Sony Alpha A900 DSLR At PMA

Sony Alpha A900 At PMA 2009 This year’s PMA tradeshow was my first chance to see the Sony Alpha A900 in person. They previewed it behind glass at last year’s show and finally introduced it at Photokina, in the fall. The Sony A900 is a 24-megapixel, full-frame, professional digital SLR, and the first and only digital SLR with an image-stabilized full-frame sensor. The A900 shows how serious Sony is about being a major player in the DSLR business. It has all the features and performance a professional digital SLR should have. And it’s built like a tank, as a pro digital SLR body should be. I think pro DSLR bodies should be able to double as a weapon. If someone tries to steal your camera you can knock them out with it.

Since I hadn’t handled the A900 yet, I spent a few minutes checking out the auto focus speed and accuracy, capture rate, image stabilization, etc. As best as I could tell in a tradeshow environment, without being able to check sharpness on a computer, the auto focus was pretty fast and accurate. I tried both single shot and continuous AF and they both worked well – especially considering the crappy tradeshow lighting in the Sony PMA booth. The 5-FPS capture rate is very good considering the 24-megapixel sensor. The A900′s built-in image stabilization worked great. I don’t recall how slow I was able to shoot with it. But I did slow the shutter speed down considerably (at least 1/10th of a second with the Zeiss 24-70mm f/2.8 lens) and still got sharp images (at least they looked sharp on the LCD).

Most photographers don’t need a camera like the Sony Alpha A900 or it’s competitors, the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and Nikon D3X. Commercial studio photographers, landscape photographers and high-end product photographers who need the absolute best image quality will benefit the most from the huge files these cameras produce. The rest of us probably wouldn’t like carrying their weight and bulk or trying to download and store 25+ megabyte RAW files. But for those photographers who do need the best image quality and performance, the Sony Alpha A900 looks like a solid competitor. That’s impressive when you consider Sony has been in the digital SLR business for less than three years. The A900 isn’t just a high-resolution pro DSLR knockoff, either. With its image-stabilized full-frame sensor, the A900 offers something really different and demonstrates Sony’s commitment to innovation and excellence. Whether they can get Nikon and Canon pros to switch is another question.

The video below is an example of the kind of cool stuff you get to see at a photography tradeshow – a blown-up and chopped-up Sony Alpha DSLR-A900:

Matt M. says:

March 18, 2009 at 8:35 am

Image quality on this camera is fantatic!!! One of the best thing about this camera, besides image quality, is the LED. It’s very bright and clear. I’ll post up my review when I am ready.