Sony a7 ii or a7R ii?

[Alejandro]

I would appreciate some opinions and advice.

I’m thinking of probably buying a Sony a7 ii. But I’m not sure if it would be better for me to buy an a7 ii or an a7R ii.

I have read that although sensors with more resolution would normally mean heavier noise at high ISOs, this would not be the case for the a7R ii in comparison to the a7ii. I have read that both cameras show similar amount of noise at the same ISO values. Is this true, or does the a7R delivers more noisy images than the a7 at the same ISO values? What about their compared latitudes?

Another thing that I am wondering about is if the resulting files would be too heavy to be comfortably edited on my computer. I shoot raw and after developing I save as tiff, and the tiff files I normally edit tend to be in between 75 and 90 MB for the photos I take with a Sony a580 which is 16,2 MP. The sony a7R ii is a 42,2 MP camera, and I should image that the tiff files that one would get from developing its raw files ought to be huge. Are the images from the a7R ii too heavy to manipulate on an average notebook (as the one I have), or none have experienced some difficulty processing and editing them on a standard computer?

Edited August 22, 2021 by Alejandro

[Pieter]

The A7Rii produces more noise per pixel than the A7ii. However, it has a lot more pixels. Because noise is more or less randomly distributed, it cancels out to some degree when downsampling a high MP image to a lower MP count. So yes, the images from an A7Rii will look noisier when viewed at 100% than those from an A7ii, but it is also zoomed in more. When viewed/printed at the same size (or downsampled to 24MP) the noise should be pretty equal between both cameras.

[Alejandro]

Thank you Pieter, you answered one of my questions.
Regarding downsampling the images to 24MP, if that would be one’s plan, wouldn’t it be better to directly just shoot with a 24 MP camera and therefore avoid downsampling? Apart from its negative points, is there any benefit on downsampling an image that I am not being aware of?

[Pieter]

There's no real need to downsample except to save storage space. Like I said: the 42MP image from the A7Rii will not look noisier than a 24MP image from an A7ii when viewed at the same size. So unless you're pixel peeping, there won't be any noticeable additional noise in the A7Rii images. The images from the A7Rii will look slightly more detailed tho when printed to the same size because it has more pixels to sample from.

[SnappyMilt]

With an "average" notebook you should have no problem editing the 42.2 Mb raw A7Rii files. I have a Dell laptop

"XPS 15 9560

Memory: 32 GB

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz[Cores 4] [Logical processors 8]

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home."

I easily process my A7Rii raw and occasional tiff files in Lightroom and in Photoshop. (I usually edit to JPEG rather than TIFF.)

[Alejandro]

Thanks again Pieter and thank you SnappyMilt.

Regarding my second question, I managed to download from the web a raw file taken with a Sony a7R ii in order to experiment myself. I had no problems to process/develop the raw file and to export as a 16 bits Tiff. The tiff file I got was 240 MB. Although I could open it with a photo editor (I tried with two different ones) and managed to apply some edits, my computer, and the programs with which I tried, faced some difficulties. They couldn’t quite handle such a huge image file without becoming unbearably slow and collapsing from time to time. I wouldn’t have any problems to edit if exporting to jpg, but then I would have been editing an 8 bits file instead of an 16 bits file.

Edited August 23, 2021 by Alejandro

[SnappyMilt]

240 MB is a huge file to edit. I do the vast majority of my edits on the raw files using Lightroom. 

[Alejandro]

I do my raw files with DxO Photolab and tried doing this one with Capture One Express as well. I had no problems with these.
To edit my photos I use Affinity Photo or sometimes ACDSee Ultimate.
Maybe, If I were to choose to buy the A7R ii, what I could do is downsample the tiff files I get from the raw files to a more manageable size. Something as Pieter mentioned that could be done. I think I prefer to keep editing on 16 bits per channel, rather than loose colour depth as when exporting to 8 bits jpg.