Banding from artificial light

[MalthouseMark]

Hi, I'm new to the A7iii and trying to understand banding issues with mirrorless having come from a Canon 5Diii recently.

With my old camera I would sometimes see banding with fluorescent lights and the way to reduce that was shoot below 1/50th.

I have hit banding twice now when shooting indoors with the A7iii when not using flash.

I stress when not using flash because I'm about to mention flash. In my research as I started to use the new kit I came by this lovely article https://theoverratedphotographer.com/2019/02/14/using-godox-with-the-sony-a7iii-a7riii/ for shooting with Godox (I have the Godox v860iiiS). In that article it mentioned turning Silent Shooting off, and the e-Front Curtain Shutter off along with making Exposure Compensation Ambient Only. It also said to turn OFF anti-flicker mode to allow for shot result preview.

As suggested in that article I set up a user setting for flash work. That has (so far) worked fine.

However (back to non-flash mode) I've noticed a few times when shooting indoors that I'm getting dark banding and/or exposure apparently dropping. It has a feel of fluorescent tubes as the issue even though they weren't tubes (they may have been halogen lights yesterday).

It could be that I just have to shoot below 1/50th still - but I was doing fast moving subjects and there was a fair bit of light in there so didn't think to shoot slow.

I had hoped that anti-flicker ON would be enough when using electronic second shutter.

Could anyone advise me on which settings to watch out for/change to avoid such light changes when using the a7iii, please?

[SkyNet404]

Hey @MalthouseMark,

After snooping online for a bit, with all the tips and tricks I know, maybe check the following:

-Set the shutter speed to the same speed as the flicker frequency.
-Turn off the electronic shutter and use the mechanical shutter. Fast shutter curtain speed decreases number of the bands. Gap between the mechanical shutter and the image sensor makes edge of the bands vague.
-Set the shutter speed as slow as possible. Setting slower shutter speeds weaken the banding, however, this remedy is useless for the scenes which require fast shutter speeds.
-Use Anti-flicker shooting function

Hope it helps.

[MalthouseMark]

@SkyNet404 thanks, that's pretty much what my own research came to. I found a whole lot out about the different curtains. This particular shoot I wasn't able to use slower shutter speeds at that point. Sadly.

[SkyNet404]

@MalthouseMark, yea shame that you can't use it.

Maybe they made it so to advertise other models that supports more features, with more options that cost more money, like the A1

Regards.