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09.02.09

Sony Alpha 900 Review

Words by Julian Lass

The industry has been anticipating a full-frame, high resolution pro-spec DSLR from Sony for a long time and there’s been more leaks than at a farewell concert for Celine Dion. Now it’s finally here, the A900’s launch puts Sony head-to-head with Canon and Nikon in the full-frame stakes.

A whopping 24.6 million pixels is headline stuff in itself, but it’s the fact that it’s priced somewhere around Canon and Nikon’s ‘cheaper’ full-frame DSLRs that really makes heads turn. For the first time, you can buy the kind of pixel count that only professional photographers talk about. And you can do it without remortgaging the house. In credit crunch times, that’s a bonus.

Let’s talk numbers. The sensor measures 24x35.9mm and packs in a staggering 4032x6048 pixels. A final Raw file is 36MB and prints out to 13x20in. If you’re lucky to have a printer large enough, it will print out at A3+ size. Just by way of comparison, and to save you doing the maths, the Nikon D700 will deliver a print that’s 9x14in at 300ppi.

There are other boxes to tick. You get a three-inch rear LCD that delivers 921,600 pixels for sharp review of images, you get Sony’s new SteadyShot Inside shake reduction system that’s claimed to offer four stops extra shake-free images. You also get an impressive central command system. In order to deal with the extraordinary amounts of information coming off the sensor, Sony has had to figure out how to power it. Sounding like something you’d find in a cheap tanning salon, the A900’s uses dual Bionz image processors. These allow the camera to shoot five frames-per-second.

Of course, pixel power isn’t everything and more important is the way a camera looks and handles. The A900 looks as though it has been penned by folks who were designing cameras in the 1980s and driving Ford Cortinas to work.

There’s a distinctly angular, retro feel to the pentaprism, and the weighty handgrip and chunky mode dial add to the nostalgia. From some angles it would scare your grandmother; from others it’s beautiful. You should definitely be aware that the A900 is a heavy beast. With the Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 SSM Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* zoom attached, it comes in at a shade under 2kg. The camera world’s equivalent of the dashboard is the top-plate LCD.

I’m happy to report there is one on the A900. It provides useful information like shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, white-balance, ISO, battery and the like. Which is plenty, but the whole thing looks squashed compared to larger examples on the Canon EOS 5D and the Nikon D700.

I like the chunky mode dial. You get the main modes – PASM and Auto – as well as three custom modes where you choose your own camera settings.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the A900 doesn’t offer a Live View function. Apparently Sony says that the R&D team wanted to concentrate on making the perfect ‘analogue’ optical viewfinder. For your money you get a brilliant 100 per cent field-of-view, so what you see is exactly what you get on the final image.

Metering is taken care of by a 40-segment honeycomb that gets the exposure right in most cases, but centre-weighted and spot are there for more control. Exposure compensation is on the top-plate and there’s three- or five-frame exposure bracketing down to 1/3 stop increments as well as a new, three-frame, two-stop bracketing that makes it easier for those wanting to create high dynamic range images.

Autofocusing is a nine-point system. These are positioned at the centre and are dual cross-types for vertical and horizontal lines. There’s also an additional 10 assist points when Wide AF is selected.

The A900’s rear layout is intuitive and I never spent long searching for a feature. There are some handy buttons on the top-plate that give direct access to main features. I liked the way the front dial changes ISO in full stops, while the rear changes in 0.3EV steps. On the rear, press the Fn button for quick access to main functions and there’s a nice dedicated switch just to change metering modes.

That means less time spent in the LCD menu. Talking of that rear LCD, the high resolution is a welcome change from lower-res screens. Images look fantastically sharp. My only gripe is the rear toggle switch, a central part of the camera’s navigation system.

Using it on the move is like trying to eat Chinese food with chopsticks while running the London marathon. It’s a case of press the button and pray it’s the right setting. Also, the AF did hunt around on vertical lines when I used just the central AF points, but a quick flip to Wide solved the problem.

On the whole though, the A900’s well equipped and extremely comfortable to use. It also makes you feel really important when you’re out taking pictures. No, really: it will make heads turn. With the 24-70mm Carl Zeiss lens fitted, it’s hardly discreet. But who wants to be discreet when you’ve got 25 million pixels to play with?

It’s the image quality that really astounds. 25 million pixels is a hell of a lot of resolving power. Just zoom into the picture and marvel at the detail. The camera offers natural-looking, slightly undersaturated images in Raw mode, though you can tweak this along with contrast, sharpness and brightness using one of the 13 Creative styles. The auto white-balance is spot-on in almost every situation. Unfortunately, this often makes the other white-balance modes, including seven fluorescent modes, largely superfluous.

This brings me nicely to the Carl Zeiss lens. It’s a fantastic piece of glass, sharp at mid-apertures right up to the edges, with minimal barrelling and scarcely a pincushion in sight. The sensor’s resolution is so high and the lens so sharp, standard JPEG compression starts to show its age. JPEGs are slightly soft. Shooting in Raw mode with stronger sharpness filtering is the solution and raises resolution.

In fact, shooting Raws and using sharpening post-capture creates images that have the look and feel of a low-end medium-format digital back. Images also show a very fine differentiation of colours without any moire patterns. That’s a good thing.

What’s more, the camera showed good results on the noise tests. Images had very low luminance noise (grainy bits to you and me) up to ISO 1600. Colour noise (random red and blue pixels) is visible in images taken between ISO 400 and 800, but it’s low right up to ISO 3200. I wouldn’t shoot at ISO 6400 if you can help it and Sony does state this is not a ‘true ISO’, meaning it’s just a turbo-boosted ISO 3200 with a bad exhaust. Noise reduction at each of the low, normal and high settings at ISO 1600 and above does reduce noise but at the expense of image sharpness.

Thanks to those two Bionz processors I mentioned earlier, the A900 shoots up to five frames-per-second in full high-res mode and a burst rate of up to 105 JPEGs or 12 Raws. Considering the size of the files, that’s not bad at all. Images can be stored on CF cards or Sony’s MemorySticks as the camera sports two card slots, but it won’t save Raws on the CF card and JPEGs on the MemoryStick simultaneously.

The Sony A900 delivers 12-bit Raw images. Look at the specs of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the Nikon D700 and you’ll see they both deliver 14-bit Raw images. Is 14-bit any better than 12-bit? A quick look on the Net for the answer leaves the impression that some people definitely need to get out more. As far as I can see, they have no known scientific qualifications. I, on the other hand, have a cub scout proficiency badge in being practical.

I did my own comparison and I found out precisely this: I can’t see any difference, either when you lay out two prints side by side or when you tweak them in Photoshop. Naturally, I’m sure both Canon and Nikon would have something to say to the contrary.

MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE

It’s all very well having 25 million pixels, but what about the glass? To benefit from that resolution, it’s best to turn to Sony’s Carl Zeiss and G series optics. The G series offers circular apertures, aspherical and extra-low dispersion (ED) glass.

So far there’s the 35mm f/1.4 G, 70-200mm f/2.8 G, 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G SSM, 70-400mm f/4-5.6 G and the 300mm f/2.8 G. There’s also four Carl Zeiss lenses on offer – the Vario-Sonnar T* 16-35mm f/2.8 ZA SSM, the Vario-Sonnar T* 24-70mm f/2.8 ZA SSM, the Planar T* 85mm f/1.4 ZA and the Sonnar T* 135mm f/1.8 ZA. Prices start at £900 (shudder).

Of course, you can use Sony’s cheaper Alpha lens line-up, they’re great lenses. The Sony Alpha 20mm f/2.8 costs £420, for example. It’s just that with the higher-resolution lenses, you’ll be getting the full benefit of all those 25-megapixels.

SPECIFICATION

Price:    £1795 body only
Distributor:    sony.co.uk
Resolution:    24.6-megapixels
Lens mount:    Sony mount; compatible with Minolta A-type lenses
Sensor : Exmor CMOS sensor     35.9x24mm
Exposure:     40 multi-segment system honeycomb-pattern, spot, centre weighted
Exposure modes:     Auto, PASM, 3 custom modes functions
ISO range:    200-3200 in 1/3 EV steps (expandable to 100 and 6400)
Shutter:    1/8000-30sec, bulb
White-balance:     Auto, 6 pre-selected, custom settings
Monitor:    3in TFT; 921,600 dots; field of view 100%
Viewfinder:    Optical, glass-type pentaprism, field of view 100%
Image file:     JPEG, Raw (ARW 2.0 formats), Raw + JPEG; 6048x4032 (3:2); 6048x3408 (16:9); 3984x2656 (APS-C size capture)
Drive system:    Single-frame advance, continuous advance (Hi: 5fps; Lo: 3fps selectable)
Storage media:    Dual slot for Memory Stick CompactFlash (I,II,UDMA)
Battery:    NP-FM500H, approx 880 shots
Dimensions:     141.7x104.8x79.7mm (WxHxD)
Weight:    850g (without battery, memory card, lens)

PROS AND CONS

25 million pixels, that’s 25 million pixels, great tonal and colour reproduction

CZ lenses pricey, irritating toggle switch, small top-plate LCD

THE VERDICT

The A900 is one of the nicest surprises of my photographic life. It is a truly great camera and the price is very competitive when you consider the huge pixel count.

The fact that Sony has managed to cram so many pixels on to the sensor is impressive enough, but when you consider how well they work it makes the feat even more impressive.

It drops a star in features for lacking Live View, but to be honest, the 100 per cent viewfinder more than makes up for it. I like using this camera. I like looking at its retro angular styling.

I like the sheer surprise of using the toggle switch and then trying to work out what I’ve done – although, this does become tiresome and is why it loses a star on handling. But overall it’s a fine camera that I recommend.

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