Sony A7S III vs FX3: same sensor, and the cheaper one costs more

A Sony A7S III costs £3,389 at Wex Photo Video. A Sony FX3 costs £2,999. The A7S III is £390 dearer.

Now hire them, from the same company's rental arm. The A7S III is £85 a day. The FX3 is £105.

The more expensive camera to buy is the cheaper one to hire, by 24%. And the two share a sensor.

Same sensor, genuinely

This is not a near-enough comparison. Both cameras use the same 12-megapixel full-frame back-illuminated sensor and the same dual processors, which is why the footage matches well enough that productions cut between them without grading around it. If image quality is the question you are asking, you have already finished: there is no answer in it.

So the £20 a day is buying something else.

What the £20 actually buys

Three things, and only one of them matters on most jobs.

A fan. The FX3 has active cooling; the A7S III relies on passive heat dissipation. In practice that is the difference between recording until the card fills and recording until the camera decides it has had enough. On a two-camera interview, a panel, a ceremony or anything else where stopping is not an option, this one difference is the entire argument and it is worth considerably more than £20.

XLR inputs, four channels of them, built into the handle that comes with the camera. The A7S III can take XLRs through Sony's separate adapter kit, which is another thing to hire, another thing to forget, and another thing to balance on top of a camera that was not designed around it.

A body shaped like a cinema camera, with mounting points instead of a viewfinder hump.

And one thing you lose: the A7S III has an electronic viewfinder and the FX3 does not. Shoot stills, or work in bright sun where a rear screen is unreadable, and that absence is not a detail.

Which to book

The honest test is not which camera is better. It is whether you will be recording for longer than the A7S III will tolerate, and whether sound is arriving on XLR.

Two yeses and the FX3 is the cheaper option at £105, because the alternative is hiring an adapter and a second body to cut to when the first one stops.

Two noes — short takes, audio recorded separately, a stills component to the day — and the A7S III at £85 does everything the FX3 would have, for £20 a day less and with a viewfinder.

Both figures exclude VAT and exclude a 10% damage waiver, which Wex adds unless you show proof of your own insurance. All in, for a renter with no policy, that is £112.20 against £138.60. Over a five-day week the gap is £500.

The part that should interest an owner

Run the payback arithmetic from the piece we did on it and the inversion gets sharper.

	Buy	Hires for	Rental days to pay for itself
Sony FX3	£2,999	£105	29
Sony A7S III	£3,389	£85	40

The hybrid costs £390 more and takes eleven more rental days to cover itself. As an asset to hire out, it is comfortably the worse of the two, and the reason is not quality — it is that the rental market pays for the fan and the XLRs, and does not pay for the viewfinder.

That is worth knowing in both directions. If you are buying a camera you intend to rent out, the cine body is the better buy despite being cheaper. If you already own the A7S III because you also shoot stills with it, you are holding a slower asset, and pricing it at the FX3's rate will simply mean it does not go out.

If you came here looking for an A7S III

People do search for one on this site and find cine bodies instead. The catalogue runs to cinema cameras and cine glass, with Sony FX3, FX6 and FX9 bodies listed and no A7S III among them.

On most jobs that is a substitution rather than a disappointment, for the reason at the top: the sensor is the same, so the picture is the same. Where it is a genuine miss is stills, and anywhere a viewfinder is the difference between seeing the shot and guessing at it. Nobody should pretend otherwise, and if that is what you need, this is the wrong catalogue today.

Hybrid bodies are also the clearest gap in what is listed here — not a thin category like lighting or sound, but an absent one. Whether that stays true is a question about who the catalogue is for, and it is a fair one to ask of a marketplace that currently answers a photographer's search with a cinema camera.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Sony FX3 the same as the A7S III?

They share the same 12-megapixel full-frame sensor and the same processors, so the image is effectively identical. The FX3 adds an active cooling fan for unlimited recording, four channels of XLR audio in its included handle and a cine-style body with mounting points. The A7S III keeps an electronic viewfinder, which the FX3 does not have.

Which is cheaper to hire, an A7S III or an FX3?

The A7S III, by about 24%. At Wex Rental the A7S III is £85 a day and the FX3 is £105, both excluding VAT and a 10% damage waiver. All in for a renter with no insurance of their own that is £112.20 against £138.60.

Why does the A7S III cost more to buy but less to hire?

Because the rental market prices the features a production needs rather than the ones a photographer needs. The fan and the XLR inputs earn money on a hire day; the electronic viewfinder does not. The A7S III is £3,389 new against £2,999 for the FX3.

Which is the better camera to buy and rent out?

The FX3, clearly. At those prices and rates it covers its purchase price in 29 rental days against 40 for the A7S III — cheaper to buy and earning more per day. An A7S III makes sense as a rental asset mainly if you already own it for your own stills work.

Can I hire a Sony A7S III on Picturental?

Not at the moment. The catalogue is cinema cameras and cine glass, with FX3, FX6 and FX9 bodies listed. For video work an FX3 is a direct substitute, since the sensor is the same, but it has no viewfinder and is not a stills camera.