Sony Alpha DSLR-A900 review

Sony Alpha DSLR-A900 Review

Reviewed by: Lori Grunin

Reviewed on: 28 January 2009

A camera in this price range doesn't really need to have great burst performance, but we do expect it to have fast AF and single-shot speeds. Unfortunately, the A900 doesn't always meet expectations in this respect. For instance, its shot lag under optimal conditions tends to be inconsistent, ranging from as fast as 0.3 seconds to as high as 0.5 seconds -- the former is quite good, the latter just okay.

Our biggest gripe, however, is with the relatively slow autofocus (at least with the 24-70mm f2.8 lens provided by Sony) in dimmer conditions, like indoor lighting. It's slow enough that we missed several shots of active kittens, and tests out at about 1.2 seconds to focus and shoot. The Nikon D90 feels more responsive. On the upside, DRO doesn't seem to slow down shooting at all.

Even though this was one of the sharper photos we took, to our eyes, the fur lacks definition

Technically, we think the A900 produces excellent photos: it has good noise numbers across the range, low colour variation and so on, all of which are manifested in the photos. However, after hundreds of photos, we still didn't experience that 'wow' moment that we expect from a camera in this class. While the A900 can produce sharp photos, usually they're weren't as sharp as we'd like. The high resolution lets you get away with a lack of sharpness, to a certain extent, since you don't have to crop in as far to get the same size print.

Photos get noisy and a bit mushy starting at ISO 1,600 -- we think the Canon 5D Mark II's photos look better. The colour is very good, however -- bright and saturated or subtle when necessary. We did get some odd red-to-orange shifts when using automatic white balance indoors, though.

Shooting speed (in seconds)
(Smaller bars indicate better performance)

Time to first shot

Raw shot-to-shot time

Shutter lag (dim light)

Shutter lag (typical)

Nikon D700

0.2 

0.5 

0.6 

0.3 

Sony Alpha DSLR-A900

0.3 

0.5 

1.2 

0.4 

Conclusion
The Sony Alpha DSLR-A900 isn't bad for a first full-frame effort, but the company has some catching up to do with Nikon and Canon, both of which have had far longer to refine their products in this class, although Sony's lack of a huge commitment to optical image stabilisation works in its favour here. We really tried, but we just couldn't love this dSLR.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet