There have been a few rumors kicking around for the past few months that Sony would bring out a new flagship full-frame camera that sits above the Alpha 7 range, and today it took the wraps off the Alpha A9.
Sony is calling this the most technologically advanced, innovative digital camera it's ever created, and with an impressive spec it's hard to argue with that claim.
The new Alpha 9 promises blackout-free continuous shooting at up to 20fps while undertaking 60 AF/AE tracking calculations per second. This is made possible thanks to a newly designed 24.2MP full-frame stacked Exmor RS CMOS sensor.
The unique design of the Alpha A9's sensor enables a broad ISO range of 100–51,200, expandable to 50–204,800, while there's also support for uncompressed 14-bit raw files.
Its design also enables data speed processing at up to 20x faster than previous Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras, while the sensor has also been paired with a brand new BIONZ X processor and front-end LSI.
Autofocus
The Alpha 9 packs in a staggering 693 phase-detect AF points that cover approximately 93% of the frame. The Fast Hybrid AF system is said to be approximately 25% faster when compared with the Alpha A7R II.
There's also an all-new, high-resolution, high-luminance Quad-VGA OLED Tru-Finder viewfinder with approximately 3,686,000 dots, which should deliver extremely accurate, true-to-life detail reproduction.
The highest-resolution viewfinder Sony has ever incorporated in a camera, it has a 0.78x magnification and a Zeiss T* coating to greatly reduce reflections, and has a fluorine coating on the outer lens that repels dirt.
The Alpha A9 is equipped with an innovative 5-axis image stabilization system that provides a shutter speed advantage of five stops, while there's a new vibration-free, fully electronic and completely silent shutter with a maximum shutter speed of 1/32,000 sec.
4K video capture
As you'd expect for Sony's mirrorless flagship camera, video is well catered for. For a start, there's 4K (3840 x 2160p) video recording across the full width of the full-frame image sensor. When shooting in this format, the camera uses full pixel readout without pixel binning to collect 6K of information, oversampling it to produce high-quality 4K footage with exceptional detail and depth. Recording is also available in the popular Super 35mm size.
Additionally, the Alpha A9 can record Full HD at 120fps at up to 100Mbps, which allows footage to be reviewed and eventually edited into 4x or 5x slow-motion video files in Full HD resolution.
The Alpha A9 will start shipping in June, priced at approximately £4,500 / $4,500.
