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This sounds like an ideal test situation for what I'm after. Maybe not as bad for WB as what I run into, but if the ambient is low and people are involved, it'll be a good demo of skin tones and tonal separation.Valid reasons all. Marc. I hope to have answers for you by the end of the week. I have the Sony 50mm f/1.4 and a dinner party to shoot on Friday. No flash as of yet so this will be a high-ISO affair.
That IS the question, isn't it?Marc, it sounds like you have answered your own question. If your A900 gives you want and need and does it well, what does it matter if something will do it "better." Especially since your clients will never see it. Why take the new expense?
Thanks for the info Bill.Marc, as a one-month veteran of the a99, I'll try and answer your questions.
In my opinion there is no steep learning curve at all for a900 users. A few different movements to master, but twenty minutes should do it.
The EVF (and the rear LCD) can be set to no image review, or a 2 second, 5 second review and so on. I like 2 seconds except when I'm shooting action when I turn it off. Like you, I don't want to miss that decisive moment! It can also show all shooting info, a histogram, a leveler or absolutely nothing but the scene.
I don't understand the lag issue either. For all intents and purposes it's the same as the a900.
Can't comment on AWB in mixed light - it's fine in daylight and compact fluorescent, but I tend to set manually anyway.It's a very quick process with the joystick. (I can always correct RAW later.)
Low light performance alone is a good reason to go a99. It is at least one, and I'm beginning to think, two full stops better than the a900. But - my definition may be different from yours. I've been shooting trains in motion at ISO 1600 with essentially noise free results. At 3200 there is acceptable noise - to me. Your standards may differ.
I'm keeping my a900 but it's likely to be as a backup rather than primary camera. In fact, I'm using the a99 as backup for my MFDB!
Good luck with your decision-making process!
Bill
Yeah Paul, The reason I swapped out of Nikon was the color issues compared to the A900, which in decent light gets it right almost all the time ... very good mid-range tonal separation right out of the camera to the point that post time was cut almost in half compared to the Nikons.ok, I've re-linked my Flickr picture above.
Marc, the comments about lag refer to old issues, either that EVFs were laggy in low light but more likely, before a firmware upgrade the A77 used to have a slight delay when you put it to your eye and the EVF kicked in. On the a99 this is not noticeable (to me at least). In fact due to the electronic front-curtain shutter the thing seems to take the picture before you've thunk it. I'd say the A99 is quicker than my Nikon D700, but I was never able to compare them side-by-side. I generally use mine for kids/events and the A/F experience is really excellent, you can defer to the A/F in many situations whereas the Nikon was almost always on point and I scrolled the point around. Mainly this is because of P&S style face recognition.
I don't think there's much of a learning curve, although I did RTFM to understand the A/F options better.
Regarding white-balance, it seems pretty good in many scenarios. I think the Sony setup is much less likely to blow the red-channel and overall the colours are much more accurate (one reason I switched from Nikon). I hit one issue recently where there was some unknown and god-awful fluorescent/tungsten mix at a persons house. I couldn't get it right in camera, everything went very magenta. I actually went back to AWB and de-saturated in post. I don't think any camera could handle that awful light.
Another reason for the A99 would be the ability to crop later. I used to crop 12MP images down to between 3 and 6 for reasonable prints. Cropping the A99 images is ridiculous. When you've got kids running around, give them more room and crop. It saves a lot of grey hairs.
fwiw, I turn off the auto-preview as it distracts me too much from the next shot. I also turn off the setting that shows all the effects in the EVF.
- Paul