Sony debuts the new Alpha 9 mirrorless camera with 20fps continuous shooting
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
To make this even more confusing, some are designed by Zeiss but manufactured by Sony and carry both of their logos (nicknamed Zony; e.g., Sony Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 55mm f1.8)
With photography it's largely the lens that drives the photo(which makes sense when you think of photographing in terms of painting with light). Until you see Sony breaking out the 300mm F2.8, 400mm F2.8, 600mm F4 and others you won't see much pick-up on the segment they're targeting(1DX, etc). For instance a 400mm F2.8 goes for 2x the cost of this camera alone(~$10k).
There's adapters for EF->Sony, however they're hit and miss on functionality and focusing speed.
The system as a whole is getting pretty compelling TBH.
Using a camera that can focus track and calculate exposure at over 20fps with nearly 700 auto focus points across almost the whole frame would for sure let me capture stuff I couldn't on any other camera.
And that's not to mention the silent shutter at this speed - I could literally capture photos I wouldn't be allowed to (golf anyone???) with a mechanical and noisy shutter.
Even if I did it on a 500mm f4 and cropped in some of those 24mp!
I'm a Nikon guy (well, I did shoot with the old a900 and some Canon/Olympus stuff too) and I'd certainly consider working very hard to deal with any lens short comings with a camera this capable.
But yeah, its true. Professionals take to stick to brands for a lot of reasons. Investment already made in lenses, repairability, how easy is to find a colleague during a job that can loan you some missing equipment, etc...
Sony is not going to conquer the professional market overnight, granted, but it's important to have this camera in their catalog to start moving things in that direction.
After autonomous cars will come autonomous cameras--the camera will be a better photographer than you are, so it won't need you to actually operate it. It'll just fly around on a drone. Have its own gallery shows. Win Pulitzers.
Hmm, it should theoretically make wide angle lenses a bit cheaper because they won't have to use retrofocus designs. But I think the actual price of the lens is going to be determined by what pro photographers are used to paying for fancy wide angle lenses.
Sports photographers need super fast continuous shooting so you can get 20 shots of that epic catch in one shutter press and choose the best one. Likewise 1/32,000th of a sec shutter speed is twice as fast as most cameras' 1/8,000th of a sec fastest shutter speed, which helps to freeze quick motion.
The high number of AF points is a sports feature too - one area that mirrorless still significantly lags traditional DSLRs is that their AF systems are not as fast as the type used in DSLRs, which have dedicated AF sensors (mirrorless does AF off the imaging sensor), so a ton of AF points is one way mirrorless tries to narrow the AF gap.
Heh, my Canon 600D's autofocus is EXTREMELY slow D:
The professional camera industry is going through a paradigm shift. From SLRs (cameras with a mirrors that flap with each photo and make the unique clack sound) to Mirrorless. You needed the mirror during the film days, because you needed to see what the lens was seeing. Now, you can capture what the lens is seeing from the sensor into an electronic viewfinder.
However, there is still an opinion that an SLR (Nikon or Canon) is a real professional tool. From built quality, to focus speed (phase detect), frames/second, battery life, dual card capture, etc.
Sony's new A9 is designed to go head to head against the top of the line professional cameras from Nikon and Canon. At least on many of the specs.
That said, I'm still not convinced it's going to be as robust as a Nikon D5 or Canon's 1Dx, etc.
I'm a Nikon user now (was canon for a long time) and I abuse my camera a lot. From rain, extreme cold, etc. And the camera continues to work. Many of my photographer friends on FB are unhappy with reliability of the Sony's A7 series and switched back to Canon and Nikon due to reliability issues. So even though the A9 has all the specs, it may still not be the camera pros shooting Olympics, etc. switch to.
I also agree on reliability. I broke an A7 II after 5 months of mild usage. I don't think the sensor stabilization system is ready for pro usage
http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/sony-announces-the-new-100-40...
But yeah, they have a long way to go to match the lens offerings of Canon / Nikon.
This new camera does things that are not possible with DSLR bodies, including SILENT 20FPS shooting, WITHOUT BLACKOUT, WITHOUT DISTORTION FROM ROLLING SHUTTER, and with SHUTTER SPEED UP TO 1/32000 -- very impressive. Sports and other pro photographers that need high-end performance will take notice.
Mirrorless cameras are now clearly the future of pro photography. Canon and Nikon should be very worried.
EDIT: Here's a good first look explaining the importance of all new features: http://briansmith.com/sony-a9-camera-fe-100-400mm-gm-lens-re...
Nikon's mirrorless range is the Nikon 1, with 3 cameras which all have sensors well below APS-C spec.
So yes, they both make mirrorless, but neither makes a full-frame mirrorless.
[Edit: corrected the reference for the M6, which I initially referred to as having a sub-APS-C sensor. HT to ianburrell for the correction).
It really feels like a half-hearted effort, more to tick the "Mirrorless" checkbox in their product offering than to produce something compelling.
I'm not a huge fan of Sony, but I respect quality of this product and the effort they put in it despite having a DLSR line as well.
http://www.dailytech.com/iPhone+6s+Focus+Pixels+Are+Already+...
Until digital viewfinders on camera are indistinguishable in quality (both accuracy and latency), there will be a qualitative advantage to having a through-the-lens optical viewfinders available (even if there are circumstances where it remains advantageous to disable it), which means SLR with lockup mode is going to beat mirrorless when that matters.
Eventually, sure, the viewfinder gap will narrow.
For many decades this was the big advantage of rangefinders such as the Leica M.
For Canon or Nikon to do the same it would mean re-releasing their entire line (or duplicating it). Canon kind of doing this with their EOS-M series but they only have a few low-end lenses available. Lenses product cycles are measured in decades, so this is a massive undertaking.
Sony was never successful in the DSLR business and they have a much smaller library of lenses so it makes sense that they are abandoning it completely.
It's impressive, but it's irrelevant to 99% of photography.
I'd personally rather have an optical viewfinder than all of those features, impressive as they are.
It's a very specialized piece of equipment for a very specific user, sure, but Sony has other bodies suited for different jobs. What the A9 shows is that there are advantages unattainable to mirror systems. As technology matures and cost of entry lowers, the more limited and cumbersome mirror systems will be cast away.
Optical viewfinder, albeit nice, won't sustain the whole market for DSLR. The advantage of no having vibration or rolling shutter or silent operation, will eventually drive people to mirrorless systems.
>The advantage of no having vibration or rolling shutter or silent operation, will eventually drive people to mirrorless systems.
Vibration is a red herring. Mirror damping for small format DSLRs has been a solved problem for decades. In any case, all of these advantages can be obtained with a DSLR too when it's in mirror lock-up mode.
Those are mostly advantages of shutterless systems (which DSLRs can be and some have been, though sensor quality issues made them niche and actually mitigated some of the advantages; shutterless cameras historically have still had rolling shutter effects, especially at "shutter speeds" higher than those current DSLR mechanical shutters operate at, which is why those shutter speeds are used), except the vibration one is affected by both mirror and shutter (though DSLRs already have mirror lock-in to address the mirror impact.) Also, mirrorless has battery impacts compared to DSLR.
So what this says to me is that, if the sensor is really qualitatively good enough to allow this without the problems shutterless cameras have faced before, Sony has a sensor technology lead that will give them a better market position. But assuming everyone else catches up on sensors, DSLRs aren't what is in trouble, its mechanical shutters that are doomed.
Why? OVF doesn't show you what your picture is going to look like. You have to move from the viewfinder to look at the LCD to check exposure then go back to the viewfinder, repeatedly.
EVF shows you exactly what your picture going to look like.
Uses less battery and works much better in low light.
>You have to move from the viewfinder to look at the LCD to check exposure then go back to the viewfinder, repeatedly.
If I want to check the histogram then I shoot with the mirror locked up, but modern DSLRs have very reliable autoexposure systems, in my experience at least.
>EVF shows you exactly what your picture going to look like.
It shows you what it will look like on a small screen with low dynamic range. You have to look at the histogram to see if you're losing shadow/highlight information.
EVF shows me the histogram (can toggle it on and off without moving my eye).
You'd need to have to reduce the optical image size to make room for an LCD display, have a HUD to overlay a digital image over the OVF optical image, or have another moving mirror and toggle between EVF and OVF to do that on a DSLR.
Which is to stay that an in-viewfinder histogram is possible but not easy for a DSLR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See-through_display
"Small scale see-though LCDs have been commercially available for some time."
Sure...which you only get on an LCD. IMO the only dealbreakers with EVFs are refresh rate, battery consumption and color gamut. If I were a camera maker, I would not be banking on any of those not being solved problems in the next five years.
It's more accurate in many respects, and lower latency, than current EVFs.
> EVF shows you exactly what your picture going to look like.
An idealized EVF with perfect quality and a resolution equal to that of the sensor would do that, sure.
But real EVFs don't.
That mechanical mirror is fairly expensive to build and imposes some restrictions on lens design (the back of the lens can't move too close to the sensor), and both will go up over time (the mirror hardware will get more expensive because fewer and fewer mirrored cameras are sold, and larger sensors require larger mirrors)
As far as I can tell (corrections welcome), the main advantages of a mirror are battery life and behavior in low light conditions (it isn't easy to rapidly update a LCD viewfinder in low light conditions, and that viewfinder may be too bright). Battery life becomes less of an issue with better battery technology. That leaves low light photography. I don't think that, over time, will be sufficient to keep a market for such cameras.
Hmm, is it though? I don't have any data on that, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that a relatively simple mechanism of that sort is expensive to manufacture when cheap labour is available. I suspect that the cost of the mirror mechanism is a tiny fraction of the overall cost of making a high end DSLR.
>imposes some restrictions on lens design
For sure, but the de facto biggest lens systems are for DSLRs. Given the usability of old lenses (on Nikons at least), that's not going to change for a very long time. The restrictions on lens design have not proven to be a problem in practice.
Also, there are reasons to use retrofocus designs other than the presence of the mirror. Ultrawides with non-retrofocus designs have serious vignetting issues. I have a 75mm Schneider Super-Angulon that I use with an old 4x5, for example, and the corners can be around 1.5 stop darker than the center. The problem is bad enough that they make dedicated filters to compensate: https://www.schneideroptics.com/ecommerce/CatalogSubCategory...
Also an interesting quote from https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/hands-revie...
>If there’s a downside to non-retrofocus lenses, it would have to be vignetting, which depending on the lens, can be 1 to 2 stops of light falloff toward the corners of the frame. When coupled to digital cameras, these issues can become exaggerated because, ideally, light shouldn’t strike the sensor at angles greater than 90° [sic], which is the case when it comes to non-retrofocus lenses.
So you might find that mirrorless cameras end up with similar wide angle lens designs to DSLRs.
A Canon 5D mk3 or mk4 can withstand a 6 feet fall (I've been through this several times). A Canon 1DX can be thrown in sand, dust and kicked like a soccer ball and still work. A Sony mirrorless camera won't work after mild rain or slight fall.
Where do you read this? I see no mention of a global shutter.
Rolling shutter is a misleading name. It is an attribute of the sensor, not of any mechanical shutter in front of it. It maybe should have been called rolling read-out. The CMOS image sensor is read out, and reset, line by line --- instead of an image being taken by the whole sensor at once (as in a global-shutter sensor). Therefore the image taken by line 2 is a moment later than the image taken by line 1, and so forth.
Global shutter sensors are rare. They don't really cost a lot more, but historically they lose two or more f-stops of exposure latitude and light sensitivity. This is because each photodiode in the sensor is crammed with a bit more circuitry, to store the charge until it is read out, so that a consistent image can be frozen all at once.
Cameras with a mirror can shoot with an electronic shutter when needed, but will usually need to do so in "live view" on the rear display - i.e. there is no EVF. Cameras without mirror on the other hand can't use an optical viewfinder, but has an EVF.
Obviously the shutter and fps features of this particular camera are impressive and beats most DSLrs, but there is nothing inherent about DSLr's vs mirrorless that prevents all cameras of both kinds to pull this off soon.
I think the size of mirrorless cameras is a cool feature when you slap on a 35/2.8 on it or similar, so you benefit from the reduced size. Throw on a normal 24-70 zoom lens or similar, and the size difference between a DSLr and a mirrorless is gone.
http://blog.jeffcable.com/2016/08/a-very-rare-look-inside-ca...
Producing the camera that has the best specs doesn't necessarily mean that pros will be using it. (Depends on the size of the gap of course)
* Low light performance and dynamic range. Sony bodies have traditionally been good at this (see for example https://vimeo.com/99893160), I hope the trend continues.
* Video features. They say 4k full frame video, which sounds nice, but subsampling the sensor inherently comes with some compromises, which might be even exaggerated in 1080p mode.
* There is more to video than just resolution; does it have any high-framerate modes, what sort of video formats and color profiles does it support etc etc.
* The 5 stop equivalent image stabilization sounds impressive. Admittedly I haven't followed the state of art that closely, but I imagined IS being typically closer to 2-3 stop eqv.
* 1/32k shutter speed seems also quite fast. I wonder what sort of new photos such fast shutter speeds enable.
* Wasn't it Sony that "innovated" a lossy compressed RAW format? What sort of impact does that have on this camera?
... and probably some more.
They don't necessarily have to subsample, they may be able to supersample. I believe Panasonic's GH5 does this.
> does it have any high-framerate modes, what sort of video formats and color profiles does it support etc etc.
Full specs, including shooting modes, are here: https://www.sony.com/electronics/interchangeable-lens-camera...
In terms of high-framerate, it doesn't have anything for 4K but goes up to 120fps in 1080p. Can't see anything about chroma subsampling or bit-depth other than it only outputting 8-bit 4:2:2 through HDMI.
> Wasn't it Sony that "innovated" a lossy compressed RAW format? What sort of impact does that have on this camera?
Yep, though it appears that like the A7RII, you'll be able to disable it. It seems that doing so will roughly halve the number of frames you can take in a single burst and drop the max capture framerate to 12.
You can shoot with wide apertures in direct sunlight without using ND filters. Fuji has had this for years now, with much more rolling shutter of course.
Now that I wrote that out, doesn't sound like much. Still, it's been nice not to play around with the filters.
!!!
Add those bandwidth requirements to some of the real-time workflows professionals engage in today (see http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a9/sony-a9A.HTM and the comments around 11:53) such as:
"first Sony camera with an ethernet port. Have to be real time. Shows, presidential debates, every shot I took went right out onto the network as soon as I shot it."
and
"for major UFC events, it’s vital to be able to do a live workflow, where images are constantly going back to an edit station and go out to the world immediately. Not only the ethernet, but the wireless is key for social media outfits all over the world."
and ethernet makes sense.
Ethernet makes sense if you consider that images are going straight from the camera to the control room (which is hundreds of feet away, and possibly parked outside in a truck), and that there's likely already network infrastructure (switches and cabling) in place for dozens of other reasons.
20 fps is almost there (playing at 24fps is a 12% speedup), but how long can you practically record at that speed?
The difference is similar to the difference between JPEG and RAW in stills. You get a lot more flexibility in post and can usually capture a little more dynamic range. There's a video comparing RAW video to H.264 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkSYIzCgdIk
Just for context, Pacific Gas and Electric (the primary power utility firm in northern California) killed 8 people and destroyed an entire neighborhood a few years back due to their failure to repair a gas pipeline that they knew to be defective.
An unwelcome root kit on your computer is a Bad Thing that it's reasonable to complain about at the time it happens, but as injustices go it's pretty minor. If you're still holding a grudge about it over a decade later then you've been enjoying a very sheltered life.
The A9 is more "professional" because of its dual memory card slots, supposedly much better AF, FPS, battery life, and controls (joystick).
I don't see anything about how weather sealed it is and the press release doesn't mention it either.
Can't afford either one though, but I can dream.
That and better battery life.
On the high end, they lack one key "ingredient" in my opinion which can be best described by one word: ecosystem. Ask any serious Nikon user and they'll show you a $15K collection of lenses, flashes and even old film bodies with high sentimental value to them. They will also talk for hours about "Nikon approach to color" if you'll listen. Competing against this takes time: Sony needs more lenses, more famous photographers walk around sporting their gear, consistently communicated "vision", etc.
This can also be a tough cultural problem to overcome. I've been shooting Canon on and off most of my life, Nikon gear is very similar in that it feels like a computerized camera system, i.e. a computer is an add-on to an excellent camera helping you take better pictures. Fuji cameras have the same feel. But every time I try Sony it feels like mm... hard to explain, maybe like a "computer which happens to take photos"? Very subjective, of course, but since you asked. ;)
If mirrorless is the future, and partially what allowed Sony to make 1/32000 possible, then does that mean Canon/Nikon are playing catch up?
Frankly, the modern photo equipment is just too good to even imagine a dramatic leap forward by one player. ISOs have skyrocketed, dynamic range is amazing, AF is fast and intelligent, etc... One major area worth improving is the weight IMO. If someone defeats the laws of physics and produces an optical equivalent of 24-70mm f2.8L mounted on a 5D, but at 30% of the weight/size, it would be an instant hit.
For video Sony is really pulling away from the competition. Outside of niches like sports and nature videography autofocus isn't nearly as important for video as it is for still photography, and nor are super-high-quality lenses - as long as the image is reasonably sharp people actually like the idiosyncrasies of older lenses in many contexts, and in any case it's common to rent lenses you need for a particular project rather than needing to have every option in your bag.
Sony has really been killing it with their low-light capability and ergonomics in recent years, and while you could point to other camera firms that do better in this or that specification area, the fact that Sony is a large global corporation that's very unlikely to go out of business in the foreseeable future is also an asset. I don't own any Sony camera gear myself so not being a fanboy here.
20FPS is insane on a 24MP full-frame camera. Each RAW is 6000x4000.. The image buffer can handle 241 pictures, so you can basically capture 12 seconds of 6k video.
To give some context, this camera can easily record 120FPS 1080P video with full autofocusing. It can record no-crop 4K video which means if you take a video of a scene, you can grab a full 24MP still from the video. 1080P video has 2 million pixels, 4K video has 8.3 million pixels, burst mode on this camera has 24 million pixels per still.