Sony a99 specs

Alan Browne wrote:
On 2012.08.31 19:39 , wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:42:01 +0100, "R. Mark Clayton"
wrote:


wrote in message
...
On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:00:23 -0400, Alan Browne
wrote:

On 2012.08.30 06:15 , R. Mark Clayton wrote:
Snip

I'm curious, what glass do you own?

17-35 Cosina
50 f1.4 Minolta
35-70 Macro Minolta
70-200 f4 Sigma
28-200 f4 Tokina (superseded the about two that came with the back)

And I am after a 500mm AF f8 Reflex Minolta, having passed up a manual focus
600mm some years ago.

What is a Reflex lens? Is it like the mirror (telescope style) lens that I think
Nikon used to make?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolt...mm_Reflex_lens

Notably the later Minolta/Sony designs are AF. Usually such lenses are MF.

I suspect Sony calibrates AF in their cameras so that the 500mm reflex
is slightly out of focus -- not deliberately of course, just the way
their standard calibration happens to work.

It's hard to discover whether the AF is slightly off because it's such
a long lens that it's very tricky to focus it accurately manually even
on a really solid tripod. I discovered this slightly off AF by
carefully adjusting the camera AF sensor plane until the AF gave
spot-on focus. It doesn't always get it exactly right, especially in
poor light, but I can't get near such sharply focused images with
manual focus except now and then by sheer luck. I'm lucky to get exact
focus manually in the best conditions once in four or five tries, and
each try takes at least 20 seconds.

Luckily that readjustment of my camera's AF also slightly improved the
focus on most of my other lenses. I wouldn't actually have cared if it
had made them a bit worse, since the kind of inaccuracy involved is
usually swallowed by depth of field. All my other lenses are easily
manually focused anyway, and usually are when I'm being fussy.

But the 500mm is so hard to focus manually that having good AF really
transforms its capabilities. It becomes a lens you can hand hold and
snap moving targets with. And it's small and light enough you can
carry it around just in case.

Since Sony were the only camera maker with a 500mm AF reflex lens, and
AF makes such a huge difference to it, I can't understad why Sony
stopped making it. Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape even
suggested it was so good with AF that for some enthusiasts that one
unique lens would a good reason to go Sony.

--
Chris Malcolm

On 2012.09.03 04:49 , Chris Malcolm wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:

As a general guide avoid zoom ratios greater than 3:1. (For 'walkabout'
lenses, greater is fine until you find that subject that you'd like to
spend some time on and the good lenses are back home).

Unless it's a very good modern wide range zoom and you don't need a
wider aperture than f8. I've been surprised by how good my Sony
18-250mm is at f8 when used on a tripod, image stabilisation off, and
carefully manually focused. Hard (not impossible) to tell the
difference between it and a good prime -- at f8. But it gets obviously
worse when opened up wider than f8, whereas my primes tend to get
better.

I wouldn't even think of getting that lens. I often shoot wide open and
in the few stops near there. The lens has to perform.



--
"C'mon boys, you're not laying pipe!".
-John Keating.

On 2012.09.03 05:42 , Chris Malcolm wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolt...mm_Reflex_lens

Notably the later Minolta/Sony designs are AF. Usually such lenses are MF.

I suspect Sony calibrates AF in their cameras so that the 500mm reflex
is slightly out of focus -- not deliberately of course, just the way
their standard calibration happens to work.

A lot of Sony cameras seem to rear up as needing focus adjustment on a
lens by lens basis (you can store offsets for your lens collection). I
don't have that issue with my a900. I test it from time to time with
the angle to paper target method and it is fine.

It's hard to discover whether the AF is slightly off because it's such
a long lens that it's very tricky to focus it accurately manually even
on a really solid tripod. I discovered this slightly off AF by
carefully adjusting the camera AF sensor plane until the AF gave
spot-on focus. It doesn't always get it exactly right, especially in
poor light, but I can't get near such sharply focused images with
manual focus except now and then by sheer luck. I'm lucky to get exact
focus manually in the best conditions once in four or five tries, and
each try takes at least 20 seconds.

Even at moderate ranges, 500mm overwhelms the f/8 DOF. It's no surprise.

Luckily that readjustment of my camera's AF also slightly improved the
focus on most of my other lenses. I wouldn't actually have cared if it
had made them a bit worse, since the kind of inaccuracy involved is
usually swallowed by depth of field. All my other lenses are easily
manually focused anyway, and usually are when I'm being fussy.

I seem to have gotten a well calibrated a900.

But the 500mm is so hard to focus manually that having good AF really
transforms its capabilities. It becomes a lens you can hand hold and
snap moving targets with. And it's small and light enough you can
carry it around just in case.

That belies the number of photogs leaving it at home as too limited by
aperture/speed and occasionally unpleasant highlights.

Since Sony were the only camera maker with a 500mm AF reflex lens, and
AF makes such a huge difference to it, I can't understad why Sony
stopped making it. Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape even
suggested it was so good with AF that for some enthusiasts that one
unique lens would a good reason to go Sony.

I didn't know they had stopped making it. And I'm not sure if that's a
good or a bad thing. As I've said elsewhere, cats are just most likely
to end up as closet queens.

--
"C'mon boys, you're not laying pipe!".
-John Keating.

Hi,

The A99 specs look good for sure. But I would strongly advise any Konica
Minolta Sony owner with no experience of the electronic viewfinder, to
extensively try the A99 before considering switching (to it or to any other
EVF-based Alpha). Also, be cautious to noise, and smearing as the outcome of
noise reduction.

I have thoroughly used KM SLR's over time (600si Classic, then 9xi, then
D7D), with decent glass (f/2.8 fixed focal or zoom lenses, both from Konica
Minolta and from Sigma). I was perfectly happy with the 600si/D7D kit, the
D7D being a digital version of the 600si, with an ergonomic design fully
suiting my needs: one function, one button, direct access, no menu clutter.
The 9xi was not in this philosophy, a nightmare with almost everything
buried in menus and a couple Fn keys.

Over time, I have had the occasional chance to shoot a few pictures with
cameras from the Alpha range, from the Alpha 100 to more recent optical
viewfinder products. I was always shocked by the amount of noise in all but
very lit scenes, and with the more recent cameras, the very visible smearing
that the camera would produce in order to hide this noise. Even more so,
that the D7D at regular ISO (say below 400) has exactly zero noise, and is
helped in low light by its sensor anti-shake, so with a bit of experience,
it produces very good shots in low light, with zero noise nor smearing at
all. My take on this is that when Sony bought Minolta, they kept the 5D
camera chassis (which became the Alpha 100), but dumped all Minolta
electronics from sensor to image processing, to put in their own stuff. And
their lack of digital SLR experience was showing in this amount of noise,
progressively more or less efficiently hidden by smearing (probably the
outcome of some form of random direction bilinear filtering used as noise
reduction).

In 2011, with no good reason other than its ageing-sensor limited dynamics,
forcing permanent extra-careful exposition and framing (apart from which the
D7D is doing perfectly fine), I considered switching to a more modern
camera, so I went and tried what Sony offered these days.

My dealer told me that there were no more optical viewfinder cameras in the
Sony range, and that there would be none in the future either. He offered me
to try an Alpha 77, by then the top of the SLT (alias semi-translucent
mirror, electronic viewfinder) range. At first I was blown away with the
very interesting features that an EVF offers, mostly:
- real-time maximum contrast highlight, the sharpness peaks shown helping
focus controlling,
- same for blown highlight and lowlight areas,
- constant scene exposure in the viewfinder: the EVF compensates for low
light situations by acting as a light amplifier, easing framing and focusing

Also, the AF with my cam-driven lenses was a bit faster than my D7D, even
though way slower than with modern motorized lenses, which I also had the
occasion to try (I lurked, and still lurk, on the Sony Zeiss 16-50 f/2.8,
mostly because with its 1.5 crop factor, my 28-70 on my D7D no longer was
the wide angle it was on my earlier full frame film cameras).

But there was this feeling of looking through a video camera viewfinder
rather than through an SLR’s. This is a combination of lag (try panning pan
with a SLT camera), lack of apparent resolution (accurate and fine focusing
without zooming feels uneasy), and lack of “natural� aspect of the displayed
image.

So I told my dealer that I would like to spend ten days with the A77 before
making a decision, which he agreed.

I shot as often as I could during this evaluation, and also tried the video
feature, in which I have a priori no interest at all, but which proved very
usable on the A77, with continuous yet discrete AF, and very decent picture
and sound quality.

I was also blasted by the overall response of the camera, by its burst
shooting abilities, by the ergonomics which are largely in line with my D7D’s
and my preference for the “one function, one button� approach.

The negative outcome of this trial period was twofold:
- factoring in all pros and cons, I massively prefer the optical viewfinder
over the EVF,

- the A77 also has lots of low light noise, tentatively hidden by smearing,
but the smearing is (for me) so bad looking that I would preferably prefer
no noise reduction at all and live with untouched noise… but you simply
cannot disable completely the noise smearing feature in the A77. All the low
light pictures exhibited noise smearing, both in RAW and JPEG formats. I
tried all noise control features in the A77 (and there are plenty, including
multiple shot superposition etc.), but all my trials shown some smearing,
with an aspect that I personally dislike a lot.

So I decided to return the A77, and given that there would be no more
optical viewfinder cameras in the Sony Alpha line-up, to switch to either
Canon or Nikon. Let me just say in this non-thread relevant part, that after
thorough evaluation of the 5DIII and the D800, I opted for the D800, mostly
because of its really extraordinary sensor dynamics; the ergonomics, feature
set and menu/setting structure being surprisingly in line with my D7D-based
habits.

Bottom line for KM to A99 switchers: I advise to spend some time with the
EVF in order to assess if it works for you or not, and to pay very close
attention to noise and artefacts of noise reduction. Maybe the A99’s newer
EVF and newer, 14 bit sensor and processing will eventually cancel those
drawbacks, but this remains to be seen first hand.

You may consider this story long, but in fact it is short, I really spent a
lot of efforts in assessing my compatibility with the A77, and after having
decided it would not do, assessing which of the Canon and Nikon offerings
would suit my likes...

Regards,
--
Stéphane

On 2012.09.04 04:16 , Stéphane Guillard wrote:

Bottom line for KM to A99 switchers: I advise to spend some time with
the EVF in order to assess if it works for you or not, and to pay very
close attention to noise and artefacts of noise reduction. Maybe the
A99’s newer EVF and newer, 14 bit sensor and processing will eventually
cancel those drawbacks, but this remains to be seen first hand.

You make a long rambling post on unrelated factors then come up with
that? Really?

I can say without a doubt that the difference between the KM-7D and the
a900 was huge without even addressing pixel count.

The 14 bit A/D of the a99 in itself should be a boon to image quality.

I do have my reservations wrt the EVF. But assuming one can frame and
focus on the subject, there shouldn't be any issues.

--
"C'mon boys, you're not laying pipe!".
-John Keating.

Alan Browne wrote:
On 2012.09.03 04:49 , Chris Malcolm wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:

As a general guide avoid zoom ratios greater than 3:1. (For 'walkabout'
lenses, greater is fine until you find that subject that you'd like to
spend some time on and the good lenses are back home).

Unless it's a very good modern wide range zoom and you don't need a
wider aperture than f8. I've been surprised by how good my Sony
18-250mm is at f8 when used on a tripod, image stabilisation off, and
carefully manually focused. Hard (not impossible) to tell the
difference between it and a good prime -- at f8. But it gets obviously
worse when opened up wider than f8, whereas my primes tend to get
better.

I wouldn't even think of getting that lens. I often shoot wide open and
in the few stops near there. The lens has to perform.

Fair enough. I guess you often shoot in low light and also often want
te subject in sharper focus with blurred background which is out of
the scope of a lens like the 18-250mm. I guess if I more often wanted
to do that with a single general purpose lens I'd go for something
like a good 16-50mm f2.8. But for general opportunistic
camera-with-one-lens carrying I find I more often want a bigger range
of focal lengths than I want wider apertures.

Since most of my outdoor walk-about shots are done at f8ish for best
corner-to-corner detail resolution whatever lens I happen to to be
using, being restricted to f8 at the widest for best quality is not a
serious restriction. If I'm not going to produce a bigger print than
A4 (roughly 12" x 8") the 18-250mm at f8 and away from the two extreme
focal lengths is hard to fault in image quality after
post-processing. At 250mm it's getting a bit soft, even when carefully
focused manually, and at 18mm the barrel distortion needs correction
if there's any off-centre long straight lines.

For best quality images or for low light work I have wide aperture
primes at 24, 35, 50, and 85mm. I've twice been asked unexpectedly on
the spot to photograph large paintings when all I had on the camera
was the 18-250mm. So giving suitable warnings about not best image
quality I've used it at around 50-80mm at f8. And been pleasantly
surprised at how good the quality was on a carefully processed A4-ish
sized print. I say "carefully processed" because there would probably
be more contrast and micro-contrast applied to the 18-250mm image
compared to the image from a prime. But I felt no need to offer a
reshoot with a prime in order to improve the images.

At A3 print size the image quality differences at f8 are starting to
become obvious, clearly obvious at A2.

Of course when photographing a flat object like a painting DoF and
bokeh etc don't come into play at all.

--
Chris Malcolm

On 5/09/2012 9:42 a.m., Alan Browne wrote:
On 2012.09.04 04:16 , Stéphane Guillard wrote:

Bottom line for KM to A99 switchers: I advise to spend some time with
the EVF in order to assess if it works for you or not, and to pay very
close attention to noise and artefacts of noise reduction. Maybe the
A99’s newer EVF and newer, 14 bit sensor and processing will eventually
cancel those drawbacks, but this remains to be seen first hand.

You make a long rambling post on unrelated factors then come up with
that? Really?

I can say without a doubt that the difference between the KM-7D and the
a900 was huge without even addressing pixel count.

The 14 bit A/D of the a99 in itself should be a boon to image quality.

I do have my reservations wrt the EVF. But assuming one can frame and
focus on the subject, there shouldn't be any issues.

I'm not "sold" on EVF (yet), but my impression trying out several EVF
cameras was that resolution wasn't an issue with the a77. There's still
some lag for sure, but it was /by far/ the best of what I tried when
annoying the heck out of my local camera store folks.
The most unappealing thing about the display to me was that (presumably
default settings) the display was like something out of an '80s sci-fi
movie with Arnie starring - too much going on for a human to comprehend.
I assume most of that can be turned off, but I've had needed to RTFM.
If the thing's that clever, why doesn't it just do it without the need
to make such a display of what it's doing?

On 2012.09.05 05:41 , Chris Malcolm wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:
On 2012.09.03 04:49 , Chris Malcolm wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:

As a general guide avoid zoom ratios greater than 3:1. (For 'walkabout'
lenses, greater is fine until you find that subject that you'd like to
spend some time on and the good lenses are back home).

Unless it's a very good modern wide range zoom and you don't need a
wider aperture than f8. I've been surprised by how good my Sony
18-250mm is at f8 when used on a tripod, image stabilisation off, and
carefully manually focused. Hard (not impossible) to tell the
difference between it and a good prime -- at f8. But it gets obviously
worse when opened up wider than f8, whereas my primes tend to get
better.

I wouldn't even think of getting that lens. I often shoot wide open and
in the few stops near there. The lens has to perform.

Fair enough. I guess you often shoot in low light and also often want
te subject in sharper focus with blurred background which is out of
the scope of a lens like the 18-250mm.

I want a lens that performs well in all light conditions and the full
range of aperture. I pay for this by having to change lenses.

I guess if I more often wanted
to do that with a single general purpose lens I'd go for something
like a good 16-50mm f2.8. But for general opportunistic
camera-with-one-lens carrying I find I more often want a bigger range
of focal lengths than I want wider apertures.

It's certainly convenient for that purpose.


Since most of my outdoor walk-about shots are done at f8ish for best
corner-to-corner detail resolution whatever lens I happen to to be
using, being restricted to f8 at the widest for best quality is not a
serious restriction. If I'm not going to produce a bigger print than
A4 (roughly 12" x 8") the 18-250mm at f8 and away from the two extreme
focal lengths is hard to fault in image quality after
post-processing. At 250mm it's getting a bit soft, even when carefully
focused manually, and at 18mm the barrel distortion needs correction
if there's any off-centre long straight lines.

It's always a tradeoff.

--
"C'mon boys, you're not laying pipe!".
-John Keating.

On 2012.09.05 06:28 , Me wrote:
On 5/09/2012 9:42 a.m., Alan Browne wrote:

The 14 bit A/D of the a99 in itself should be a boon to image quality.

I do have my reservations wrt the EVF. But assuming one can frame and
focus on the subject, there shouldn't be any issues.

I'm not "sold" on EVF (yet), but my impression trying out several EVF
cameras was that resolution wasn't an issue with the a77. There's still
some lag for sure, but it was /by far/ the best of what I tried when
annoying the heck out of my local camera store folks.

Lag may be very distracting, such as in the studio when posing people
and shots can be reactive to fleeting expressions. I hope that the lag
is short enough to be barely perceptible.

I can imagine shooting one eye in VF one eye out and having to deal with
the difference. (Not my practice much as my left eye is dominate so my
right eye is blocked with most cameras).

It's bad enough, if I believe what I've read that the shutter lag is
still 50 ms on a camera that doesn't have to move a mirror out of the
way. Perhaps in manual exposure mode it's not that bad.

The most unappealing thing about the display to me was that (presumably
default settings) the display was like something out of an '80s sci-fi
movie with Arnie starring - too much going on for a human to comprehend.
I assume most of that can be turned off, but I've had needed to RTFM.
If the thing's that clever, why doesn't it just do it without the need
to make such a display of what it's doing?

The user interface is something camera makers get really right or really
wrong. Sony have a hit/miss record in that respect.

IAC, I won't be rushing to get the a99. I'll let its reputation
develop. I bet the images will be superb. I also want to see if there
are image artifacts related to the pellicle as some early Sony SLT's had.

--
"C'mon boys, you're not laying pipe!".
-John Keating.

R. Mark Clayton wrote:
wrote in message
...
On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:00:23 -0400, Alan Browne
wrote:

On 2012.08.30 06:15 , R. Mark Clayton wrote:
Snip

I'm curious, what glass do you own?

17-35 Cosina
50 f1.4 Minolta
35-70 Macro Minolta
70-200 f4 Sigma
28-200 f4 Tokina (superseded the about two that came with the back)

And I am after a 500mm AF f8 Reflex Minolta, having passed up a manual focus
600mm some years ago.

The most interesting lens Minolta ever made was the 250mm MD reflex - a
shame it was not adapted for AF use as this would keep the weight of the kit
down!

I note that its second hand price on Ebay exceeds the price of the new
(and AF) 500mm reflex -- when it turns up, which isn't often. Be
interesting to see how the second hand prices of the 500mm go once all
the remaining stocks of new ones have sold out.

Does the 250mm MD reflex need an optical converter for the alpha
mount? MD lenses usually do, but these mirror lenses were usually
built to focus past infinity. Enough past infinity not to need an
optical converter to the alpha mount?

--
Chris Malcolm