Astrophotography with a 7R II

[Garth_Hayter]

Good evening, I'm new to the forum, and interested if anyone has used the new 7R II for long exposure astrophotography? I guess I am keen to find out if any one has experienced any of the hot pixel issues that some are reporting.

[lacroix]

I tried it couple of weeks ago at Zion National park and the results exhibited excessive hot pixels.  Sony released a new firmware to fix or reduce this issue but I have yet to try it.  I'm waiting for dark skies to return and will post some results post firmware update.

[Garth_Hayter]

Thanks for the reply, I am keen to see how you go. Cheers

[MickDK]

I'm seing the same - excessive chroma noise and a lot of white pixels with ISO 100 and 30 seconds exposure.

 

Just updated my A7R II to the newest firmware but it didn't help much. Tried twice to set date to 2016+ to force hot pixel remapping but still have 100+ hot pixels - mostly white and some bluish. Image is just about useless.

 

Even setting the slider for "Dead pixel" to 100% doesn't help much.

 

I also have a Canon 5D3 and here setting the "Dead pixel" slider to 25% eliminates every hot pixel. I really hope Sony can do better that this with a new firmware - having to remove +100 hot pixels for low light photos is NOT what I expected of a $3200 camera..... the problem is real because these most are 100% white pixels and they are in dark areas. Disappointed.

 

Using DXO Optics Pro 10.5.1. Going to try Capture One tomorrow.

 

Love my A7R II but it seems that is requires a lot of post editing work when using it for astrophotography.

 

Suggestions appreciated!

[gatormac2112]

I dont have the a7rii, but are you guys importing the images into lightroom? The only reason I ask is because I read online somewhere that lightroom was doing something funky with Sony raw files that was causing this. The person imported a raw into lightroom that had hot pixels, they imported the same image into Capture One and there were no hot pixels.

 

I cant verify this as I dont have the camera, but its worth trying.