Best ISO values for Sony cameras

After providing the suggested ISO lists for Nikon and Canon, it is time to look at the best ISO values for Sony cameras.
If you want to know more about the reason why these ISO values are suggested to use for astrophotography, please read the article on the details of what ISO actually is and how it works here.

Sony A7S

When talking about Sony cameras for astrophotography, the A7s comes to mind immediately of course as it is a very popular camera for astrophotography. It’s high ISO performance is praised a lot, even though that might not all that important for astrophotography and more applicable for video. If we look at the suggested ISO of 3200 for the A7s, we notice the dynamic range is 10.4 which is ok, but nothing great. You might want to test ISO 2000, as the drop in read noise seems to happen between ISO 1600 and ISO 2000. However, I’m not familiar with the way Sony handles the partial stop ISO values so I’m not sure if ISO 2000 is better than 3200. If you know more about this or even tested it out, please let me know in the comments.




Suggested ISO values for Sony cameras

Here are the graphs and ISO values to use for astrophotography for the Sony cameras. If you disagree with certain values, please let me know in the comments below.

DSLR modelSuggested ISODynamic rangeGraph
Sony A3000400 (try 800 as well)11.2best-iso-for-sony-a3000
Sony A500020011.8best-iso-for-sony-a5000
Sony A510040011.2best-iso-for-sony-a5100
Sony A600040011.4best-iso-for-sony-a6000
Sony A7Unclear. 2 linear trends present so ISO 200 and ISO 1600 both seem plausiblebest-iso-for-sony-a7
Sony A7R10013.5best-iso-for-sony-a7r
Sony A7SUnclear, two linear trends present.
There seem to be a significant drop in read noise at ISO 2000 so ISO3200 is a good possibility
10.4 @ ISO 3200best-iso-for-sony-a7s

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