Sony DSLR-A900 Camera hands-on preview
Attended the Sony A900 launch this morning and had an opportunity to handle the camera, the new flash (which almost stole the show for me) and both new lenses.
Impressions and tidibits:
Very solid, purposeful camera. Users of the A700 will feel right at home with the control layout.
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Sony A900 |
Sony A700 |
Literally zero learning curve. I was merrily changing flash settings, ISO's, DRO settings, file sizes, metering patterns, in no time. As far as the build quality goes, my point of reference would be the Olympus E3 (a very solid camera) which I use regularly, and the A900 feels every bit as tough and durable. The ergonomics of Sony's higher end cameras are just right on the mark as far as I'm concerned.
To stabilize the full frame imager required a 50 percent increase in power to the driving mechanism. 
The dual Bionz processors move 123 Meg's of information off the chip during a one second (5 frames per second) burst.
The 100 percent view viewfinder is very bright, has an excellent eyepoint for those with glasses (like myself)
The samples they had printed up were aprox. 3 ft. x 4 ft. and looked medium film format quality to my eye.
Focusing feels slightly improved from the A700. Did very well in the lower light areas of the studio the presentation was held at.
Rear LCD is excellent, although only slightly higher rez than the A700.
Informations on LCD:
- Exposure Mode
- Shutter Speed / Aperture
- EV scale / Exp comp. / Flash comp.
- Focus Area mode
- Metering Mode
- Sensitivity (ISO)
- Drive mode
- AF mode
- Creative Style
- Dynamic Range Optimizer setting
- White Balance
- Frames remaining
- Memory Card
- Size
- Quality
- Battery level
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| Changing the exposure (not all settings shown here) - you can also do this in Manual exposure mode, though obviously you won't see depth of field changes. |
Changing the white balance (again, not all options are shown in this animation). |
Intelligent preview is a useful feature that allows you to make all the major changes - Exp. Comp., DRO, WB -to a single exposure. In manual you can preview the effect of changing either shutter or aperture, but obviously the depth of field is unaffected by aperture changes as the picture is locked to the original settings for that. 
The new HVL- F58AM Flash has a very cool feature that will have all of you smacking yourselves in the forehead and saying 'why did't I think of - and patent - that!' The flash head rotates 180 degree around the axis of the lens, then it also tilts for bounce flash as well. This totally eliminates the need for a flash bracket as the rotational ability of the flash duplicates a bracket exactly. You will love this feature.
The new 70-400mm lens comes in a cool grey colour, not white. A heavy lens you'll want to put it on a monopod. Just judging by studio flash-lit samples on the rear LCD it seems to have good sharpness. This lens would have really nice reach for the size of it if you were using an A700 as a 2nd camera (600mm max. equivalent focal length).
The camera is fully weather sealed - I checked with a rep on this - with every opening on the body, and there are a lot of buttons, switches and doors on this thing, sealed with rubber gaskets. No lenses are sealed as of this time.
Trivia
They used the same model for the studio test shots as last year's A700 launch, and you'll be happy to know that time has barely touched her and she's still smokin' hot.
All the shots for the A900 brochure worldwide were done in British Columbia , Canada , something the Sony staff were very proud of. They brought a photographer over from Japan to do them.
A Toronto commercdial advertising photographer who spoke briefly, and has apparently been using the camera for a while, and said the file sizes are more than enough for his Agency clients - in fact, he suspects they mainly down-rez the files. No complaints about files being too small at all.
I can't get the wickedly cool feeling of using that Zeiss 135mm 1.8 out of my head :)
Congrats to you Sony users. This is a gem of a camera.
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