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by E.J. Peiker on Thu Jun 08, 2017 7:00 pm
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E.J. Peiker
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Note that Sony just released new firmware for most of their mirrorless cameras.  For a7R2 and a7S2 model users this is a very important update because it corrects the problem called the "star eater effect" introduced in the last firmware update which made the camera much less useful for night sky photography as the RAW processing mistakenly eliminated some stars interpreting it as long exposure noise.  Go to the Sony support pages for your model of camera and do the updates.

There are a number of other more obscure improvement and fixes.
 

by Alan Melle on Fri Jun 09, 2017 10:39 am
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Installed. The first thing I noticed is that start-up time on my a6300 is significantly improved. Thanks
Alan Melle
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by E.J. Peiker on Fri Jun 09, 2017 12:29 pm
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Alan Melle wrote:Installed. The first thing I noticed is that start-up time on my a6300 is significantly improved. Thanks
Start-up times on Sony cameras can vary significantly from start-up to start-up.  If you haven't used the camera in a few days and the battery has lost some charge since the last start-up, it can take a few seconds while it re-calibrates the battery capacity.  Once you do that, it stars up almost instantly.  You may have gotten fooled by that Alan, but if there is a real start-up improvement, that would be good.
 

by E.J. Peiker on Tue Jun 13, 2017 7:31 am
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It's been out for 5 days. If there were any serious problems it would be all over the internet and there is nothing. I did the upgrades - no problems.
 

by E.J. Peiker on Wed Jun 14, 2017 5:34 pm
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Reports are indicating that Sony has not fixed the star eater phenomenon and in some ways have made things worse resulting in a green cast on the pixels that represent the stars.  Sony makes some great cameras but they continue to struggle with their RAW format.  We still do not have lossless compressed.  The compressed RAW downsamples the camera to just 11 bits/pixel, and even the uncompressed RAWs are cooked and do not represent the actual data recorded at each pixel site on long exposures.  It is the single mos disappointing thing about Sony cameras and why companies like Nikon and Pentax are able to get more out of the exact same Sony sensors than Sony themselves.   But then again, nobody else is using the 42 megapixel sensor so Sony still ahs the overall image quality edge in most shooting situations.

BUT!!!... this also impacts the a7S Mk II which is a camera specifically designed for very low light operation - they really need to get it together on the RAW format front for dark sky long exposure shooting.
 

by Jens Peermann on Thu Jun 15, 2017 6:43 am
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Thanks for the notice E.J.  Just updated all three of mine.
A great photograph is absorbed by the eyes and stored in the heart.
 

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