Photography with A7Siii or A7C?

[Joshua]

I have some upcoming food photography shots to do and I'm wondering which camera to use? The photos are for an online menu only, no print, so I'm not sure if there will even be much of a difference. I know the A7C has the 24 megapixels but is there a reason to go with the A7Siii over the A7C? 

Thanks for any input.

[thebeardedgroundsman]

I cannot see any reason to use the A7s over the A7c for any type of photography, unless you're trying to save space on a memory card, or file size.

[XKAES]

If the results will only be seen on-line, no one will notice the difference.  Use whichever camera has the features that will make the shooting the easiest for you.

[Joshua]

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.

[Veres Deni Alex]

You can use both without any problems.

I had my first photo exhibition a couple years ago and realized I can actually print double the size people recommend without any quality loss, because at the end, it's all a matter of viewing distance.

I have a workmate that uses the Canon R6 to shoot fashion to be printed on billboards. He also crops. Billboards need around 4-6MP for a good rendition of image, because of viewing distance. nobody will sit 10 cm from that billboard to pixel peep.

and reality is, nobody will ever sit 10cm away from your artwork and pixel peep like we photographers do in front of our screens. Even if they do, they will look at your art, not at sharpness.

That's why I could print a 24MP camera to double it's recommended size without any quality loss, because the viewing distance was about 60-90 cm.

How Big can you actually print 4K?

Ok so the a7S III has a 12mp sensor, which is the higher end of 4k resolution. The lower end of 4K can also be 7.5-8 MP, so that is really good. Now imagine going to the cinema watching a 4k image being projected on that HUUGEE screen. Or imagine your Home TV.

There are multiple videos on youtube comparing Prints of a 100MP camera vs the a7S III on a blind test, and most people didn't know which is which.

So you will be fine with both of them, social media requires only HD quality, max 2k resolution, which is plenty room to crop and edit, don't forget it's compressed as well, they cannot zoom in.

 

But I recommend you go to a professional printshop and ask them to print a couple of your images at different sizes so you can see for yourself how large you can print and actually how much information is in a 12MP image. It's a lot more than you'd think.

Try printing an image without many textures and one with textures like trees, branches and so on.

You will be surprised by the results.

 

 

Edited March 11, 2023 by Veres Deni Alex

[Samir32]

On 3/19/2022 at 9:55 AM, Joshua said:

I have some upcoming food photography shots to do and I'm wondering which camera to use? The photos are for an online menu only, no print, so I'm not sure if there will even be much of a difference. I know the A7C has the 24 megapixels but is there a reason to go with the A7Siii over the A7C? 

Thanks for any input.

 The Sony A7S III is renowned for its exceptional low-light capabilities. If you expect to work in challenging lighting conditions or prefer capturing images in dimly lit environments, the A7S III's superior low-light performance can be beneficial. It allows for cleaner, noise-free images even at high ISO settings.

[mbrose Bryc]

On 3/19/2022 at 9:55 PM, Joshua said:

I have some upcoming food photography shots to do and I'm wondering which camera to use? The photos are for an online menu only, no print, so I'm not sure if there will even be much of a difference. I know the A7C has the 24 megapixels but is there a reason to go with the A7Siii over the A7C? 

Thanks for any input.

I've got a food photography gig coming up, and I'm a bit torn on which camera to use. I've been considering the Sony A7C and the Sony A7S III, but I'm not sure if there's a significant advantage to choose one over the other for this particular project. The photos will be used exclusively for an online menu, so I'm not sure if the higher resolution of the A7C's 24 megapixels would make a noticeable difference compared to the A7S III. However, I've heard great things about the low-light capabilities and video performance of the A7S III. 

[Pieter]

23 hours ago, mbrose Bryc said:

I've heard great things about the low-light capabilities and video performance of the A7S III. 

The low-light capabilities of the A7S are so good because it has so few megapixels. The signal-to-noise ratio of these pixels is outstanding, resulting in very low noise at high ISO-settings. For real-world use however, this benefit is questionable: if you downsample a 24 MP image from the A7C to 12 MP, the (random) noise is averaged over several pixels and the final picture will have a very similar noise level as one from the A7S. What's more, the downsampled A7C image will look slightly more detailed because it is downsampled from a picture with more detail information.