Along with conventional RAW and JPEG, you can choose the HEIF (High Efficiency Image File) format for still-image capture. Smooth 10-bit colour depth provides realistic reproduction of skies and portrait subjects where subtle, natural gradation is essential. A selection of ten Creative Look presets and eight parameters can quickly craft a mood for your still images, movies and live streams. And since no post-editing is needed, you can share your vision immediately after shooting.

Sony's latest flash units communicate fully with the α7 IV, leveraging its powerful face detection capabilities to adjust exposure to produce natural-looking skin tones. For greater convenience during shoots, compatible flash and radio wireless commander units connected to the α7 IV can now be controlled directly from the camera interface.

The Fast Hybrid AF system, combining phase-detection AF and contrast-detection AF, has evolved even further to achieve greater speed, accuracy and tracking performance. With Sony's 4D FOCUS, a wide, dense AF area covers roughly 94% of the image area for both stills and movies with 759 phase-detection AF points. Both the mechanical and electronic shutters allow you to shoot more than 800 frames at up to 10 fps with AF/AE tracking, thanks to the α7 IV's high-capacity buffer memory, speedy BIONZ XR processor and improved memory-card writing speed.

Sony's unique subject recognition algorithm uses colour, pattern (brightness), and subject distance (depth) data to rapidly process spatial information in real time. AI is used to detect and track the eyes and face of the subject (human, animal or bird) with extremely high precision. Just select the subject to track, then leave it to the camera. The high speed of the latest image processing engine provides a significant boost to Real-time Eye AF performance, even when the subject is looking up, down, or sideways.

By setting the camera's subject detection type to "Animal" in advance, you can automatically detect and track an animal's eyes, for greater success in both wildlife shots and photos and movies of your pets at home. Animal-eye detection has been improved, with reliable tracking and accurate focus even when the animal's face is upside down. For the first time in the α series, bird-eye detection is available in movies as well as still shots – simply preset the subject to "bird". The camera's astonishing speed and precision allow automatic tracking of a specific bird, whether it's perched somewhere or in flight, keeping the eye in steady focus despite any fast and unpredictable movements.

It is now possible to record movies at up to 4K 60p with full pixel readout and without binning, taking advantage of the α7 IV's brand-new image sensor and wide dynamic range for smooth images of fast-moving subjects. When recording 4K movies at up to 30p, full-frame 7K oversampling is possible, resulting in high-resolution, highly detailed 4K. Select the mode that best suits your purpose, and let the camera deliver.

The α7 IV's built-in Soft Skin Effect makes skin look bright and beautiful, softening wrinkles, blemishes and dull-looking areas while adding emphasis to the eyes and mouth. This feature is available for still shots, movies and live streaming. The α7 IV supports UVC (USB Video Class) / UAC (USB Audio Class) standards that are usually included in USB cameras, so there's no need to prepare dedicated software in advance. Just connect via USB and get ready to go live at up to 4K resolution

Make in-camera recordings with the amazing richness of 10-bit depth and 4:2:2 colour sampling, with either Long GOP or All-Intra frame encoding, for far greater flexibility in image grading, post-processing and compositing. All-Intra recording encodes every frame independently, at bitrates of up to 600Mbps, capturing complex motion more accurately and allowing more efficient editing workflows. The XAVC HS recording format uses HEVC/H.265 encoding to achieve twice the compression efficiency of AVC/H.264 encoding, for superior image quality and smaller, space-saving file sizes.