Screenshot via Dpreview.
Dpreview (Click here) updated the Studio scene comparison and included the A99 RAW files. As you see from the image on top there are very small differences between the single cameras when comapring the RAW files. The A99 holds up well with the rest of the class. What do you think?
One more thing for EU readers: As you know the A99 price in Europe is 2800 Euro (like here at Wex De). A couple of readers linked me to a store where you can save 220 Euro. It’s [shoplink 15344 ebay]UKbnsuk on eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]. This is a Top rated seller but I ask you if you had an buyer experience on that store. I would always try to be careful before to grab one of these kind of superdeals…(deal found via Slidoo).
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The RX1 can be pre ordered at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto, Wex UK ,Wex Germany, Sonystore DE–UK–FR–IT–ES–NL–SE–FI–CH and more links at Alphacameradeals.
A99 body Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto, Jessops, Wex UK, Wex Germany, Sonystore DE–UK–FR–IT–ES–NL–SE–FI–CH and more links at Alphacameradeals.
100 Responses
I think the UKbnsuk is not based in UK, they are based in Hong Kong and thats explains the lower price !
just read throw their feedback and you will notice that.
Yup buyer beware:
“Member since: 10-Mar-11 in Hong Kong”
I have the A99. High ISO/Noise is not really its forte, at least in the standard of full frame sensors.
Everything is relative. It’s at least as good as the D3 in terms of overall noise, which still isn’t considered a slouch in this department, even though no longer the best. In fact, it handily beats the noise appearance of the D3 in shadows (blotchy patterns, hot pixels etc.), which is usually quite important in low light.
Since when was Sony GOOD at high-ISO? At least on par with Canon for that matter?? I’m shooting with the Nikon D600 and chose it specifically because all the bell and whistles don’t equate to a good HIGH-ISO performance in either Canon or Nikon. Mind you, I LOOATHE the A99 all day, since I miss my A900 days. However, despite my dislikes about it Sony still manages to pack a crap load of technology into a body that both the other two must be crazy over. Every squeaks over stuff like this, instead of looking at real world day-to-day applications for a $3K toy in comarison to the unreachable consumer for such likes of the D4, 1D X lines. So … $2K full frame entry point on the D600 and 2 months ahead of the 6D (a joke). Nikon rules all in this round of pro-sumer DSLRs.
What exactly are you saying? All I gather from this is that you like Nikon. The rest is gibberish.
“Since when was Sony GOOD at high-ISO?” – A580? Beat every Canon APS-C camera of it’s age.
This.
Pretty sure that both the D7000 and K5 beat the a580 in noise tests… It was a good camera, but it still mid pack when it came to high ISO.
Yes, but you were specifically asking since when sony was good at high ISO, or at least on par with Canon. Now we provide you with an example and you want to backpedal and now bring in the sony-powered D7000 and K5? LOL
The A580 came out before them and isn’t really noisier than the D7000. The K5 just throws RAW NR into the mix.
So no surprise, same sensor as the D600, minus some pixels for on sensor phase detect AF, minus the SLT mirror = about 2/3 of a stop worse than D600.
I think the better comparison for Sony users on DPreview is A99 vs A77. Looking at that, I’ve convinced myself that the differences up to ISO1600 are sufficiently small to stick with the A77.
RAW noise: A99/D600 ISO1600 = A77 ISO400
Yeah, I have both the A99 and A77 (as well as the A900) and I can say with 100% confidence the A99 is at least 2 full stops better than the A77 and at least one full stop better than the A900 in terms of Noise at Higher ISO values.
Point taken but i guess my issue is that if they want to capture a77 prosumers, the pricing is all wrong… if I wanted to go ff I could stay with sony for apsc, but go with canikon for cheaper ff options that suit prosumets better. The game is different for pro users, but I would like to see a sony ff that undercuts canikon from day one for people who own tne a77… sony are missing that market atm.
Surprisingly good. Seems like in some conditions A99 gives better results then D800 – that one I did not expected.
ps. Fun-fact: Seems like yet again Sony is focused in different point then both: D600 and D800. lol They will never learn…
Realy? RAW noise: A99/D600 ISO1600 = A77 ISO 400.
True–the playing card is more in focus on the a99 shot than the others, which seem to be focused more towards the foreground.
D600 really looks like it has some NR applied.
I think that it looks very promising, try downloading the files and process with Lightroom, I think that ISO6400 is nice and ISO12800 is usable, much better than my A900
No offence but the A77 is not that great from iso 800 and up. I went back an bought a D7000 just for the noise issue alone. Even pushing iso 400-800 files in Post processing ended up in noisy images.
THE A99 does really well imo. Good job sony for finally catching up!
Maybe a good job catching up. But Sony is the leading sensor manufacturer, so expecting them to take the lead was justified. Unfortunately, they did not deliver in that respect.
No, that was fully unjustified, unless you don’t understand the SLT concept.
I understand it all too well. It is a transitional and soon obsolete technology that we have to live with at the moment.
We were told by Sony that it would be an SLT, so how can you expect the “lead” then? You were expecting Sony to pull a quantum efficiency greater than 76% out of that Bayer sensor when Nikon manages 53%?
So your are constantly switching between several camera systems? And next time, a Canon is better? And then you go and buy all your lenses and accessory and stuff again for that new camera? Or do you only walk around with the attached kit lens on a 2,5k camera?
Or you could have used MFNR, or down-sampled your images to 16mpix…How much shooting do you do above ISO 800 anyway, about 1 in 10 images if that. High ISO bitches need to get their head out of forums and shoot stuff. The people viewing your images (if any) don’t care about noise.
As someone who is both a wedding and newspaper photographer, I’ll attest that high (800-3200) ISO performance is extremely important to me.
That being said; the MKII, D600 and A99 all seen to perform at a level that I don’t think anyone should be scoffing at. “Ahhh, a half stop here, a quarter stop there!”
Has anyone looked at ISO3200 Film’s noise results lately? We cant really complain about RAW now, can we!
i have bought my sony a99 a week ago in local sony store for 2620 with grip 🙂 but i dont need the grip – so i will sell it 🙂
the price is in euro 🙂
Could you give us please location and the name of this store? Thanks!
No significant difference in these RAW samples between all those cameras. I would look at the features then to decide
Very very pleased with this, Already field tested the A99 at last weeks wedding and was very very impressed with everything except the responsiveness of the control interface. I’ve not had a chance to shoot with my A99 alongside the 5D III yet,but it looks like there will be nothing between them in terms of noise, and the A99 will get a shadow advantage because of the dynamic range! Amazing result!
Not impressive but this did not stop me for buying one..
Everything than my current a290 is better 😀 and I use it easily at 1600, with Topas DeNoise 5 tool pictures looks pretty good, so, with A99 there won’t be any problem at all. Anything else is just marketing. I’m more disappointed about Sony prices, lenses are more expensive than on Canon, and in some categories there is huge difference for equivalent lenses. For example, 16-35, on amazon.co.uk, Canon top lens costs much more less, and they have 14mm too. Same with telephoto- Canon 70-200 2.8 costs 1000£, while Sony 1600£? Ok, Canon with IS is about same price, but I’ve tested non IS and it was absolutely OK.
can anyone tell me:
1./ at what ISO point is the a77 and a99 start to be unusable…??
2./ is the video in the a99 a lot better than the a77…??
Why not have a look on your own? It definitely depends on your eyes and how you look at images.
Suggest you have a look at the submission guidelines of the mains stock photography websites re technical quality as that is a real commercial contraint (rather just personal opinion). Basically, it is a balance between noise, sharpness and size.
The guidelines will tell you that your images must have zero noise. You will have to remove all camera noise yourself. The flipside is that if you add too much noise reduction, the image will be rejected on sharpness. You also get paid more if you offer larger MP images, so that’s your three technical constraints: noise, sharpness, size.
For APS-C, look to be rejected on technical issues after ISO800 on any current camera. For FF, look to be rejected beyond ISO1600. Values will vary significantly depending on the photographer’s ability to expose and post process correctly.
IMO, the diffferences in these figures between different brands within the same price range, class and generation is by far the least important issue, and so slight that I wonder some times why it gets so much prominence on the web.
I wouldn’t call these differences “small”, unless you want to put yourself in a very humble position that basically says “I expected it to be much worse than that”.
The camera with the worst sensor spec-wise (5D3) comes out best in this comparison. The A99 is on position 3 (of 4), also not too exciting.
All these are within about half a stop of eachother for a given output. That can be considered small, because different processing can easily make a bigger difference.
Did you actually go ahead and switch the ISO to 3200, 6400 and 12800 on that page? If you do that, you’ll note that the difference is more than half a stop in certain cases, probably even more than 1 stop.
E.g. switch D800 to ISO6400, 5D3 to 12800. 5D3 still looks better noise-wise -> more than 1 stop.
A99 looks slightly better at ISO3200 than 5D3 at 6400. But the difference is probably closer to 1EV than to 0.5EV.
I converted them all to the same output (size, brightness, contrast curve etc) and in that case, ISO 6400 from the A99 is clearly better than ISO 12800 from any of the other cameras. Basically right between ISO 6400 and 12800 from those, which would be no surprise because of the 70/30 beamsplitter (in theory 0.51 EV “loss”).
“E.g. switch D800 to ISO6400, 5D3 to 12800. 5D3 still looks better noise-wise -> more than 1 stop.”
Not even close, Mike. You’re comparing a 22mp sensor to a 36mp sensor at 100%, putting the D800 at a huge disadvantage.
Resample the D600 to 22mp, or 5D3 to 36mp, then come back and try to make the same claim.
The D600 image has the best noise behaviour. On the other hand, the image is out of focus or has lack of resolution(?). The A99 and 5DMkIII are very near in noise and detail this time.
“Holds up well”? To me, it looks like the D600 and the Canon 5D have still better noise reduction, starting at ISO 400. But on it’s own, ISO 6.400 and even 12.800 is still usable.
For me, the message of this screenshot is: There *may* be a measurable difference, but no difference *at all* for the human eye in all practical use cases.
BTW, does anybody know which is the dominating noise source for such pictures? Shot noise, read noise, or dark current noise?
It is a fact that there is a measureable difference. If you question even that, you are obviously blind or ignorant.
We can discuss all day long if the differences are relevant for everyday use, but that doesn’t change anything about the fact that the differences are measureable AND even visible at 100%.
Mike, give it up……….you are never going to convince a fanboy of anything they don’t want to believe.
Others that are not totally in the fanboy class don’t understand why anyone “needs” to shoot at ISO 3200 and above or why anyone would ever crop to 100% or print bigger than 8×12 full-frame size and these posters will ridicule you to no-end. And of course, some claim that the noise is okay and it will clean-up just fine, so why even consider it to be a problem in the first place 😉
Most dominant factor by far, shot noise.
GOOD? You just took good side of picture – even there could be seen that A99 more @grainy@ than D600. And please look at bad side of same picture – http://photo.qip.ru/users/ozerovpaparacci/4087643/100942153/
Same test – zone with large amount of small details.
Main difference between D600 and A99 – Nikon have uncompressed RAW file and Sony made it 8 Mb smaller – by the way deleting many small detail and making noise grains much large.
I really want stay on Sony – but without uncompressed RAW it will be too dificult.
The differences in details in that particular crop are mostly due to focus differences. Just look at the playing card (queen) or the Kodak logo top right, which are further back in the scene and much sharper on the Sony.
The compression is near lossless, so that shouldn’t have much if any visible impact at all, see the A900 compressed vs uncompressed comparisons.
First, don’t show the RAW comparison…go to jpeg. Everyone processes RAW differently, there’s no good way to judge. And seriously, enough with the obsession over RAW…talk about a waste of workflow time.
Second, when you examine the jpegs, the a99 performs just as well as the D600 and better than the D800 at high ISO. I’ve poured over the chart at every setting.
Third, in grayscale areas, the Nikons introduce sloppy colorful blotches while the Sony remains purely grayscale (jpeg version)
Fourth, I viewed the chart with the a57 included, and the a57 can hang with the D600 as well.
The better conclusion is that the Sony combination of sensor and processing engine is doing an EXCELLENT job handling noise. When you consider that the a99 is in most other respects TWICE the camera the D600 is, and obviously the only TRUE LIVE VIEW camera in the set, to me it’s clear winner.
Is hi ISO capabilities the single most important factor for you all?
Then Sony isn’t the primary choice, get used to it.
There are many other features that make me like their way of building cameras.
How come shooting in darkness is so important, and then choose a brand with very few stabilised fast lenses??
/E
No Sony lens is stabilized.
The Body itself is stabilized!
Yeah that was his point… Why shoot in the dark then pick a brand (C, N) with few stabilized lenses when you can have all lenses “stabilized”.
Plus, actually SEE something in the viewfinder (OVFs go dark easily)
I do not know which RAW converter was used, but I never get such creepy colored blurs at ISO 3200 (Sony A99) by using ACR 7.2 (Photoshop). It looks like converted by moldy Sony IDC!?
ACR with the standard chroma NR (25) turned off.
I don’t get that kind of noise from ISO 3200 and I pass mine through Lightroom. I wonder if they have a pre-prod body.
I see on ISO 12800 RAW A-99 has shutter time longer than other cameras – 1/1250 vs 1/1600. It means that this test was performed not very precisely and actual noise level of A-99 is about half stop more 🙁
************
FUN FACT
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Set iso to 100 and replace any of the 4 camera with the nex-7, and get amazed by a 350g APS-C camera beating all the bigger FF cameras in resolution power.
Haters gonna hate.
Sony NEX is back- and Nikon is frontfocused.
Cheaper tehre:
http://panamoz.com/index.php/catalogsearch/result/?q=a99
I used them for my Sony a77. Would recommand.
I clicked on iso25600 and said: WOW THATS AMAZING!!!!
Than i noticed the sony only went to 12800 -_-‘
but comparing iso 12800 the sony is still amazing considering 33% light loss due to the mirror!
and the sony sample is a bit out of focus- visible at iso 50.
Clearly, the Nikon D800 shows the greatest about of noise/grain at ISO 3200 but it does have the highest megapixel at 36MP……….Can we agree that this is true?
And it’s arguable that the camera with the least noise is the Canon 5dIII
But I see an important difference!
The Canon RAW was processed using Adobe Camera RAW 6.7 beta………………………WOW!
And all of the others used Adobe Camera RAW 7.2 beta.
As a self-described pixel peeper and Lightroom/Photoshop professional I see this as being a big deal that the Canon is being process with a ACR that old.
Maybe this is a misprint?
No, we can’t agree unless we’re comparing pixels/images of different size, rather than equal output. At equal output size, the D800 performs about the same as the D600, as clearly displayed on page 18 of the review.
Most of you have a finger up your ass and worry too much about the
fucking digital noise. If you are not happy than go back to film ISO 3200.
Pull out that fucking stinking finger out of your ass and go outside
and start taking pictures in RAW and in 5 years new software will come
along and deal with the fucking digital noise. I am sick and tired of
you complaining about digital noise shit!
I took pictures at ISO 25600, noise is not the best but I have
pictures to remember for many years to come http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.439488286099354&type=1
So seriously get a fucking life!
Derek
You’re a real charmer aren’t you, Derek.
I am speechless to your reply… I guess that says it all about me, doesn’t it?
I actually agreed with your sentiments about digital noise to an extent, but your, shall we say, colourful language just made you look moronic.
You would have been just as able to make your point without the torrent of f-words and crude references to anal insertions. 😉
Totally have to agree here. You can peep at test charts at 200% of whinge like a bitch that the Sony is half a stop down on say the D600, or you can take your camera and focus on producing a better image.. I can assure all of you that the likes of Helmut Newton could take an A99 and produce a far more aesthetically pleasing shot than nearly any of you with a D600, D800, 5D3 or whatever the f*** you opted to use.
The bodies are all so close these days that it’s almost pointless swapping if youve already made the investment in glass. Buy the body, accept your fate and focus on taking stronger images..
Well, its clear Sony is going into a different direction -Cinematography!
*1080 at 60p – its the only FF camera that can do that.
*Constant phase detection AF.
*Best Video stabiliziation – with any lens.
Serious video shooters will go with the a99.
I’ve had my A99 for a couple of weeks now and I am definitely impressed. I still have my A77 and when I compare the images (not technically like Dpreview) in overall depth and impression, I’m very impressed with the level of detail that I’m getting from the A99 compared to the A77.
I agree with most on a couple of things..1) sony’s jpeg compression is terrible BUT the RAW files are solid so there’s a lot to play with in post and 2) A77 ISO range isn’t great. If possible I never put the ISO above 100. If you have great lenses that make it easier to get the light you can forgive the ISO limitations. On the other hand I’ve been pretty impressed with the A99 ISO range. I’ve used it at 3200 and 6400 and gotten some really good shots. Even with some basic NR in LR4.2, I get a pretty sharp image.
I wonder looking at some of this imagery if the D800 is falling victim to what happened with the A77…too many MP on the sensor. 36MP on the FF sensor might be too much (like the way 24MP on the cropped A77 sensor is too much). Maybe Sony was smart to not go up to 36MP on the A99.
Do you guys think that we’re seeing the MP threshold for FF sensors? is 36MP best suited for a square sensor instead?
++ i’m still a rookie at this stuff, so don’t slam me too hard if I goofed on some basic info 🙂 ++
Check out the bottom of page 18 from the D600 review:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-d600/18
It fully answers the question whether the D800 is having a noise handicap from the extra pixels (hint: no).
no matter what the ISO performance is, just a good ISO performance will not make great picture. I dont know what all this fuss about. My friend who is a professional (selling more than 100 copies of landscapes every 4-5 months) is making his living in a very humble Canon 60D (which has worse ISO performance than all the recent cameras). Stop worrying about the ISO or JPEG performace and improve your shooting techniques.. Just saying.. BTW i Love sony because they dare to think out of the box and I love the SSS..
Its clear to see that all cameras tested are more capable than most people that will purchase them. Its also true that proper exposure has a lot to do with the final picture as I get great pics at iso 6400 with my A850, if exposed correctly. I say just pick one and then do with it what it was ment for.
The really intersting thing is to look at the output from the Pentax K5 IIs….!!!!!!
It’s a bit smeary, as expected based on the RAW NR applied by the camera and the moiré (See all patterns, especially the card with the blue VW Beetle) is insane.
Try doing a comparison to the d700 or 5DmkII, you can see clearly that the a99 is much better than these two cameras. It’s clearly a step forward for Sony and I think with these capabilities, Sony is making a leap forward.
It seems it is better than D800? That’s promising.
I got my A99 for 2300€
And i am happy
I payed 2500 for it here in Italy. Couldn’t find better deals at the moment.
Where did you find it for 2300? (or even 2500 in italy??) I have’t seen it cheaper than 2799 euro in NL, while the Nikon D800 is already available for 2427,- and the 5D mkIII for 2915,-
And why are there no CZ 24-70 and 70 – 200 G on stock in most places? Are they being replaced soon? If so, sony should better start releasing it, otherwise ou can buy an a99 but no suitable lenses.
Fotokonijnenberg had it for preorder at 2550 for some time.
I find it for 2.3k in a german Mediamarkt, i am working in this place.
It looks like they where shot at different apertures or something… The 4 and 5 on the D600 and D800 look more out of focus than they they do on the A99 and 5d3. This could be because the photos are zoomed in a bit more. It’s really hard to tell which one is clearly better because they are so different.
It would be easy to say that the D800 is the worst but it’s zoomed in the most and looks darker than they others. In a better controlled lighting situation I would say all of these camera’s would be within 1/4 stop of each other. This is quite negligible in real world use.
I agree. The rest of the game between these cameras has to be played on other features, reliability and being future proof. Waiting for my A99 to be delivered soon..! 😉
I apologize if someone had already posted this but…
The only ISO selection we have is:
50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800 and 25600
Most of us know that the canon’s 5dm2 (maybe 5dm3’s or more) have cleaner ISO at 160, 320, 640, and 1250. Why cant we see these ISO numbers in the settings?
These are the only ISO settings I use on my canon 5dm2.
The A99 has the values between 50 and 100, such as 64 and 80, up through 25600; but they may not have been tested. ISO values from 50-25600 multiplied by two each time represent a full stop.
Its cleary appear that the a99 is fighting nice for iso and when you will print it you will never see if its a d600 or a d800 or mark 3 or a99 so its really useless to try to found the best pixel crop iso. People normaly shoot most picts in day time and dont need hight iso so what is the most important its a Dynamique Range, but i just saw one time a test for dynamique range beetween d800 and mark 3, its appear the d800 is so superior, so a99 will be same a killer in DR. i think most peexel peeper are not pro.
What concerned me a little was at ISO 100, comparing the A99, D600 and 5D MKIII,
The A99 looks the least sharp.
Though again who knows where the focus point is set to, AF or Manual Focus,
These tests to me just have to many variables. Almost pointless.
I guess if they retested all the cameras at the same time process identical in LR which I assume they do, and all focus on the same point and use Manual Focus / Live View then maybe it would be more useful.
Then again lens choice. So many variables.
See review of A99 at Colorfoto (German magazine). Resolution (measured) of A99 at low ISO is lower than A850/A900, probably due to the SLT mirror.
Did anyone feel the shutter sound of a77 and a99 is no good? Nex 7 sounds great…
Nonissue to me. My friends 7 is as loud as my 5n. The 99 is more quite. That is more important to me.
The sound of the shutter is an important factor in your purchasing decision? Dear Lord..
Kinda tells you what his priorities are: a good-sounding camera. Forget about the actual purpose of a camera – to take images. Nooooo, what’s important is the *sound* a camera makes!! LOLOLOL
Well I am not going to defend to my dying breath and proclaim superiority of any particular camera. All I can say is if you have any of these cameras and you cannot produce nice images under any light condition then it is not the camera it is you. I have the the 99 and while I am still figuring out various nuances, the camera is pretty damn awesome. What I see from these tests and in real world shooting is that at 6400 the results are negligible. I do think the 600 edges everyone out and the 5dm3 comes in second but the 99 is a very close third. At 12800 the same order but the 99 falls further behind but surprisingly useful. Ok now the practical points. I can print very nice prints at 6400 and so far up to 10000iso. One I could not even shoot at that iso with my 850 and would not think of printing at 3200. Do I wish it was better? Hell yes! Do I think it is good? Hell yes. But as I see it and this is me, I am not going to give up my Zeiss glass for the 600 at this time, especially if this dusting issue with the sensor is as prevalent as it appears on the blogs and I am surely not going to give up the Sony colors and DR for Canon at present. I am not sure about this mentioned banding issues at even low iso’s with the 5dm3 but there should not be any problems in that area of shooting at all with any of these camera. If there is a banding issue at low iso’s that would be more of an issue than shooting at 12800 iso because at 6400 its tit for tat.
Nikon and Canon raw files are getting bigger and bigger as the ISO is increased. The Sony A99 RAW is 24mb regardless of the ISO. At ISO 6400, Nikon D600 is 40% bigger than the A99 (same for the Canon 5D MkIII)… that’s huge for two cameras that share the same sensor (or almost).
If RAW files size are changing, that means that some sort of lossless compresion is applied to Nikon and Canon raw files but not to Sony raw as the size remain the same. So we can assume that there is 50% more data in nikon and canon raw files than in Sony RAW files… That mean that there is some hiden potential in the A99.
Oh woe be to us, how did we ever shoot pictures for the past XXXX years without clean high ISO… *rolleyes*
It’s a classic example of pixel-peeping measurebators when everything is about high ISO rather than seeing the camera as whole and realizing what we have now is 10x better than what we had 5 years ago…
Seriously, my collegue who shoots with a D600 just bought an A99 as well, because he does photojournalism (where the articulating LCD screen, fast PDAF in live view and focus tracking) have helped him immensely, and because he loves shooting macro on weekends (where the real-time preview and lack of mirror slap helps tons). High ISO? “All modern cameras are better than ever” (his own words). He’s what I call a “photographer”, because he appreciates how a tool helps him capture the image he wants/needs, rather than “measurebators” who slave away at 100% magnification all day comparing 2 near-identical images.
did you notice that the JPEG engine of the A99 is more better than D600?
I hope Sony will update JPEG engine also on A77!
Aldo will be nice lens corrections on RAW…
About noise reduction I think that A99 is in pair with 5DMK3, little better is D600. Consider that A99 have 1/3 stop less light with SLT… so noise reduction seems great! 😉
Actually I heard there might be one last FW update for the A900 too. 😀