight amount
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of very fine grain that is showing up there. it's pattern noise we look down in this area it's still nice and clean the shadows here are still
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nice and inky though i don't think quite as inky as what they were we also see they're still very
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good color consistency on the grip there now at 3200 and then 6400 everything obviously looks fine
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at a global level if we zoom in here we can see it still looks really quite clean now what we can
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see is that we are getting a bit more noise coming into these you know the color swatches here we
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don't see any kind of like pattern grid pad or anything like that starting to emerge if i look
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down into this area here we can see that there is a little bit more roughness that's starting to come
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into the shadow information but by and large it's still very consistent not a lot of uneven pixels
29:39
there but everything is holding up fairly well now on a global level all the way up through iso
29:45
12,800 and then up to 25,600. Everything still looks fine. It looks pretty much as original
29:51
However, while 12,800 on the left is still looking really clean, what I can see here in the grip
29:57
is you can see that there is just a little little bit of some green influence starting to come in and just in general just a little bit of
30:05
pattern there and you know obviously inside the mirror here the noise is looking rougher up in
30:10
our color swatches noise is looking rougher there and if we look towards the shadow information you
30:15
can see it's getting increasingly speckled with just uneven pixels and so what we're going to find
30:21
is that we're not going to have quite as much contrast because those shadows are starting to
30:25
lift from those uneven pixels. At the same time, I think you could argue that in many circumstances
30:30
that would still be usable. Now, the native limit is ISO 32,000. So, only a third stop higher than
30:36
25,600. You can expand up to 51,200. If we take a look here at a pixel level, we can see that
30:45
yeah, there is, you know, that it basically looks very, very similar to 25,600. We can see that
30:50
you know there is a little bit of shift there we can see if we go into the expanded range here
30:55
that you know what the color is not shifting a whole lot further it's just basically getting
31:00
rougher overall you can see here looking up into the swatches and definitely as we start to look
31:05
into the what should be just pure black shadow area it's much more speckled at this point and so
31:11
i wouldn't say venturing into the 51,200 for me kind of a practical limit is 12,800 which i think
31:19
It still looks really, really clean. I think in a pinch, you could use 25,600 and even ISO 32,000, but I would say I would avoid
31:27
the expanded range. Most of the time, my practical limit is around 6,400
31:33
Most of the time, that's sufficient to get what I need, but I will go up higher if needed
31:37
This is at ISO 3,200, and you can see here, even shot in a challenging setting, basically
31:42
a dark room with some kind of high contrast here. This is one of our youth group performances here
31:48
we can see that it really looks quite clean. There's a little bit of that fine pattern noise that's in the image itself
31:54
but the image looks very, very usable. And even at a pixel level, it looks just fine
31:59
If we check out Photons to Photos and their rankings, we can see that from the original 5,215 low-light ISO performance of the Mark I Alpha I
32:10
we see that we have now jumped to 5,768. And so that's a significant jump
32:16
And by the way, that exceeds what we're going to find from competing cameras according to their rankings
32:22
The Nikon Z8 is rated at 4,224, so a lot lower. And then the Canon R5 Mark II is rated at 4,846
32:32
And so clearly in every one of those metrics, the Alpha 1 Mark II is way above those cameras
32:39
So let's talk dynamic range. range. According to Photons to Photos, once again, the Alpha 1 Mark II is really ranked at being
32:48
one of the very top Sony sensors. And we can see, once again, if we're looking at the blue line
32:55
that's the Alpha 1 Mark I, and the black line is the Alpha 1 Mark II. And if you're looking at an
33:00
even faster camera like the A9 Mark III, you can see that its dynamic range really lags behind
33:07
either one of the Alpha 1 cameras. But we can also see that basically
33:11
at all of the tested ISOs, it is pretty consistently better There one exception right here in this zone right here But outside of that we see a consistent pattern where it is exceeding the performance not quite by a half stop but
33:27
according to their rating, you know, around 0.4 of a stop. And so it is, they've definitely
33:33
tweaked more out of this sensor. Now if we compare to, again, some of those competing cameras
33:38
the blue now represents the Alpha 1 Mark II, black represents the Nikon Z8, green represents the
33:44
R5 Mark II. What we find is that base ISO, there is no question again that the Mark II is at the top
33:52
slightly followed by the R5 Mark III, which is 0.16 lower. And then considerably lower
34:01
nearly a stop, is the Z8. What we find is that the advantage here is pretty consistently throughout
34:09
the whole ISO range that the sensor out of the A1 Mark II is just consistently better once again
34:17
except for this one little zone right here but other than that it really shows up well against
34:22
other high resolution competition. Now going to my test what I like to do for practical is to
34:27
intentionally underexpose and overexpose images and see how well we're able to recover both shadows
34:33
and highlights. So in this case we're going to start with being underexposed by a total of
34:38
four stops. So this is the original raw image on the right side. What you can see is my recovery
34:43
where in Lightroom I've added four stops of exposure back in. So first of all you can see
34:48
looking at a global level it looks fantastic. It's recovered really well, really naturally
34:53
And if we zoom in here at a pixel level we see it looks really really clean. There's very very
34:58
little noise that has come in. Everything is recovered very naturally. Not even really
35:02
hardly any pattern noise here. It looks just really really clean. That's great
35:07
even at a full five stop under exposure here to where you know most of all like for example all
35:13
part of this image is completely lost crushed away and yet if we zoom into a pixel level you
35:18
can see it's really quite beautifully recovered i would say the tiniest bit of a little bit of
35:23
green coloration in there a little bit of noise here on the mirror and a little bit of noise down
35:28
in this area but if we look in the shadows not a whole lot of speckle there it's very fine what's
35:33
there it looks really nice and clean so shadow recovery is quite impressive now on the other end
35:39
of the spectrum here i have overexposed by all the way up to four stops in this particular image that
35:44
we'll start in this is a three stop of overexposure typically normal cameras will fall apart between
35:50
two and three stops of overexposure in this case i feel like the alpha one mark ii handles the
35:56
three stop of overexposure just fine if we look in the timer face you can see that it is very
36:01
naturally and very consistently recovered some of these color swatches that were just completely
36:06
blown out you can see they're fully recovered no issues there also over on this side we can see
36:12
that you know these colors many of them completely washed out fully recovered and so really excellent
36:17
on that metric there and as far as highlights on some of the textures i feel like all of that
36:22
texture information is back even in this zone which is a you know really blown out here all
36:28
throughout here all of that texture information is back on the spines of the
36:31
book recovered very nicely quite impressed really now I have yet to see any camera that I have tested at all handle this test with four stops of overexposure and this is not going to be the first Here the attempt to recover four stops of overexposure here on the right and you can see comparing to the three stop recovery
36:52
you can see how it recovered all of that color information on the timer face here
36:57
Not at all. You know, it just looks really unnatural. Some of these color swatches you can see are just irreparably gone and not recovered
37:05
You can see here at four stops, these ones here, they're just, you know, they're not there
37:10
And what's more, the whole image has a little bit of an unnatural tinge, and it hasn't even recovered back to that proper brightness
37:17
And so there is our practical limit. The practical value here is that I'll give you one real world example
37:22
In this image here, it was a beautiful scene, beautiful lighting. However, you can see to try to expose a little bit for this section
37:29
The sky's really blown out. And also, there's lots of detail that's crushed and lost in the shadow, including some of the beautiful color
37:36
But with just quick work on the sliders, and that's all that's been done to the image on the right
37:40
is that I've just pulled up some of the shadows, pulled down the highlights. You can see we've got some of the beautiful sky showing up down there
37:47
It looks more natural here. And we've just brought out all of the detail and the color that is there, that was hidden in the shadows before
37:57
and so now we have the ability to just see the image kind of come out and pop for us
38:02
and lots of information that's recovered there and it looks clean and looks natural
38:07
and that's kind of the key thing for me. Overall, I'm actually really, really impressed
38:11
with not only the dynamic range but the performance of this sensor at large
38:16
For such a fast stacked sensor, it is really impressively good in terms of the performance
38:22
So what's my conclusion? Sony has an interesting development cycle that I have observed time and again with their releases
38:31
With one generation, they introduce a lot of new features. Often there's a new sensor, maybe a higher resolution point
38:38
And then in the next generation, they essentially kind of polish all of that
38:43
and help it to kind of realize the promise of the previous generation
38:47
A lot of times what Sony doesn't necessarily do is thoroughly support their cameras via firmware and continue to flesh out missing pieces
38:57
And I think that was one of the main frustrations with the original Alpha 1 is that it was this very expensive flagship camera
39:04
And it seemed like that there were features that were released on subsequent cameras that cost a whole lot less that many people felt could have been added to the Alpha 1 via firmware
39:17
Instead, what we're seeing is that it took the Alpha 1 Mark II to get a lot of those features realized
39:22
and some of the kind of sore points of the first generation camera to be addressed
39:27
Whether or not that is worth an upgrade is going to be up to you
39:32
I own the original A9, for example, and I elected not to upgrade to the A9 Mark II
39:37
I own the original Alpha 1, and I have decided to upgrade to the Alpha 1 Mark II
39:42
But for me, my personal calculus is that I don't spend a lot of my own personal photography budget on lenses
39:50
For the simple reason that as a lens reviewer a gear reviewer I almost constantly probably 85 to 90 of the time shooting with someone else lenses And so I don have an opportunity to use my lenses as often as what I would like And so I spend my own photography budget on having the
40:06
best cameras that I can across these various brands. And so that I have the best technology
40:11
to access the performance of the actual lenses themselves. Obviously, that's a really unique
40:18
calculus for me personally. And so when it comes to you, you're going to have to decide for yourself
40:22
whether these upgrades to the Alpha 1 Mark II constitute enough of an improvement to spend that
40:29
significant amount of money. Now, setting all of that aside and just looking at the Alpha 1 Mark II
40:34
standing alone by itself in a vacuum, this is a fabulous camera. And I can say that having owned
40:42
the original Alpha 1 for about four years, I find the Alpha 1 Mark II just a better camera for me
40:49
personally. It has some key features that were sources of frustration for me with the original
40:55
Alpha 1, most notably including not having the ability to articulate that screen so I could
41:00
monitor from the front. And when you're someone like myself who does a lot of these segments where
41:05
I'm in front of the camera and not behind it, not being able to see the framing means that there are
41:09
going to be some entire segments that I have to reshoot because I should have gone back and checked
41:14
the framing, done a quick clip. I didn't do it. I come back and realize the shot is wasted. There's
41:20
not enough headroom. I'm clipped here or there, and so being able to monitor from the front is huge
41:26
for me. I also just appreciate the fact that the Alpha 1 Mark II remains something that's pretty
41:32
incredible, and that is a camera that basically is a jack-of-all-trades, but essentially master
41:38
of them all. It has an extremely high resolution point that none of the other brands are really
41:44
competing with, much less the A7R series. But in this case, we have not only that very high
41:52
resolution point, we have an extremely fast burst rate. We have deep enough buffers that you can do
41:59
true sports or wildlife photography really without any kind of limitation. We have an incredibly
42:05
robust video feature set. And on top of that, we have amazing autofocus. We have great technology
42:12
throughout the camera. This is just a camera that does everything well. And if you're going to own
42:17
one camera to do it all, it's really hard to beat the Alpha 1 Mark II. Now, I would say that if
42:24
you're looking at other brands, you can look at the R5 Mark II from Canon or the Nikon Z8 as
42:30
cameras that cost considerably less and do a lot of what the Alpha 1 does. But none of them quite
42:37
to do it all the way that the Alpha 1 Mark II does. And so at the end of the day, if you're
42:43
looking for that jack of all trades camera, I don't know that there's a better one out there
42:47
on the market right now. And that in itself, I don't know if it justifies the extreme price point
42:53
but at the least it makes it very, very interesting. If you want more information
42:57
please check out my full text review where there's areas where I dive into even more detail because
43:02
of having the time to do so. So check that out. It's linked in the description down below
43:06
there are buying links there as well. As always, thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in

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Sony α1 II (ILCE-1M2) Review | A Better Flagship?

Dustin Abbott