Luminous Landscape Posts an A900 Field Review
Alpha A900Just a few days after Michael from Luminous Landscape posted that he was canceling his Nikon D3x preorder because the high price tag just wasn’t worth what he would get out of the camera, he’s posted a field review of the new Sony Alpha A900. He manages to avoid mentioning the D3x by name in his post announcing the review, but certainly is taking a shot at Nikon’s pricing:
Does the thought of a full-frame, 24 Megapixel camera with a large bright viewfinder and the ablilty to shoot 5 FPS in raw with a deep buffer make you salivate? Does the thought of having to spend $8000 for a camera like this have you weak in the knees?
Well, one alternative is the Sony A900, which started shipping in most markets within the past few weeks. It retails for under US $3,000, offers excellent image quality, and access to some great Zeiss glass as well as a large range of Sony and Konica / Minolta lenses.
In case you’ve missed other news about it, the Sony A900 is a 24.6 megapixel full-frame DSLR, and marks Sony’s entry into the big leagues—as in, big sensors with big megapixels—something formerly dominated by Canon and Nikon. Well, let’s not kid ourselves; Canon and Nikon still dominate. But Sony is at least stepping up to give them a good fight, and early reports are that the A900 might just be the perfect camera to do that with.
Luminous Landscapes reports poor battery life, getting only 260 shots in 65 degree F weather, and only 230 shots when shooting outside around the freezing point.
They seem to have mixed feelings about the A900′s image stabilization system. Unlike Nikon and Canon’s systems, Sony’s is on the sensor rather than on individual lenses. The obvious advantage to this is that every lens on the A900 will be stabilized without extra cost for those lenses; Canon and Nikon shooters have to pay a premium for IS lenses, and lower-end lenses won’t have that feature. On the other hand, the review mentions the comfort level of seeing the scene stabilized in the viewfinder when you take the picture, something that you can’t do with sensor-based image stabilization. They also report that, unlike Canon and Nikon, Sony’s IS doesn’t automatically turn off when you use the camera on a tripod, and the reviewer mentions that he often either forgot to turn it off manually when using a tripod, or forgot to turn it back on afterward.
Some people may miss live view and a video recording mode on the A900, especially when you compare the A900 with Canon’s 5D Mark II, another full-frame camera in the same price range that has fantastic HD video recording capabilities.
They also have complaints about the memory card capabilities. The A900 gives you dual memory card slots, like many other high-end DSLRs, but in a far more annoying way. On cameras like the Canon 1Ds series and the Nikon D3, you get CF and SD slots, and can configure them to do things like save RAW images on one card and JPEGs on the other, save the same images to both, or use one as an overflow when the other fills up.
With the A900, however, you get a CF and a Memory Stick Duo slot. In case you haven’t seen Memory Stick Duo anywhere before, welcome to the wonderful proprietary world of Sony. Sony loves doing this stuff — ATRAC audio, Memory Sticks, etc. They’ll come up with something weird and proprietary when there’s a perfectly good alternative that everyone else uses (e.g., MP3 and CF or SD) and then doggedly keep using their proprietary format on their devices no matter how much it’s hurting their sales. At least the A900 has a CF slot, unlike cheaper Sony digicams that will force you to use Memory Stick Duos and nothing else. But even if you give in and get a Memory Stick Duo (I happen to have some for my PSP, so it’s not as painful for me as it might be for someone with no other use for them) you still don’t have much flexibility: you can select one card or the other as the target for where images are saved, and that’s it. No overflow, no flexibility at all. Maybe they figured that nobody’s going to bother with Memory Sticks, and so there’s no point in programming in any decent dual-slot features?
Keeping with the unnecessarily proprietary trend, Sony keeps Minolta’s proprietary flash mount hot shoe. As someone who rarely uses a flash, this bugs me more on principle than on real world usability, but the reviewer was much more offended:
Sony gets marked down big-time for sticking with Minolta’s proprietary flash mount hot shoe. If it was just a matter of being stuck using their proprietary flash it would be one thing, but not being able to use a flash trigger for studio use, such as a Pocket Wizard, is a real failing. Sony does have an adaptor for $129, but it really shouldn’t be necessary to have to purchase something like this and have one more bulky battery-operated gizmo to keep track of. It also means that the camera lacks a regular shoe, useful for bubble levels, flags and such. Boo on Sony. Bad design decision./blockquote>
Luminous Landscape also wishes that the A900 had the ability to record audio notes, since the reviewer often uses that. Obviously, this varies from person to person. I have never used this feature on any camera I have.
While the A900 does have a top LCD panel for showing settings, unlike some of the cheaper DSLRs on the market that force you to use the rear LCD for everything, they don’t really show very much information. You can see the status of a few settings (drive mode, exposure compensation, white balance, and ISO) by pressing a corresponding button near the display, but otherwise you just get battery level and number of frames remaining. For everything else, you have to use the rear LCD just like on cheaper cameras. That’s a pet peeve of mine, though less of a big deal for this review.
The A900 includes an infrared remote control, although it’s a lot less useful than it could have been:
Interestingly the remote also has a shutter release mode so it can be used as a wireless remote when shooting. Potentially very cool. But only potentially .
First of all, the sensor is in front of the camera (in the hand grip). This obviously means that it only works when you’re standing in front of the camera, not behind it, not the usual place for photographers to stand. Duhh! (Indoors in a small room the IR may work since the signal may be reflected, but outdoors this is never the case).
Another annoying aspect, given how useful this could have been, us that there is also a 2 second self timer release, but there’s no way to combine this with mirror lock up, since these are found on mutually exclusive settings in the Drive menu setting.
Come on Sony! This is almost as bad as the design faux pas usually found from the other guys. Doesn’t anyone ever actually ask photographers to field test these things before committing to production? The difference between good and great is when you sweat the small stuff, and this is all small stuff.
Unfortunately, it sounds like noise is much more of an issue than with most other DSLRs, which makes it sound like Sony might be trying to get more pixels out of the sensor than it can realistically handle. The A900′s base ISO is 200 (ISO 100 is useless, it just reduces dynamic range but has the sensor producing as much noise as ISO 200) and Luminous Landscape reports that even that isn’t completely noiseless. ISO 400 is “fine” but only when compared with cameras from 2-3 years ago, and he expects the Canon 5DMkII to blow away the A900′s noise performance based on early samples that he’s seen. At higher ISOs, it gets more and more unusable:
By ISO 800 noise is unavoidably obvious and there is a bit of visible chroma noise as well. This can be tamed a bit in the raw converter, and isn’t too objectionable in prints up to about 13 X19″, but is quite noticeable on screen at higher magnifications.
Sensitivities above ISO 800 I regard as unacceptable for fine art prints and publication quality images, unless a special effect is intended.
On the other hand, the noise that’s there is at least better noise than what some other cameras would give you:
…unlike some cameras the noise on the A900 is stochastic in nature. In other words, less grid-like and more random. This makes it much less objectionable to the human eye, and so when noise characteristics are compared numerically this perceptual nuance is not factored in, yet it can mean a considerable difference in the way that we perceive noise. In other words, noise with the A900 at higher ISOs (at least up to ISO 1600 when chroma noise starts to kick in), is visually less objectionable than it is on some other cameras which claim lower noise. More film like, and less digital in other words.
The A900 also gives 12-bit RAW files, which may be an issue for some people when compared to the higher color bit depth available in Nikon’s and Canon’s DSLRs. The review also notes that the auto focus is “competent,” but not as good as what you would get with a high-end Canon or Nikon.
That’s a whole lot of negatives for a camera that most people seem to like. On the plus side, they love the viewfinder, saying it’s large, bright, and “a joy.”
They also throw around some superlatives about the amount of detail in the images:
On the resolution front first, it can be said that when used with a lens capable of showing what this sensor can do, the A900 is the highest resolving DSLR that I’ve ever used. I have not yet had an opportunity to work with the just announced Nikon D3x, but when I do I will conduct an informal four way shoot-out between the Canon 5D MKII, 1Ds MKIII and the Sony A900. Notwithstanding this upcoming comparison, anyone buying an A900 can be confident that there’s nothing else anywhere near the A900′s price range that can beat it in terms of resolving power. Simply outstanding when used with the best lenses.
But even the high resolution isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. He reports that Sony’s lens lineup isn’t really good enough to take full advantage of the great sensor on the A900. Many of the lenses are old Konica/Minolta designs from the 70′s and 80′s, which have slower auto focus and, in general, aren’t sharp enough for a 24.6 megapixel sensor. He really likes the Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 24-70mm f/2.8 and the Sony 70-300mm G f/5.6 (although the 24-70mm’s bokeh isn’t great), and feels that the Sony 50mm f/1.4 is “competent” and similar to the Canon and Nikon versions. But otherwise, Canon and Nikon have a huge advantage in the amount and quality of lenses available for their high resolution DSLRs.
But let’s get back to the good things about the camera. He raves about the camera’s dynamic range, saying that it’s better than anything in the same resolution range, and that the only cameras that might have better dynamic range are the Nikon D90, Fuji F3, and Fuji F5.
I have rarely seen such wide dynamic range from any camera, including some medium format backs. On my shoot in Arizona I was able to capture scenes with brilliantly illuminated clouds along with deep shadows, and hold detail in both places. When combined with the sensor’s high resolution, for landscape work its hard to think of another camera currently available that is a more suitable tool, and at under $3,000 this level of performance is unparalleled. Just a few years ago it took a medium format back costing $30,000 to generate comparable images. And while today’s MF backs still have an edge, the price differential is significant.
And let’s not forget the decent price of the A900, especially when compared with everyone’s favorite subject these days, the price of the Nikon D3x:
In the light of the just announced (Dec 1, 2008) price for the Nikon D3x (US $8,000) the inherent goodness of the Sony A900 comes into focus (no pun intended). For the cost of a D3x one can buy a Sony A900 plus the exceptional Zeiss 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, the very fine Sony 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, a Sony A700 body as a backup, a flash, a couple of 16 GB high speed memory cards, and still have enough left over to pay the sales taxes. The same goes for the Canon 5D MKII, though you’ll have to pick two or three of your favourite lenses from that company’s lens line-up and something like the 50D body as backup instead.
Interestingly, Michael’s conclusion is that Canon people aren’t really going to defect from Canon for the A900; he thinks the 5D Mark II is good enough (and at the right price) to keep them happy. But given the pricing of the Nikon D3x, he sees high-end amateur Nikon shooters going for the Sony rather than anything from Nikon. He sees 2009′s top “serious amateur” cameras being the 5DMkII and the A900.
We’ll see. I can see the rich pixel peepers reading glowing reviews of the D3x and deciding that they absolutely have to have it. Maybe these are people with tons of Nikon glass and a serious need for huge numbers of pixels. I don’t know these people, though, so I don’t know what they’re likely to do. It’s certainly an interesting camera, and despite my general distrust of anything Sony (I still can’t get over Blu-Ray’s requirement to spend thousands of dollars per title for copy protection, even if you don’t want it, not to mention their endless proprietary format streak) I can’t help but admit that. Luminous Landscape seems to have found far more to complain about than some other glowing reviews that I’ve read, but with some huge positive elements in there, and an overall favorable review.
