![]() ![]() It didn’t always keep the subject in absolutely pin-sharp focus during extended bursts, but even so, out of the thousands of images I took, only a handful were unusably out of focus. Indeed I found that continuous AF worked practically as well as with the native 70-200mm, giving an excellent proportion of keepers while achieving real-world speeds of 12-17fps. ![]() Set to AF-C and wide-area AF, the Alpha 9 was able to pick out planes as tiny dots in the distance and focus on them in the blink of an eye, then keep them sharp as they closed in on the camera, as with this Hawker Sea Hurricane below. Shooting fast-flying vintage fighter planes at the Shuttleworth Fly Navy day, I had to switch to using a Canon-mount Sigma 150-600mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sport lens with the Sigma MC-11 adapter to get enough reach. It only occasionally faltered when they were moving quickly away from the camera, giving a few frames that were a little less than pin-sharp – but this is a scenario in which DSLRs usually struggle too. ![]() I first tested continuous AF by photographing trains with the Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS lens, and the camera did an exceptional job, keeping them in sharp focus while shooting long bursts at 20fps with the lens set to f/2.8. ![]() Face detection is also available for portraits, with the option to lock focus on your subject’s eye. Hopefully Sony will soon fix this behaviour with a firmware update. This is especially strange as the AF point is highlighted in orange when positioned by touch, as you can see below, but this is usually invisible beneath your finger. But in one of the camera’s few operational missteps, the AF area isn’t highlighted in the viewfinder when you move it using the joystick, but instead drawn in a near-invisible grey. Alternatively you can select the focus point manually. Users can choose between allowing the camera to select the focus point itself, which with moving subjects it does uncannily well, and there’s also a centre lock-on AF mode in which the camera will attempt to track a specified subject based on its size and colour. This allows you to shoot sequences of frames and pick your favourite, confident that it will be in focus, as I did with the below shot of a Westland Lysander. Indeed, it’s mesmeric to watch the little green AF points light up and track across the viewfinder as the camera keeps a subject in its sights. It can focus on a subject practically anywhere in the frame, and use subject recognition to track it as it moves around. Fortunately, this is just as remarkable in practice as its specs suggest on paper. Given the Alpha 9’s aim of competing with pro DSLRs, a lot rests on its autofocus system. By default the display brightness is quite low, though, so you’ll need to turn it up on sunny days. The LCD is much the same as used in the Alpha 7 series, and its ability to tilt up or down is a real advantage for low- or high-level shooting, although it’s still not quite as versatile as a fully articulated screen. However the live-view feed doesn’t quite do justice to the panel resolution, and aliasing artefacts can often be seen in areas of fine detail. It’s bright and clear, and easy to see into the corners even if you wear glasses. With a 3.68-million-dot resolution and 0.77x magnification, the A9’s viewfinder has one of the highest specifications on the market. Video, Image Quality and Verdict Review.Viewfinder, Autofocus and Performance Review. ![]()
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