I mainly use my A9 on medium FPS (10FPS?) as I found I had far to many images to look through when using the full 20fps. TBH it’s great to have the 20fps for the times when there is plenty of action that I need it (which isn’t really that often). 10 FPS is generally plenty for what I do. Another reason why I end up over shooting is because of the silent shutter. By not being able to hear the shutter I find I now shoot longer burst than I did with DSLRs (I used to shoot in short bursts rather than one long burst). The great thing about the electronic shutter is that it doesn’t rack up the mechanical shutter count. Though that’s not a big issue as even the mechanical shutter has an 500,000 actuation rating. That should last me plenty of time. The silent shutter is great. I’ve found the lack of noise means animals like deer don’t prick their ears forward like they used to as there is now no noise when taking photos. So I know when the shutter is firing I’ve set the viewfinder to show a small frame of four small boxes when the shutter is firing as otherwise I don’t know the camera is working! It’s been a while since I last used the A9 so it may not be small boxes but there is something noticeable that appears in the viewfinder.
One of the main reason I moved to the A9 from the A7RIII was because of the blackout free viewfinder and lack of slideshow at the highest frame per speed as I found it hard to track fast moving subjects because of the slideshow effect at Hi+ FPS rate. When I initially encountered the slideshow effect I didn’t know what it was. At the time I was trying to photograph an air show and just gave up that day I I couldn’t track the aircraft across the sky. Very frustrating and I didn’t know it could be fixed that day!
Thanks for this, I appreciate it. The first time I encountered the slide show effect was with the Olympus EM1 and just thought it was a case of mirrorless being poor at tracking compared to DSLR, as soon as I found out about the slide show effect it changed my view completely.
I've done a little reading and see what you mean, at 10fps there's no liveview and at 8fps there is so at 10fps you're never seeing a live image so I guess you're asking is the A9's mechanical full speed mode like the 8fps with liveview or the 10fps without. I'd guess the A9's speed would be able to handle liveview at full speed, I tried switching mine to the mechanical shutter and fired off some bursts but it's difficult to see how well it's tracking just mucking about indoors.
The AF aside I'd be concerned the A9-II is too big a step down in IQ given it has a lot less pixels and your shots here take good advantage of the high resolution R sensor.
Thanks. The decrease in IQ is a concern for sure, the main reason I did this was so that I could use the 100-400mm lens and crop instead of a 150-600mm or the Sony 200-600mm and save weight. However over the past year, and certainly the past few weeks the high pixel count and the camera have become more of a nuisance than a benefit.
Firstly, LR has always been incredibly slow with the 61mp files, and I don't think it's the size of the file per se but just the fact it's having to process 61mp as it's slow whether I convert to dng (lossless compression) or compressed files. Even opening full res processed files on my computer causes a lag before it renders properly
Secondly, as you'll be aware a lot of the functions on the Sony cameras don't work whilst the card is written to and the buffer takes quite a while to offload on the A7RIV. I know you get this on all Sonys but I'd assume that it's less on cameras with much smaller files. I don't plan on shooting 20fps very often so it's not as though I'll have double the files to offload.
Thirdly, and I don't know if this is isolated to the A7RIV tbh, when reviewing images on the camera there's a delay moving from one image to the other, and q noticeable delay viewing 1:1 which I do to check focus.
Lastly, whilst a very specific area of AF I've obviously been frustrated that I can't take the photos of my dog that I want to.
Now clearly these are all proper first world problems, I'm sure partly fuelled by GAS, and I could carry on using the A7RIV and getting images I'm perfectly happy with. I can hold my hand up and say in hind sight I probably bought the wrong camera as I bought it for a very specific reason (cropping for wildlife) and since I've had it I think I've shot wildlife twice, but you live and learn. I can always get the 1.4TC for the odd occasion I do wildlife
) and the images cleaned up quite nicely using the Topaz DeNoise Ai discussed on here. I was hoping for the light to be really poor to test the Topaz but the sun kept coming out! I won't be doing it again though, the AF was atrocious, I'm obviously spoilt by the A9. I did appreciate the crop factor bringing me "closer".
