The job? Four days on location corporate event shoot for a billion dollar company. No pressure for the A99 to perform, at least there shouldn't be any. =P
A photo of my photo (My photo is on the screen behind the presenter). Shot previously with a Canon 7D though.
>>> Comfort & Useability <<<
Holding the camera for extended period of times it is a little on the heavy side with flash, lens, etc attached, but that's as expected as it is a full frame camera. The issue I ran into was that my right pointer finger would get rubbed up against the top ridge of the grip and over time this made my pointer finger quite uncomfortable. This would be a non-issue for a shoot under 2 hours, but wedding photographers will most likely be up in arms over this issue.
Button placement & ergonomics are fantastic & everything is easy to adjust on the fly. The EVF is also very helpful displaying adjustments that you are making, so you never have to leave the viewfinder while in the middle of shooting.
The flipout screen many Sony users are familiar with is awesome. No complaints here.
Seeing changes realtime in the EVF & on the screen is equally awesome and every photographer would love this feature if they only knew.
>>>Autofocus<<<
Autofocus is acceptable. I don't think it's fast, but I don't think it's slow under normal shooting conditions. It's just middle of the road & this is something that Sony can definitely improve on. In lowlight it's slow by my measure, but with the HVL60 on top it became much snappier.
>>>Image Quality<<<
White Balance
Hands down the best auto white balance I have ever seen in my life. In previous cameras they would nuke scenes all yellow or all blue when they couldn't figure out the white balance. I would be hardpressed to get this camera to read the incorrect white balance. It's spot on everytime. Saves me a ton of time in post not having to fix the white balance.
A photo like this would strain the AWB of most cameras with it's hot & cold areas, but the A99 performs like a champ and nails it perfectly.
ISO
Fantastic ISO up to 1600, with useable 3200 & 6400. When using 6400 if you properly expose the image it comes out quite nice, but you can't crop in because the image quality will be degraded too much. ISO 1600 is beautiful.
ISO 6400
ISO 3200
ISO 1600
Color Depth
The best color rendition I have seen in a camera ever. Saves me a ton of time in post not having to enhance the color.
Color is fantastic. Sorry I don't have a better "color photo", but you can see skin color is duplicated flawlessly. There was no post production on this photo.
Dynamic Range
Best dynamic range I have seen in a camera ever. It's very difficult to run into a scene that this camera can't handle. If you do and it doesn't look good in playback you can take that bad boy into RAW and save the highlights & the shadows. I find that I can take shadows up to 50 in ACR Camera Raw with little to no damage to the original image. Highlights you don't have as much play, but you can save about a stop to a stop and a half of overblown highlights. Both are amazing feats by any measure.
Things to look for in this photo are the lights on the sides going up the curtains. Most cameras would most likely blow those areas out. Here the only thing that is blown out is the very bright stage lights, but I still think the A99 holds that well enough. I could have bumped the shadows in post more if I wanted to, but I wanted the focus to be more on the presenter.
Overall Image Quality
The photos that come out of this camera are bloody fantastic. I think that perhaps the only camera that can compete is the Nikon D800 (The D600 is crippled & the 5DMKIII can't keep up with the Sony in regards to IQ imo except at high iso).
>>>Camera Operation<<<
Great, amazing, we already knew all that stuff from a million reviews online right? What about actually using the camera?
Overall camera operation of hitting playback, ability to take another photo after you just snapped one, turning the camera on/off, formatting a card, etc is a little slow overall. With a traditional DSLR there would be little to no lag, but everything you do on the Sony A99 seems to come with a hair of lag. It's just a short enough lag that you don't complain too much about it, but it's long enough to notice.
The EVF was fantastic & image review in the EVF is brilliant, but sometimes I don't want image review in EVF if I'm busy shooting an action scene. At any event there is usually a combination of slow shots (posing, etc) and action shots, so it would be great if I didn't have to dig into menus to change that and could assign it to a button.
In the end I think I will be adapt to the weak points of the camera (not many). I have not set up my custom user dials yet, so perhaps I can have different EVF settings stored in each of those, but I have yet to run through all of the features of the camera (There are a ton!).
>>>Conclusion<<<
This camera is awesome, really awesome. The grip needs a hair of redesign, the autofocus can be sped up, camera operation can be sped up, but there's not too much to complain about other then that in regards to photo.
P.S.
When I told the AV team that I switched to Sony from Canon everyone had a good laugh. =P
P.P.S.
When the Canon guys were trying to take photos in the auditorium at 1/60 (Using a CN24702.8 & 5DMarkII) they were saying that "It's really dark in here." Of course with built in stabilization and that nice bright EVF I had no problem obtaining focus and sharp crisp images with the Sony A99.