Funny how some of us eagerly wait for a new model of a favorite camera, only to find the updated features to be less than what we’d hoped for. Adding an a7c to the arsenal a few months back cured me of that condition.

Sony boasted about its “simplified” menu arrangement when the a7IV came out, but to those of us who’d followed the upgrade path for years, the changes seemed minimal—well, at least for me.

Until I went back to the older menu of the a7c.

After setting the camera up with basic settings plus a user profile, the grid and histogram started reappearing in the viewfinder. It took a leap of lunacy to find that the setting for changing this was in the movie section of the menu.

I still haven’t managed to figure out how to assign a one-touch function to the rear thumbwheel. It defaults to EV even though there’s a separate wheel for that function. The camera still needs to have the image DB “recovered” so that files deleted from the SD card won’t show up as undisplayable.

The a7cII, meanwhile, just hums along as I want it to—without hiccups and with great autofocus. If I want to change a setting, I can usually find more than one way to do it. And the IQ is so good that it makes the a7c’s colors sometimes hard to look at.

The older model will be promptly ditched as soon as the a7v hits the market. And by then I’ll have forgotten all about the a7cII’s improvments and likely be griping about there being nothing new in the a7V . . .

a7cII/70-200mm GM II/2X . . .