There was a moment — and anyone who lived through the DSLR-to-mirrorless shift remembers it vividly — when Sony felt dangerous. Not in the playful marketing way or incremental “2% improvement per year” way. No, Sony came in like an outsider who didn’t care about legacy, storage room full of EF glass, or what the “serious photographers” thought. It was bold, maybe borderline reckless, releasing cameras that felt like prototypes disguised as products, but the speed of iteration was intoxicating. New bodies every year. New sensors that made everything else look prehistoric. Early A7 sensors with that magical combination of dynamic range and low-light ability felt like cheating. Even Canon shooters — the loyalists, the “never leaving EF” people — started secretly checking eBay prices of their gear and whispering: should I switch?
Sony didn’t just build mirrorless — it made mirrorless inevitable. It forced Canon and Nikon to wake up from a strangely long and comfortable nap. The shift wasn’t gentle, either. Sony pushed firmware updates like a software company. Suddenly autofocus wasn’t just “good”; it was uncanny. Eye-AF for humans, then pets, then birds, then seemingly anything with a pulse. The third-party ecosystem exploded because Sony didn’t lock the gate. Companies like Sigma, Tamron, Viltrox — even the weird boutique lens makers — finally had a full-frame future to plug into. Sony basically said: Sure, everyone build lenses, we’ll make the mount big enough to feed an economy. And that worked.
But somewhere along the way, the urgency faded. The most recent Sony releases feel oddly familiar, like déjà vu packaged in magnesium alloy. It’s not that the cameras are bad — they’re arguably some of the best engineered tools on the market — but they lack that slightly chaotic ambition that made early Sony gear exciting. The A7 bodies are now predictable. Safe. Iterative. You almost know the spec sheet before Sony publishes it: same body shape, slightly improved sensor, better AF tracking, some new AI buzzwords, a negligible shutter sound redesign, and a color science correction that comes with the promise: “This time we really fixed it.”
Meanwhile, the competitors Sony once shocked into motion have learned the game. Canon came back swinging with RF glass that borders on optical witchcraft, plus bodies like the R5 and R6 II that feel genuinely refined. Nikon, once considered moments away from irrelevance in the mirrorless era, suddenly built cameras with soul — the Z9 being a loud reminder that Nikon isn’t just alive; it’s angry. Even Fujifilm carved out its own identity instead of joining the full-frame war, and that stubbornness is paying off.
Sony now sits in an odd space: still leading in silicon, still adored by video shooters, still the modern standard, yet somehow… predictable. The company that once disrupted everyone is now the one people hope will be disrupted again, just to see what wakes up inside.
Maybe Sony is in its “Apple era”: refinement over revolution, safety over chaos, mass adoption over risk. Or maybe — and honestly, I hope this is true — Sony is quietly cooking the next seismic thing in some underground lab in Minato City, where engineers can’t speak without signing NDAs thick enough to use as lens spacers.
Because photography — real photography — thrives on evolution. And it would be fun to see Sony become reckless again.
