How I Was Convinced to Move to Sony

Camera systems are supposed to be a long-term relationship. You pick one, build years of glass around it, and mostly stay put. In this business, brand loyalty runs deep, and switching gets treated like a bigger decision than it needs to be. I’ve been shooting the Fujifilm X system since 2018. Right now I have three bodies, a bag full of lenses built up over years, and no real plan to change any of it. If you had asked me in early spring which system I’d be recommending by the end of the year, I probably would have laughed. I wasn’t looking for a new camera. I already had one I trusted.

This isn’t a camera review. I’m saving the A7R VI’s spec sheet and the dynamic range numbers for a separate post, once I’m back from Switzerland. This one is just about how I got here. It started with a sponsorship conversation, not a spec sheet.

It started as a partnership, not a pitch

Sony’s Zagreb office and I were talking about something bigger than gear: a potential sponsorship for Croatia Photo Academy. Nobody was trying to sell me a camera. Somewhere in those conversations, they offered to send me an A1 with the 12- 24 mm F4 for two workshop trips I already had booked: Sicily and Cinque Terre in April, then Portugal in May after CPA Edition I. Not a spec demo. A real loaner, used on real work.

That part mattered. I wasn’t testing a camera in a studio against a checklist. I was using it on the road, doing the same unplanned, reactive kind of work I write about in Two Coastlines, One Instinct. The A1 was in my hands for exactly the kind of shooting where a camera either stays out of the way or starts costing you pictures.

It stayed out of the way. The 12- 24 mm wasn’t the only glass doing the work, either. I also shot those trips with two Sigma lenses, the 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN II Art and the 35mm F1.4 DG DN Art, which I wrote about separately in Beyond the Postcard for Sigma Adria. Looking back, that stretch changed more than I expected. It changed which lenses I reached for, and slowly, which body I wanted behind them.

The second test: after CPA, with the A7 V

Sony came on as Platinum sponsor for CPA Edition I, and not long after, I had their new A7 V in hand for a portrait project. I wasn’t looking for a reason to be impressed; I’d shot enough portraits on Fuji to know what I liked about its color science. But the skin tones from the A7 V caught me off guard. They needed less correction than I expected, and that’s the kind of thing that matters when you’re editing a full shoot, not just eyeballing a single sample image.

That kind of thing rarely shows up in a spec comparison. It shows up later, when you’re editing the files and realize you’re spending less time fixing something you expected to fight with.

The project that actually convinced me

The one that settled it wasn’t a portrait or a coastline. It was a villa on the Adriatic: architecture and interiors, the core of what I do for hotels and properties. Full-frame’s dynamic range advantage is obvious on paper. What surprised me was the color correctness. I’d always considered that one of Fuji’s strongest points, a big part of why I’d stayed loyal to the system for years. But shooting that villa, working through the RAW files afterward, Sony held its own in exactly the area I thought was Fuji’s home turf: mixed light, deep shadow detail in stone interiors, highlight recovery on the coastal side of the building. That was the moment the decision stopped feeling theoretical.

For someone whose specialization is interiors, reading a room’s light and holding onto shadow and highlight details at the same time isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the job.

One more thing worth mentioning: ergonomics were never a problem on any of these bodies. Sony keeps the buttons and the overall layout close to identical across every new A7 body, so moving from the A1 to the A7 V to the A7R VI, the muscle memory just carried over. The viewfinders are excellent too, big and clear, especially on the A7R VI, and I’ll get into that more in the deep-dive review post. The autofocus is probably the best on the market right now. It was good enough on its own that I never felt the need to run a real comparison against Fuji’s system.

Why I didn’t sell the Fuji gear

I still have all three Fuji bodies and most of the glass. It’s not sentimentality; I genuinely don’t know yet if I’ll need them again, and the X-H2S in particular is too good a video tool to let go of on principle. 6.2K, open gate. There’s no reason to sell a tool that still does its job better than most alternatives just to prove a point about brand loyalty.

I switched because the work told me to, not because I needed to burn a bridge to make the decision feel real. My main camera is a Sony A7R VI now. The Fuji gear sits ready in case a project calls for it again.

Where things stand now

Sony was Platinum sponsor for CPA Edition I, and they’ve already confirmed for Edition II. That partnership grew alongside my own switch. One didn’t cause the other; both stemmed from the same habit: testing gear against real work rather than a press release.

What I’d tell anyone thinking about switching systems

Don’t switch because of hype, and don’t switch on a spec you haven’t tested against your own work. Test it on the projects that actually matter to you, the ones where a camera either solves a problem or it doesn’t. You don’t have to sell everything the day you decide, either. My Fuji bag is proof of that.

I’ll go deeper on the A7R VI itself, what the dynamic range actually looks like in practice rather than the number on paper, in a follow-up post once I’m back from Switzerland. This one was just about how I got here.

If you’re curious about the gear conversations behind projects like this, and want to see it discussed live, not just read about it, that’s exactly what happens at Croatia Photo Academy.