Lovely kit. Well, not aesthetically - Sony tend to put the excellent workings together, then clag a box round them. But it is a fantastically capable machine.
That said, have you seen the new A9?
Further delay due to another house hunting trip (successful this time).
I'd agree the A7 series are ugly buggers, they look like something I'd draw with CAD in a spare few minutes. They are damn capable cameras though. I bought mine, (and lets face it, it was bloody expensive, and a couple of years ago I couldn't possibly have countenanced such a beast) because of its outstanding low light/high ISO performance for photographing period dance events, which are usually in poorly lit venues, and of course flash is a definite no-no. Lots of focus mode choice, which really does take quite a bit of learning, not that obvious or intuitive. Sony's instruction book is utter crap!
The A9 is not what I'd expected, and is of no interest to me, being a super speedy sports camera, and that's not what I do. I've got used to my 42MP, but what I now need to do, having just retired from paid work, is to spend much more time on slowly and gently photographing what I want to, so its my technique that wins through. Currently I'm being carried by having a bloody good camera which covers for my sometimes sloppy technique. There are some features of the A9 which are excellent, such as the proper separate dials for focus modes and, I think, ISO. All the negative comments about wanting twin SD card slots don't seem that important to me, and as for all the stuff about poor battery life, that's cobblers, unless you really need to shoot over 400 shots without the ability to spend almost 5 seconds swapping batteries.
I actually had a proper play with the tilt/shift lens at the weekend, in the churchyard in Montgomery. What I found was that shifting was very good for church towers, but that the lens is a bit shit on the flare front, unless I very carefully shade the lens with a card or my hand. I suppose I've been spoilt by my favourite Zeiss 25mm F2, which barely shows any flare when shooting straight into a low sun. No "veiling" at all, just one little aperture type dollop, which if you shoot dead straight into the sun, you can lose in the image of the sun itself. Again, that lens is bloody expensive, but for the dance photography, absolutely perfect. Fortune has been financially kind to me of late, being made redundant again by virtue of my temporary contract not being renewed, about 6 weeks before I qualify for state pension...