The Sony A77 Review! [Part 4]

Okay, in part four, I felt it was about time I tackled some of the pro's and cons of the A77, now I and [probably] you all know or at least heard about the about the noise issues surrounding the A77. Almost every forum has said their piece on the jpeg engine, that it was not at its best [could always get better with a firmware upgrade] above 1600. Below are three shots in ISO 1600, 3200 and 6400, downsized to 1080 pixels wide with Baseline-Standard [using PS to say, simulate its upload on Flickr and the relative size of most sharing/social networking sites] and shot with High ISO Noise Reduction: On/Low, Control: Manual, WB: Florescent [Warm White], DR: Off, Scene: Neutral, Focus: Spot. Fstop 4.0 [Using Minolta 35-70], Exposure Value was balanced by shutter speed with the changing ISO: 1600 1/6, 3200 1/13 and 6400 1/25. No noise reduction was made BY ME and they were saved at quality compression [100%].

Click to see larger image

Click to see larger image

Click to see larger image

I bet you don't see much difference in noise between the three. To set a point that most people use, when they 'pixel peep', they basically look at 100% of the image size. And the image size of a 24MP file is pretty big. Here's 10% crops of the original images [basically 10% of the image size taken from the same position].

Click to see larger image

As you can see [if you made the image larger] the noise IS apparent the higher the ISO goes, but even at 6400, its still usable and as long as you don't go larger than say, a 32inch TV screen [non wide screen if you go 3:2 aspect ratio], I believe it would still look good in my opinion. Ok one last sample, at ISO 10000, the original file was used for the upload and the crop after it, the original isn't edited but the crop was of course copied from the original file and saved on PS at 100% quality.

ISO 1000 @ 24MP baby! [6000x4000] Click me!

ISO 10000 @ 600x400 [10% crop of original] Click to enlarge!

Now one more of the other features that people wanted in the A77 is of course it's video capabilities. Specwise it's impressive, you can take high quality video and quite easily at that with various settings to [almost] please everyone like 1920 x 1080 (60, 24 fps), 1440 x 1080 (30fps), 640 x 424 (29.97 fps) shooting, 4 "Dial" modes [P,A,S,M] and [on P mode] full Phase Detect continuous AF.

Since everyone has practically heard the good points on the A77's video capabilities [search youtube, I'm not so Steven Spielbergish at the moment], I wont be posting some [serious] video samples. But for me, with all it's capabilities, it's when you want to be more creative or controlling that it becomes a little harder to achieve what you want. For example, you have full [Phase Detect] AF when you are in P mode but once you want to go to the other modes [Aperture, Shutter or Manual] that you lose the AF and have to manually focus [There is the focus indicator that shows green when something is in focus is active and helps in focusing]. Try adjusting aperture and/or shutter when focusing at the same time as you're trying to catch a scene and you'll get my drift.

Now I'm not an engineer or video person, so forgive me for wondering why did Sony not allow/make some kind of contrast detect auto focusing when in the non P modes of video? I mean I feel it shouldn't be hard to change the say, aperture while on slow contrast detect or shutter speed? I mean you can change the ISO in all modes [oh and by the way, the maximum ISO you can select with video is ISO 1600], AWB, AF Area [Wide, Zone, Spot and Local] but it cant compensate if the aperture or the shutter changes.

Now one other concern that a friend of mine raised is that the A77 crops video, due supposedly for compensating the Super Steady Shot image stabilization. Makes me wonder though how come you can't turn off SSS and get the full image resolution? Also, though you don't see the focus points, overlay's etc in the final video created within the cam, when you attach the A77 to an external display [or one of them video gadgets that saves the stream of video to a hard drive] you get to see EVERYTHING you would normally see on the live view screen/EVF. And this means [according to my friend who runs Sony Alpha & Nex] that the A77 output isn't clean. Check the sample video below I got when I connected the A77 to an LCD tv via HDMI [and took a video of the output at 24fps].

Psychidellic huh? I did say I won't be posting a serious video sample ^__^ but it does illustrate what would show up in case the video is streamed from the camera. This basically means you wont be able to get clean video output to say a large jumbotron screen for your event or concert, bummer. maybe in the next firmware update they'll include that [Here's hoping].

One last video that IS serious, it's about the reported lag when using the camera and changing the settings. Aside from the lag involved when the camera is sleeping and you wake it up, the A77 system is alright, not as snappy as the previous Alpha's but no slouch either. Forgive the quality of the video, it was taken with a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Tomorrow, I'll post the last part, it'll have some round ups [like things I forgot to mention] and my conclusions.

Thanks for reading this far ^^