SONY A900 - DIGITAL SLR CAMERA REVIEW

Let's start with the first thing about the Sony A900, and that is it's a full frame DSLR featuring 24.6 megapixels. When holding this camera, you will immediately notice its weight as the entire body is based on a magnesium alloy frame, with environmental seals.

With an ISO range of 100 up to 6400, a shutter speed of 30 sec down to 1/8000 of a sec, continuous shooting up to 5 frames/second, single or continuous bracketing and exposure compensating of -/+ 3 steps, this is the camera the up and coming professional will be seeking. When you consider the file size (up to 6048 x 4032) they added a second Bionz image processing engine to accommodate the huge data size.

The viewfinder of the A900 is both huge and very bright, and offers a huge amount of creative control as you would expect from a professional camera.

The A900 has two card slots, one for Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Duo format, and it is possible to select which card your image will be stored.

Technical Details

• Continuous Shooting Speed : 5 fps max
• Self-timer - (10 seconds, 2 seconds with mirror-up function)
• Shutter Speeds : 1/8000 to 30 seconds, bulb
• Exposure Compensation : ±3.0 EV (in 0.3EV, 0.5EV steps)
• White Balance Mode : Auto plus Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent and Flash.
• TTL phase detection Focus System
• 9 point focus system (center dual cross type) with 10 assist focus points
• AF Modes : Single-shot AF, Automatic AF, Continuous AF, Manual Focus
• Wide and Spot focus areas

Pros

• Very well built
• Excellent photo quality
• Body button placement is very good
• Easy to use
• Best image quality obtained in RAW mode

Cons

• Lacks auto-dust cleaning on the mirror (need to invest in some kind of third-party sensor cleaning solution to keep the image sensor completely free of unwanted dust)
• The camera lacks a pop-up flash requiring a proprietary flash shoe
• No Live View shooting capability
• In higher ISO settings in JPEG mode with the default noise reduction settings, the images are a little noisy over 800 ISO
• RAW mode uses 36 Mp/image

Summary
There is absolutely no question that it can out-perform anything else on the market, outside of the larger studio type cameras. This camera is a high end professional camera without a doubt. DSLR-A900 is the highest-resolution digital SLR in the world, and also the first "full-frame" digital camera with an integrated anti-shake function.

Recommend using full-frame lenses (unfortunately, very expensive).

SONY A900 - DIGITAL SLR CAMERA REVIEW