Although I was able to shoot with a production sample of Sony’s latest full-frame mirrorless camera at its press announcement, we had to sign an agreement to not publish the images until now. We’ve now created a gallery of our Sony A9 sample images for you to browse here, but if you follow this link you can also see and download full resolution images from our Flickr album.
All of the images are direct from the camera with no editing or cropping. With a limited time with the camera and a bunch of enthusiastic journalists vying to shoot with it in a crowded gym, some of the images don’t have the greatest composition, but they still enable you to see the quality of the results that are possible with the camera.
Most of the images were shot at 20fps and I varied the autofocus mode a few times, but I used Wide AF and Zone AF for the majority. This meant I wasn’t in full control of where the AF point was, but as you’ll see, the Sony A9 did a great job of identifying the subject and getting it sharp. In some cases it focused on a boxer and sometimes the boxing gloves, but generally the end result looks good.
The images were shot under constant lighting with shutter speed varying between 1/1000 sec and 1/1600 sec (at ISO 1600) to freeze the fast movement. The aperture was generally wide with f/2.8 and f/5.6 being the most commonly used (I was shooting with the A9 in shutter priority mode) and the narrowest being f/6.3. This makes the A9’s focusing accuracy apparent as there’s rapid fall-off in sharpness with the full-frame sensor.
Some of the leaps and gymnastics on display also give you a good sense of just how fast 20fps is.
If you take a look at our hands-on Sony A9 review you can read my analysis of the images, but in summary, they’re good with noise being controlled very well. I’m looking forward to getting hold of the camera again in the near future so that I can test it in a wider range of lighting conditions, but these initial results are very encouraging indeed.