Sony Alpha 77

24.3 Megapixels, 12 frames per second rivaling any competitors' flagships which costs 4 times as much, best electronic viewfinder on a dSLR/T... I bring you Sony's new king of APSC, the A77.












And with that, my old pal A700 which have served me well time and time again, will be moving on to better hands.





Ok, after a bit of time of fiddling and shooting, here are some of my initial findings:

Single handed operation is very very easy. You do NOT need to remove your eye from the viewfinder for almost anything, except for accessing items in the menu. For example, on the A700/850/900, deleting a photo involves 2 handed operation.

Though buttons are a lot, which is also a good thing, layout and common used buttons are very well placed. Nearby buttons are separated with enough distance and height to be differentiated without looking.

Exposure compensation button should be swapped with WB button as WB will be used more often than EV comp (which I have customized to be adjusted from the rear dial).

EV comp button cannot be customized as well which is a waste as it is one of the many buttons that has little or no usage.

Shut down is slow. VERY slow. Although the screen has already blacked-out, the shutting down process is still in progress, shown by a much delayed cocking of the mechanical shutter and lens returning to infinity.

When using mechanical first shutter, shutting down takes about a second longer compared to electronic first shutter. I believe it's due to the need to return the mechanical shutter back to home position.

As opposed to popular believe, turning on the camera isn't that slow. Upon power on, the image feed immediately comes on the rear screen. Followed by a delayed information data to show on the screen. From turn on to 1st click, I would say it's pretty short at about a little more than 1 second.

My images from A77 doesn't actually turn out particularly cooler than from the A700. Except that now a lot of my shots are a tiny bit underexposed due to the much much wider dynamic range of the sensor when my exposure compensation is at 0 (zero). I was using the body's metering, so it has nothing to do with the translucent mirror. The histogram is smack right in the middle and the peaks are all concentrated in the center - indicating everything is within range. So I have to expose right to get things back to where I want. Then again, I was using matrix metering as opposed to center weighted or spot which could be more precise. Zone focusing is pretty handy where you don't have to cycle along all individual focusing spots to get where you want. It's very precise for everyday use. For the extra finesse, there's always local focus points to choose from.

I'll update more as needed.