The Sony a9 just arrived, after a 1-day UPS delay for which B&H says they’ll make me whole. The battery is charging now, and I’ll be testing soon.
I’m going to use this page to point to the individual tests. I’ll be writing brief descriptions of some, and they’ll all be available if you scroll down to the bottom of this page, below the comments, and click on the pingback links. Each will take you to a post that tests the items mentioned in the title. Or, if you prefer, you should be able to find all the posts about that camera in the Category List on the right sidebar, below the Articles widget. There’s a drop-down menu there that you can use to get to all the posts in this series; just look for “a9”.
Some things I want to test:
Camera read noise and precision in continuous and single shot modes, with mechanical and electronic shutter, at all ISOs. That’s four tests: mechanical shutter in single shot mode, mechanical shutter in continuous mode, electronic shutter in single shot mode, electronic shutter in continuous mode. There may be more tests if it looks like the behavior is changing with frame rate.
Does the a9 suffer from the same non-defeatable low-pass filtering at exposures of 4 seconds and longer that Sony introduced to the a7RII with firmware release 3.30? Yes, it does.
Red channel banding. Lloyd Chambers has detected this on his copy of the camera.
Electronic shutter scan rate. I expect it to be fast. How fast? I’ll have to test.
The new menu system and the ergonomics. Having set up the camera on the tiny bit of charge that the battery arrived holding, I can tell you that is is dramatically different from the a7x menu system (which itself varied from model to model), and it appears to be much improved. For one thing, all the movie function are grouped together (hallelujah!).
Bokeh effects of the electronic shutter.
How well no-blackout EVF viewing works.
Let me know if there are additional tests you want done. I can promise to do them all, but I’ll certainly consider what you all want.
Would it be possible for you at some point to test Leica Summilux 50 & 35 against their Sony/Zeiss counterparts (or some other lenses which were problematic on A7 series) on A9? It would be wery interesting to me, because nowadays you have to choose between SL and M10 if you want to use Leica glass, and it is curious question if A9 has any chance to be good competitor.
The 50 ‘lux performs just as poorly on the a9 as on the a7II. I don’t have a 35 ‘lux.
Thanks for info on 50 ‘lux. Seems for Leica glass it’s M10 or SL.