Sony Alpha A9 III
Sony’s latest sports and action camera is the world’s first with a global shutter. Andy Westlake finds out how it performs
Sony’s Alpha A9 III is the latest in the firm’s line of specialist cameras purpose-designed for professional sports and action photography. In an eye-catching technological breakthrough, it’s the first full-frame camera with a global shutter sensor. Technically, this means that the camera is capable of exposing and reading out every pixel simultaneously. This distinguishes it from other pro sports cameras like the Canon EOS R3 and the Nikon Z 9 (or Z 8), where the sensor is read out sequentially line-by-line, albeit at extremely high speed.
For the A9 III’s target audience, the global shutter is something of a holy grail, as it brings several unique advantages. In principle, there should be no subject distortion due to rolling shutter, nor any flickering or banding artefacts in artificial light. Flash sync is also available at all shutter speeds, without needing to use a power-sapping highspeed sync mode. Sports photographers should also find it’s immune to a phenomenon where parts of LED advertising boards can appear blacked-out.
These advantages are backed up by astonishing continuous shooting and autofocus specifications. The camera is capable of 120 frames per second in full-resolution raw, while tracking focus on subjects as they move around the frame, and with no viewfinder blackout. It’ll also record 4K video at 120fps using the full sensor width. Such capability doesn’t come cheap, though; you’ll have to pay £6,100 for the privilege of owning one.
Sony’s original Alpha A9 was
undeniably a landmark camera, as it was the first mirrorless model to comprehensively outperform high-end sports DSLRs. Sony certainly wants us to believe the same of the A9 III, describing it as a ‘game-changer’ in its marketing. But while the global shutter may be a godsend for pro photographers shooting the Paris Olympics this summer, what does it mean for the rest of us, and is it a pointer towards how all cameras will work in the future?
Features
Let’s take a closer look at what the A9 III offers. It’s built around a 24.6MP full-frame sensor, which in addition to having a global shutter, employs stackedCMOS architecture for rapid shooting and data readout. Sony is sufficiently confident in this technology that it’s left out a physical shutter entirely, which means the camera can operate completely silently.
Sports cameras are often used with very fast shutter speeds, and the A9 III offers settings as high as 1/80,000sec. The catch is that initially this is only available in single-shot mode, with the top speed limited to 1/16,000sec for continuous shooting. Sony is promising to fix this with a firmware update.
In the first clue that the global shutter is not without its drawbacks, the sensitivity range covers ISO 250-25,600 as standard, and ISO 125-51,200 extended. This is narrower at both ends than the previous A9 II, which offered ISO 100-51,200 as standard. The lack of an ISO 100 option means that logically, the A9 III won’t be able to deliver images with quite such low noise and high dynamic range as its predecessor in favourable lighting conditions. Meanwhile, the reduced top setting suggests increased noise at high ISOs.
There’s an argument that the ISO 250 limit isn’t really a problem, as sports photographers rarely employ such low ISO settings anyway. However, it could impact their ability to take panning shots at slow shutter speeds without having to fit a neutral density filter.
While the A9 III can shoot at 120fps, Sony has recognised that nobody needs to shoot this fast all the time. So there’s a new Continuous Shooting Speed Boost function which allows the camera to be temporarily switched up from a slower speed, simply by holding down a button. This can also be set to slower speeds if you prefer.
In another new feature for Sony, Pre-Capture is also available. Here, the camera can continuously buffer up to a second’s worth of images, then record them to card when the shutter button is fully depressed. In principle, this allows you to capture unpredictable action when normally you wouldn’t have time to react.
Sony’s latest subject detection autofocus system is onboard, inherited from the high-resolution A7R V. It’s powered by its own AI processor, with dual Bionz XR processors handling everything else. The system can recognise and track focus on a wide range of subjects, including people, animals, birds, insects, cars and airplanes. One new feature, at least for Sony, is custom AF areas, that allow the user to
specify rectangular zones for autofocus.
In-body stabilisation is included, promising an impressive 8.0 EV of shake reduction. You may think this will bring little benefit for sports photography, but it could be handy for those who’d like to convey a sense of motion using long exposures.
While the A9 III isn’t especially designed for video, it can still record in 4K at 120fps, with 6K oversampling for maximum quality. This is backed up by 10-bit 4:2:2 colour, with S-Log3 and S-Cinetone support. Sony’s active image stabilisation is also on board to provide smooth handheld footage.
Pro-spec connectivity is built-in, including an Ethernet port and a super-fast 10Gbps USB-C port. As usual, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are also on board for connecting to a smartphone via the Sony Creators app. This offers the expected functions, including the ability to control the camera remotely and copy images to your phone for sharing.
Build and handling
In terms of design, the A9 III is a relatively compact, single-gripped camera that accepts an optional add-on VG-C5 vertical grip. This stands in contrast to the Nikon
Z 9 and Canon EOS R3, both of which include integrated vertical grips that house hefty batteries for extended shooting. As for the control layout, it’s very similar to the high-resolution A7R V, with most of Sony’s latest design tweaks on board. However, the A9 III boasts additional dials on the top left for continuous shooting and autofocus modes. Existing Sony users should be able to pick it up and use it pretty much straight away.
There are no fewer than four electronic dials for changing settings, with an exposure mode dial on top (which is unusual for a camera of this type). A large AF-ON button is placed above the AF selector joystick, while the video button is tucked away next to the viewfinder. A switch beneath the mode dial selects between stills, video, and quick/ slow motion, and you can tell the camera to use entirely separate settings for each.
However, there’s more to the A9 III than just a lightly reworked A7R V. Its handgrip has been reprofiled and moved further away from the lens mount, resulting in a body that’s 7mm wider than the A9 II’s. This also creates space for a new C5 function button on the front, which by default engages the 120fps speed boost option. Meanwhile, the two function buttons on top behind the shutter release have been made larger and more positive.
It’s noticeable how much of an improvement this all makes when you’re wearing gloves, which I found very welcome on some freezing winter days. On other Sony cameras, your fingers can end up feeling uncomfortably jammed in between the handgrip and the lens. This may sound like a minor point, but many pro sports shooters have to shoot outdoors in the cold and rain.
In this regard, the only fly in the ointment lies with the locking buttons on the top-plate dials. These must be held down whenever you want to change the drive or exposure mode, but their shallow travel makes this awkward with gloved hands. Here, Canon and Nikon’s approach of pushing a button and spinning dial arguably still makes more sense.
As on other recent Sony models, the A9 III gains a whole new level of touch operation. This works not only with the onscreen Fn menu, but also with a second set of touch buttons that can be called up and dismissed by swiping left or right at the edge of the screen. It’s a nice option to have available for changing secondary settings more quickly.
Naturally, a high level of customisation is available. For example, you can remap pretty much every button to whichever function you find most useful, change how the dials behave, and customise the Fn menu. It’s also now much easier to build a custom My Menu of your most used settings, simply by pressing the Delete key when you have an item selected. This is especially welcome, as the menu is vast and suffers from more than its fair share of incomprehensible abbreviations. This minor gripe aside, though, it’s clear that the A9 III is the best-handling camera that Sony has made to date.
Viewfinder and screen
When it comes to composing and viewing your images, the A9 III employs a similar set-up to the A7R V. It boasts a huge, detailed 9.44m-dot viewfinder that offers 0.9x magnification, but with a key difference being that it’s entirely blackout-free during continuous shooting. This results in a fantastic viewing experience that none of its competitors can quite match (although to be fair, they’re not far off in practical terms).
It also uses the same rear screen design as the A7R V. The 3.2in, 2.1m-dot LCD is attached
to a side-hinged, fully articulated mechanism that allows it to face in almost any direction; up, down, left, right or even forwards. This is mounted onto a frame that also enables the screen to be tilted up and down while keeping it behind the camera. As a result, it’s particularly easy to set up the camera in awkward shooting positions.
There’s a comprehensive array of viewing aids on hand, too. Sony previews colour, exposure and depth-of-field by default, which means you get a very good idea of how your images are going to turn out. You can also display a small live histogram and electronic levels, although not at the same time. There’s not a lot else you could ask for, really.
Autofocus
We’ve become used to Sony’s high-speed cameras offering class-leading autofocus, and the A9 III doesn’t disappoint. I tested it with a range of subjects, including athletes, rally cars, and birds in flight, and found it to be astonishingly fast and reliable. Indeed, among the many thousands of frames I shot with the camera, it’s hard to find many that are out of focus.
Subject detection works incredibly well, regardless of whether it’s faced by people, vehicles, or animals. It’s impossibly quick, locking onto subjects in an instant, and then following them precisely as they move around the frame. It will also concentrate on the most important part of a subject as it gets larger within the frame.
However, if you use one of the wide area AF modes, Sony doesn’t make it very easy for you to select between multiple subjects that the camera has detected. Instead, it’ll usually concentrate on whichever is largest and closest to the centre of the frame. I found the easiest way to deal with this was to use a smaller AF area to pick up the subject initially.
You will also need to use Sony’s own lenses to get AF tracking to work at the very highest frame rates. Having said that, I shot both birds in flight and rally cars using the Sigma 100-400mm F6-6.3 DG DN OS and found the camera still tracked focus effectively in the 15fps mode.
I do have a couple of operational gripes, though. Where Canon and Nikon allow you to toggle AF tracking on or off at the touch of a button, Sony forces you to select between a replicate set of AF-area modes instead. There’s also no auto option where the subject detection can select between the various subject types automatically. I suspect that much of the time, that won’t be a concern for the camera’s target audience. But there are certainly some sports where it would be helpful to have the camera recognise people at the same time as cars, motorcycles, or animals.
My overwhelming impression from working with the A9 III, though, is that it’s a camera that will autofocus on pretty much whatever you point it at, no matter where it is in the frame or how fast it’s
moving. You just have to work out how best to configure it for each type of subject you shoot.
Performance
Just as we’d expect from a pro sports camera, in practical use the A9 III is incredibly quick and responsive. It fires up the moment you flick the power switch, and then reacts instantly to all the controls. Its shutter button requires only the lightest of touches before focusing and firing off a burst of frames.
With no mechanical shutter, the A9 III is inherently silent in operation. That’s great for many situations, but there are times when you could do with audible feedback that you’re actually shooting. Here the camera can play fake shutter sounds, and Sony has assigned the volume control to an external button (C3). This allows you to easily change it from loud, through quiet, to muted. I must admit I couldn’t understand this decision when I first got the camera, but it really does make sense.
Battery life is highly dependent upon how you shoot. The CIPA-standard figures of 400 shots per charge using the EVF, or 530 with the LCD, only really apply when you’re shooting single frames at a time. In reality, when mostly shooting bursts, I got the best part of 2,000 frames from a battery with plenty to spare.
As for the continuous shooting performance, suffice to say that this is a camera that’ll shoot faster than you’ll normally ever need, for longer than you’ll normally ever need. In my tests, it maintained its headline 120fps speed for at least 190 frames when shooting compressed raw, before throttling back to a mere 30fps or so. Drop back to a still-rapid 15fps, and it’ll keep on shooting for about 400 frames.
You don’t necessarily need to use a CFexpress card to benefit from its sheer speed, either. Instead, the advantage of the faster media lies in how rapidly the camera can write buffered frames to the card. For a 200-frame burst, this takes about 10 seconds with CFexpress, but 30 seconds with even the fastest UHS-II SD cards. Pro users will surely invest in CFexpress, but it’s good to know you can fall back on SD cards too.
I found the metering and auto white balance systems to be very reliable – perhaps more so than on Sony’s other recent cameras. It generally does a good job of retaining highlight detail without underexposing and blocking up shadows. However, when playing back your images on the rear screen, it often looks as though highlights are clipping in a rather ugly fashion, but then the same files will look much better on a computer. This can tempt you to apply unnecessary exposure.
Shooting in daylight, you’ll get natural-looking colours that err more towards realism than making punchy-looking JPEGs. But that’s probably not a bad thing on a camera that’s tilted mainly towards photojournalism. You can always boost the warmth, vibrance and contrast later.
Under artificial lighting, though, things are more complicated. You won’t see colour banding on any individual image, but you can certainly get colour variations between frames due to the flickering effect of the lighting. This can result in some frames with rather unattractive colour if you’re using a preset or manual white balance.
When it comes to examining the raw image quality, though, we see the compromises Sony has made in building this astonishing camera. Because of how the global shutter works, each pixel is limited in terms of the amount of light it can capture. The upshot is that it simply can’t match its 24MP full-frame peers, such as the Nikon Z f or Panasonic Lumix S5 II, in terms of dynamic range and high-ISO noise.
In practice, this means that at its highest standard ISO settings, the A9 III’s files end up just that bit lacking in detail and colour compared to its peers. However, that doesn’t mean those images are unusable. And while ISO 51,200 raw files look pretty bad when viewed in Adobe Camera Raw, Sony’s in-camera processing does a surprisingly good job of cleaning up the JPEGs.
Probably the biggest drawback comes with respect to dynamic range, and in particular, the ability to recover extra shadow details from raw files. Things aren’t too bad at ISO 250; I shot a couple of sunrise landscapes, and was able to convincingly bring up as much extra detail as I needed. But the moment you try to bring out extra shadow detail in files shot at even slightly higher settings, you’ll find there’s just not very much on offer.
It’s important to acknowledge that for much of the A9 III’s target audience, these image quality compromises will be an entirely acceptable trade-off for its unique superpowers. But they do mean that it’s a specialist product that makes little sense outside of its own particular niche.