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  • Physical Tour

  • Components

  • Design / Layout

  • Modes

  • Control Options

  • Conclusion

  • Specs

  • Physical Tour
  • Components
  • Design / Layout
  • Modes
  • Control Options
  • Conclusion
  • Specs

Physical Tour

Front

The front of the Alpha 900 has a strip of rubberized plastic running across the entire length of the camera. The left side of the face is taken up by the substantial grip. Due to the large weight of the camera (almost two pounds without battery or lens) a big grip is absolutely necessary, but it may be a little difficult to hold if you have small fingers. At the bottom right of the lens is a small dial that chooses between Single Shot Auto Focus, Continuous Auto Focus and Direct Manual Focus. Directly to the right of the lens mount is the lens release button, and above this is a flash sync contact, which is usually covered by a rubber plug. On the left side, just before the grip is the very large auto focus assist lamp. Near this on the hand grip, in the depression for your first finger, lies a remote sensor for use with remote controls.

 

The Alpha 900 has a substantial grip

Back

The rear of the camera has the large LCD in its center. This screen is 3' diagonally with 921,000 pixels, and is bright and clear. Along the left of the LCD is a column of four buttons: Menu, Display, Playback and Delete. On the top left corner of the camera's back is the off/on switch. Directly above the LCD is the large viewfinder with 100% coverage, and a detector which turns off the LCD when your face gets close to it. At the top right of the LCD is a small button surrounded by a switch. The switch controls metering, between 40-section honeycomb, center-weighted and spot. The button is AE lock while shooting, and index during playback. Above and to the right of the AE lock is the auto focus/manual focus button, which zooms in playback mode. Finally, in the uppermost corner, is the rear control dial. While many SLRs use a four-way pad to navigate menus, the Alpha 900 uses a joystick, sealed under a rubber protective layer. Okaying a selection involves pressing the joystick inwards. When not navigating menus, moving the joystick alters the focus area. Below this are two buttons, marked C and Fn. C is custom, and can be set to a number of features, while the latter lets you navigate the settings shown on the LCD screen. Both serve different functions in playback, where C displays a histogram and Fn rotates the image.

 

While there are a lot of buttons, they're logically laid out.

Sides*
*The left side of the Alpha 900 has three sets of ports, each under their own protective cap. This allows you access one without exposing the other to the elements. The topmost houses the remote terminal, and beneath that is the DC in. To the right of these two is the HDMI out and PC/AV out ports.

The three sets of ports.

The right side is almost completely bare. There is the memory card cover on the rear of this section, and the grip material on the fore.

*The hefty right side
*

Top

On the far left of the Alpha 900's top is the mode dial. This changes between MSAP (manual, shutter priority, aperture priority and program), Auto, and 3 different customizable modes. The roof is dominated by the flash and hot shoe, and to the right of this lies a small black and white LCD panel. Should you ever need to view said display in low light, there's a small button which illuminates it via a back-light. At the fore of the grip is the front control dial, and just behind that the shutter button. Further back on the grip is a single depression housing the Exposure and Drive buttons. Finally, at the rear of the camera, are the buttons for white balance and ISO.

*Many of the most commonly altered settings have

buttons on the top*

Bottom

The underneath of the camera is fairly standard, with the tripod mount centered on the lens, and the door to the battery. The mount is heavily reinforced, and will survive many a tripod attachment.

The reinforced tripod mount looks like it will survive repeated, heavy use

 

Components

Viewfinder

The viewfinder offers 100% coverage at 0.74x magnification. Beneath the viewfinder is a small sensor that shuts off the LCD when your face is brought near.

Sensors beneath the viewfinder turn the LCD off

when you hold the camera to your eye.

LCD Screen

The rear LCD is an impressive 3', 921,600 dot affair. It's bright, clear, and suffers only minor solarization when viewed from extreme angles. Sony has made grand claims about its anti-reflective coating, but until we can get this camera into the noonday sun, we will refrain from commenting. The camera's gyroscope can detect when you rotate the camera, and change the view on the LCD appropriately.

As with many higher end cameras, the Alpha 900 has a secondary LCD on the top of the camera. This shows shots remaining, battery level, drive mode, shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation.

The rear LCD

The top LCD

 

 

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Flash
The Alpha 900 does not have a built in flash.
**

 **Lens Mount**

Sony currently has one of the less extensive lens catalogs on the market due to their recent arrival on the SLR scene. However, the Alpha 900 is compatible with the  Alpha, Minolta, Konica Minolta auto focus lenses. In order to improve shutter speed and burst rates, Sony has redesigned their shutter, so instead of just lifting, it folds at the same time, like an electric garage door.

Backwards compatibility with Minolta and Konica Minolta lenses

is a plus.

Connections

The Alpha 900 has a wide variety of ports on hand for various gadgets and connections. There's USB/AV out, HDMI out, DC in, remote in (which allows you to control your camera via, among other things, PC) and a flash sync terminal near the lens on the front of the camera.

The ports for Remote In (top) and DC In (bottom)
Battery
The Alpha 900 uses a rechargeable Li-Ion battery, rated to approximately 880 shots. The camera can accurately display battery levels down to 1% 

The Alpha 900s battery
Memory
The camera can take both Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Duo and CompactFlash cards, and iamges can be saved to either or transported between them. At least Sony isn't forcing you to wholly submit to their own format, and CompactFlash cards tend to be reasonably priced, quite easy to find, and now feature up to 100GB of storage.

Thankfully, the Alpha 900 doesn't only take Memory Stick Duos.

Dual BIONZ processors

In order to transfer the huge amounts of data behind a full-frame, 25 megapixel image at high enough speeds to get a five frames per second burst mode, the Sony Alpha 900 actually uses two image processors, both of which are the latest generation of BIONZ processors developed by Sony.

 

 

Design / Layout

Model Design / Appearance

The Sony Alpha 900 is not a thing of grace, subtlety or style. It's big, resplendent, and if you drop it on your foot, you may break a toe. That said, it's powerful, fast, and you wont be spending $3000 on this camera because you want something sleek and sexy.

Size and Handling

The Alpha 900 is large. And heavy. Not unusably so, but it is a big, and you should definitely try and keep a good grip on it at all times. It weighs in at 1 lb. 14 oz. (850 g) without battery, memory card or lens, and measures 6.13 x .63 x 3.25 inches (156.3 x 116.9 x 81.9mm). This isn't a camera you just throw in a bag for a day on the beach, but rather would most likely be used on dedicated photography missions. One advantage to having a camera of such a size and complexity is that almost every function has a button to call its own, minimizing the need to browse through menus.

*

  • Holding the Alpha 900 requires a firm grip

Menu

The menu system is large and advanced, but is at least laid out extremely logically. There are four tabs: Recording, Custom, Playback and Setup. Each of these has multiple pages which can either be scrolled through item by item or page by page. This allows you to access the setting you need as quickly as humanly possible. The menus are all clearly labeled in bright type against a dark background. In an excellent design decision, Sony has positioned many of the most commonly used settings at the very top of their respective menus.  Changing image size and quality, for instance, takes only a couple of button presses, rather than going through pages and pages of settings.

 
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**

**

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Ease of Use

The Alpha 900 strikes us as both easy to use, or not, depending entirely on your level of familiarity and comfort with slightly more advanced photography. If you know what you're doing, then all the options are laid out clearly, the buttons are obvious, and the settings easy to control. If you've only used entry level SLRs, the huge variety of controls will be overwhelming. 

Modes

Auto Mode
The Alpha 900 does have an auto mode, though it would be fair to say it's probably not the main point of the camera. But it's there, so if you want to turn  your $3000 SLR into a point-and-shoot just set the mode dial to Auto and start snapping away.

Movie Mode
As with most SLRs (barring recent developments from Nikon and Canon) the Alpha 900 does not record movies.

Drive / Burst Mode
The Alpha 900 has two levels of continuous shooting: Hi and Low. Hi shoots 5 images per second, and Low shoots 3. Both go to a maximum of 12 RAW, 11 Extra Fine JPEGs or 10 RAW+JPEG. However, if you're willing to clock down to Standard image quality, you can take an impressive 285 images on continuous shooting, at a full 24.6 megapixels.

There's also a 10 and 2 second timer, remote control and Mirror lockup. This last option prevents mirror movement when taking images that might suffer from vibrations, such as macro or long-exposure telephoto shots.

Playback Mode
The Alpha 900 has no editing controls to speak of, barring the ability to rotate the image. During playback, you can alternate between just the image, shooting information, 4 previous/following images, RGB histogram and highlight/shadow warnings. Zooming out will take you to 4, 9 or 25 picture thumbnail view, while zooming in will bring you to a maximum of 19x enlargement. That  covers the basics that most users will need, though.

Custom Image Presets
This camera has a series of 'Creative Style' settings, which tweak the brightness, contrast and saturation. These settings are: Standard, Vivid, Neutral, Clear, Deep, Light, Portrait, Landscape, Sunset, Night View, Autumn Leaves, B&W and Sepia.

Control Options

Manual Control Options
The Sony Alpha 900 is a $3000, full-frame sensor SLR. It's manual control options are varied and all-encompassing. There are no shortages of settings to tweak, and you can save them to the three custom shooting modes for later use. These can be accessed through the three spots on the mode dial; a useful feature if you often move from one shooting situation (such as indoors under florescent light) to another (such as outdoors in daylight) and need to quickly adapt.

Focus
Auto Focus
The auto focus on the Alpha 900 can be set to either Wide, Spot or Local. Wide uses the normal 10 focus points, but also adds an additional 10 sensors around them that help to find the right spot if the object of your desire is off-center. Spot uses the center focus spot, and Local uses the 10 focus points. None of these are arranged in a diamond around the center, with an additional one in the middle. For focus mode, you can choose between Single-Shot AF (AF-S), Automatic AF (AF-A) or Continuous AF (AF-C). The auto focus illuminator is rated to an impressive 7 meters, although we were unable to test if this would blind the subject.

ISO
The ISO range in the default automatic mode is from 200-3200 in 1/3 of a stop steps, but is expandable to 100-6400. The automatic ISO can be limited to ranges of 200-1600, 400-1600, 400-800, 200-800 or 200-400.

White Balance
The white balance presets are Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent and Flash, all of which can be tweaked slightly and saved to one of three custom settings. There's also Auto mode, Manual and Color Temperature (2500 - 9900K) the last of which can also have added color filters in 19 steps of magenta/green compensation. There's also a white balance auto bracketing tool with a range of three stops in either direction, to help you get the perfect color from the image.

Metering
The Alpha 900 has a 40 segment, honeycomb patterned metering system. This can be set to Multi Segment, Center-weighted or Spot.

Shutter Speed
The shutter in the Sony can go from 1/8000 of a second to 15 seconds, plus a Bulb mode. This is the standard range we expect to see from  an SLR of this price. Teh flash synch speed is an impressively fast 1/250 of a second, or 1/200 if the iamge stabilization mode is enabled. The shutter is rated for approximately 100,000 cycles

Aperture
The Alpha 900 does not have a kit lens, and the apeture is dependent on the lens that is used.

**Image Stabilization
**Most SLRs put the iamge stabilization in the lens, but the Alpha 900 uses sensor stabilization, where the sensor is on a plateform that moves to adapt for camera shake. This feature is controlled by via a switch on the rear of the camera. Sony states that the new SteadyShot INSIDE is 1.5x more powerful and 1.3x faster than their previous generation of image stabilization, and that you can take photos that are, on average, 4 steps slower than normal. We'll be taking a close look at this bold claim when we test this camera soon.

Picture Quality / Size Options

The Alpha 900 shoots at: RAW, cRAW (compressed), JPEG (Superfine, Fine or standard), RAW & JPEG (fine) and cRAW & JPEG. It can shoot in 3:2 and 16:9 aspect ratio, from 6048 x 4032 (24MB) to 1984 x 1320 (2.4MB). We welcome the inclusion of a RAW & JPEG mode, as this gives the best of both worlds.

Picture Effects Mode
The Sony Alpha 900 doesn't have a picture effects mode, though color, brightness and saturation can be altered by shooting in Creative Style modes: Standard, Vivid, Neutral, Clear, Deep, Light, Portrait, Landscape, Sunset, Night View, Autumn Leaves, B&W and Sepia.

**Intelligent Preview
**One of the new features that Sony is touting is the Intelligent Preview function. When you activate it, it takes a picture that is stored temporarily, that you can tweak before taking the real photo. You can change the D-Range Optimiser, white balance and exposure, and when you are satisfied with the results, the final image is taken and stored. With the breaking news of CompactFlash memory cards now available at 100GB, the need to save space rather than just shooting at all the different settings seems slightly less urgent. But if you're trying to keep down the number of images taken, we can see how this might be useful.

**D-Range Optimizer
**The D-Range Optimizer works on images that have areas of both extreme light and dark to capture the greatest amount of detail and range of colors. It can be set to Standard, Advanced Auto or Advanced Level, and each level offers greater control than the previous. It can also be bracketed to store images at all three levels of optimization from one photo.

Conclusion

**

Conclusion**

The Sony Alpha 900 offers a full frame SLR at a reasonable price. In the short time we got to use it, it appeared sturdy, well designed, with clearly labeled buttons and a logical menu structure. It also fits well into the hand and is comfortable to hold, although it is somewhat bulky. Having the vast majority of functions assigned independent buttons is fantastic as it avoids navigating menus whenever possible. Unfortunately, with such an advanced camera, it's difficult to get a proper impression in such a limited amount of time. You really require a longer period to get to grips with the bevies of settings and tools offered by this camera. From the time we did get with it, we were immensely impressed by the five frames per second burst mode, as well as the layout of the camera. But for $3000, we really want to get it into our lab for testing before offering any final judgments.

Specs

**Specs Table
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Meet the tester

Tim Barribeau

Tim Barribeau

Contributor

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Tim Barribeau is a valued contributor to the Reviewed.com family of sites.

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