Steel Chen contacted me yesterday. he is the maker of a completely new Nikon F to Sony FE autofocus adapter. This would be the second adapter after the [shoplink 43423 ebay]Commlite adapter[/shoplink].

He sent me a video showing the improved version of his adapter. Steel is using the [shoplink 43430 ebay]Nikkor 70-300mm lens[/shoplink] on the A7rII:

My Nikon/Sony E ring performs better AF because we can better leverage Nikon lens parameters, make it the best fit in PDAF on A7R II.
1. Engineering prototype demonstration.
2. AF-S lens support only, for now.
3. Fast full range PDAF on Sony A7R II, good CBAF speed on A7R II
4. Its status can be tracked here in http://forum.xitek.com/thread-1529533… , sorry its in Chinese .

Mine is still in prototyping, cause  I need to solve the problem of automatic Aperture control of Nikon G lens.

Compared to the Commlite adapter Steel Chen’s version seems to focus much faster and also absolutely no annoying autofocus motor noise! He is reading this site so feel free to comment this post with your questions and he will try to answer you. There is yet no exact plan about when the adapter will go on sale and for what price. But I surely hope to get my hands on that adapter soon as it really seems to work fine!

SAR readers DAN sent me the link to his video. It shows how the A7rII start-up time seems to have been reduced on the new 3.0 firmware:

Just a quick test of the new 3.0 Firmware and how much fast the boot time is over 2.0. Pretty negligible, but every bit helps, I suppose. Other benefits to the 3.0 firmware are well welcomed.

I hope other readers can confirm this. And I do hope Sony will reduce the many lags of the camera during normal operation (not only at startup) via future firmware update.

Imaging Resource choose the Sony A7rII as the best camera of the year:

Like its predecessor, the Sony A7R II is a groundbreaking camera, and redefines what is possible in a full-frame mirrorless camera body. For the first time in an “R”-series A7 body, there’s phase-detection autofocus. Jam-packed with no less than 399 focus points covering most of the image frame, the A7R II provides swift, accurate autofocus lock and capable tracking, even with adapted Alpha-mount or third-party lenses. And courtesy of backside-illumination technology, the A7R II provides sufficiently good noise characteristics to allow handheld shooting under typical city street lighting, even with its higher resolution of 42.4 megapixels.
But perhaps most impressive of all, the A7R II is also now capable of 4K video capture completely in-camera, using the entire width of the image frame. And all of this comes wrapped in an impressively compact yet configurable body, which now sports noticeably better ergonomics than its predecessor. In a nutshell, the Sony A7R II is a truly spectacular camera that gives demanding photographers incredible capabilities while significantly lightening the load in their camera bags.

Surely not a surprise Sony got the prize :)

Sony A7rII store links: [shopcountry 43363]

By the way, the camera of the year for Barney Britton (Dpreview) is the RX1rII. And Imaging Resource mentioned the RX1rII for featuiring the technology of the year (for its Variable Low Pass Filter technology).