I tested the A9 with the 200-600 f5.6 plus the Sony 1.4 TC for the afternoon falcon flying, where a long focal length is required, and the Sony could in theory get out to 900mm . The falcon test is quite demanding as the bird flies incredibly fast, and at a long distance away. The starting position is usually known though so these are slightly easier shots than the kite feeding ones. The results were very poor, with the AF points all over the place, except on the bird.
This is a sequence of shots taken with the A9, and the 200-600 plus 1.4 TC. The focal length was an FF equivalent of 840mm, the lens was wide open at F9, and the shutter speed was 1/2000 s. This was a large vulture flying slowly from right to left. It couldn’t be easier. In this series of 52 shots, there was only 1 in focus. This series shows 35 of them. At the beginning there are no green AF points activated, only the orange final focal point. The orange FP loses the bird after 3 or 4 shots. Then you see the AF points and the FP at the right hand side of the frame, miles from the bird. Then they randomly dot around the screen, almost always missing the subject. It doesn’t begin to find the subject until shot 26 of the series, and even then it keeps missing the bird. All the shots were out of focus on inspection.
Even if the shots had been in focus, I could not have used the images, as the resolution and noise levels were dreadful.
I got a surprisingly low focus hit rate for the A9 camera I tested. Was I just missing focus? I checked 850 A9 shots with afv.exe for where the actual focus point was in the image. Here are 50 examples of where the bird should have been in focus, but the camera laid all the the focus points in thin air. On the testing day, there were 443 images where the camera failed in this way.
Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience.
In an earlier post I compared the Sony A9 focus accuracy with that of the Olympus EM1x to get a comparative birds in flight hit rate. It has caused a…
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I got a surprisingly low focus hit rate for the A9 camera I tested. Was I just missing focus? I checked 850 A9 shots for where the actual focus point was in the image. Here are some examples of where the focus point was right on the bird but the image was out of focus. Each image shows the AFV.exe screen on the left, showing the location of the focus points, and a higher resolution of the same image on the right, showing the level of focus. On the testing day, there were 299 images where the camera failed in this way.
Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience.
While many photographers are under the impression that the Olympus Pro cameras have poor noise quality, they do not think the same about competitive APSC cameras or full frame cameras…
