This «review/impression” was posted on fredmiranda. Very interesting read!
The title is self-explanatory--I just returned from a week in Colombia with my new A9III and I thought I'd share my observations for those of you considering this camera, or just curious to learn more.
I'll start with the gear I took with me: I brought along one of my A1's, my 600GM and the new 300GM. I also had access to a 400GM while there but chose not to use it at all. I had both the 1.4x and 2x TC's with me as I use both of them often. The purpose of my trip was bird photography, and it was a pretty intense week chasing a lot of birds in the central Andes around Manizales and Pereira. I'll preface this by saying that when I left on the trip I thought I would have to force myself to use my A9III because I really, really like the pixels of the A1. I'm a pixel-whore, I'll admit. Surprisingly, I found myself forcing myself to use the A1. I won't dwell on ergonomics as I mentioned it in one of my earlier posts on the A9III, but I will reiterate here that its just a more comfortable camera to use than any of the other Sonys I've had before it.
The biggest reason I found myself grabbing the A9III was the superior AF. This is not just the AI chip either; it just performs better overall, and this was especially noticeable in low light. A lot of the best birding is happening early in the morning and/or in the jungle where the light is never great, even in the middle of the day. The A9III was superior both at subject acquisition--no doubt aided by AI chip and algorithms--but also in general AF speed. Once a subject was found, it nailed it fast, and this was particularly noticeable when using the TC's, where the A1 can get quite sluggish, especially with the 2x TC. One area where the AI technology no doubt helped was in nailing the focus on the eye of the bird, and a visible increase of the number of in-focus shots in any given sequence of photos. I typically shoot the A1 at 20-30fps and especially in low light I will notice the focus drift around a bit so that the eye isn't always locked in focus. With the A9III, even at 60fps, virtually 100% of any sequence would have the AF locked on the bird's eye.
One insight I had while there was that the pixel count really didn't matter to me as much as I thought it would. Generally speaking I am always striving to get as close as possible to the subject so I can fill the frame as much as possible without having to crop. Under those conditions the reduction on megapixels is really not terribly noticeable except when zooming in on the image at 200% or more. When I make prints they are rarely larger than 48x36" and I am quite confident it would be difficult to choose which camera they were taken with, at least to the typical person viewing an image. Where the lower pixel count does matter is the edge cases where I can't get close enough and need to crop, but those turn out to be the exception as generally if an image is worth taking and keeping I will make any and all efforts possible to get in as close as I can.
Noise and dynamic range were also considerations that I had some concern about before the trip began. After using it for a while, I am pretty comfortable with saying that the noise isn't really that different than the A1, and the bench testing that's been done with the camera also shows that this is pretty much the case. The larger grain size of the noise, however, can be issue at higher ISOs with fine detail if you are not as close to the subject as possible where it manifests itself as a loss of fine detail. I found that up to and including ISO 6400 I felt the images were great; at 12,800 I had to nail the exposure or the images don't stand up as well to post processing. Again, this is less of an issue than I might have guessed; I generally try to keep the ISO low no matter camera I used. Analyzing the images I took, only 7.6% were at ISO 8000-12800--virtually identical to the percentage I shoot in that range on average on the A1. As for dynamic range, that one stop lower DR vs. the A1 *can* be noticeable at the higher ISOs, where either the blacks will block up or the whites will blow out if you miss the exposure.
When it came to the frames per second—the real area the A9III stands out—that came into play in two ways. First, I found that most of the time I was happy to shoot at 60fps in short bursts, similar to how I shoot the A1 in 30fps most of the time. The advantage is that more frames means that you are more likely to “catch the moment” when shooting, although it comes with the disadvantage of having to slog through a lot of shots later. Second, and most obvious, is that the 120 fps really opens up the ability to catch moments you can’t even imagine—it’s kind of a new way of seeing the world, like a slo-mo movie. I had a great time shooing hummingbirds in flight as they came to visit flowers or interacted with each other. Going through those images it was amazing to see the things that happen in the blink of an eye that would otherwise be missed.
This brings me to the final and perhaps to me one of the most important new features of the camera which is the configurable pre-capture. Depending on the frame rate I would set this to 0.5s to 0.2s. I actually just permanently left pre-capture turned on and paired with the fast AF and AI AF it was a game-changer for fast moving birds. Many times I’ll have a fraction of a second to swing the camera to a bird and try to fire off the shot I want. With the A1 I’ll often end up with nothing in the image, or a blurred bird in the moment of flying or hopping away. With the A9III I ended up with a lot more successful shots from those moments, where pre-capture caught 2-3 frames of the bird that I would have totally missed with the A1. Because you can blow out the buffer fast at 120fps, I would shorten the pre-capture to 0.2s when shooting at that frame rate.
One other observation that surprised me: the A9III seems to be way more power-efficient than the A1. I took my nephew with me on the trip and we were typically shooting side by side all day. Most days I could get through 10 hours of shooting (not continuously of course) and shoot somewhere around 12,000 images without exhausting the pair of batteries in my A9III, while he would go through almost two pairs of batteries in his A1 in the same time. I’ve mentioned this before, but the A9III’s new grip and/or the camera itself will now drain the two batteries equally vs. draining one first and then the other. If you put in one battery with a greater charge than the other, it will drain that one until both batteries are at a near equal charge, and then they will both draw down to zero near-simultaneously.
The IS is very, very good. I am routinely able to handhold the A9III and 600GM at shutters speeds about 2-4 stops slower than before. This is very helpful for keeping the ISO low but it also just means more in-focus shots overall without and motion blur.
With regard to exposure and white balance, the A9III is definitely superior as well. I had to tweak how I expose a tiny bit to accommodate the slight difference in DR, but once I got that dialed in I got a lot more shots that were perfect SOOC and didn’t requite much if any adjustment. The AWB is much better in low light—while the A1 is fine in daylight, when it gets dim it seems to shift quite a bit towards magenta. The A9III’s AWB was superb, and typically required no adjustment at all in post-processing. It most definitely does not have that magenta shift at higher ISOs/lower light.
At the end of the day, photography is about getting the shot. The combination of faster overall AF speed, better tracking and subject acquisition due to the AI chip and the pre-capture meant that I just got a lot more shots that I just would have missed with the A1. I still really want all of those features in an A1 II and really hope we don’t have to wait too long for that. I have started to wonder if the new A1 will also have a global shutter, which is why we didn’t see it released at the same time at the A9III. While I know some have speculated that was to prevent any cannibalization of A1 sales, that doesn’t really seem to have been a concern as there appear to be very few buyers of the A9III here vs. those who have just held on to their A1’s. That’s not surprising given that like me many really want those extra pixels, and many feel like 120fps isn’t really necessary. It seems to me that a A1 with a global shutter that could do 60fps would be very similar in many other ways to an A9III at 120fps in terms of pixels read out per second and buffer requirements. That noise penalty and DR penalty are quite small at this point so some extra time to perfect the global shutter technology for a higher-megapixel sensor would make sense too. Of course this is all just pure speculation!
