Is Sony's rumoured new a7000 APS-C going to be THAT good?

Anyone who does a search of the Web for Sony’s likely upgrade to the highly popular a6500 APS-C camera will find that the replacement for the a6500 is most likely to be called the a7000—rather than the a6700.. You will also find a lot of articles about the rumoured a7000 being the ‘best APS-C camera ever made’.

There are a lot of writers close to the photography markets that are very confident that the a7000 will not have the same form factor as the a6500. That it will be more like the a7 series of Sony cameras, as depicted by the image below clipped from Digital Camera World.

Image links to article at Digital Camera World

Another of the more interesting rumours is that the a7000 will have 32 megapixels crammed onto the half-frame APS-C sensor.

This is interesting because there are many articles that can be found on expert photography pages that argue that the perfect resolution for an APS-C sensor is 24MP and that any higher resolution would result in a degradation of the image quality. This is based on the premise that the larger the size of the sensor site the better the image capture capabilities of the sensor. So, considering this premise, increasing the number of sensor sites on the same sized sensor—which, obviously, results in smaller sensor sites—in turn will impact RAW image quality.

This sensor site size problem is an issue that manufacturers of smart phones have to try and work around all the time. They work around it by adding more and more post processing to the images in an attempt to regain image quality lost on the sensor. This post-processing impacts the faithfulness of the captured image, but—by and large—smart phone users are not concerned by this. Especially as the final picture is then generally only viewed on sub-6” screen. It only becomes an issue if enlargement prints are subsequently required or heavy cropping is done.

However, it is a different story when talking about serious photographers. With serious photographers, if there is any post processing to be done then they want to be the ones doing it. All of it! Because of this Sony cannot be putting a sensor into the a7000 that does not deliver at least as good results as that of the a6500 at the RAW level. No intrusive in-camera post processing fix-up allowed.

Sony also have a great 26MP APS-C sensor. They might just avoid the whole sensor site issue created by using the 32MP sensor and put the 26MP sensor into the a7000. Issue avoided.

We may not have to wait too long. Most sites I can find are suggesting that Sony will announce the a7000 late in March.