In a curious twist of fate, I have decided to sell my Phase One/Mamiya gear and have purchased a Sony a900 to take its place. The Phase One P30+ leaves behind some big shoes to fill, both literally and figuratively. My total investment in the system was over $25,000 about 18 months ago. I am still paying on that loan, and that was a major motivator to jettison the P30+. More than anything, selling it is my attempt at coming back to earth and responsibly managing my expenses and balancing my photo capabilities and goals. Here’s my mini review of the a900 in comparison to the P30+.
The Phase One system does many things with aplomb, including bar-none top image quality (with caveats). One of things it does not excel at is single camera versatility. This is due mainly to its speed, size/weight, auto-focus (AF) performance, and low-light (high ISO) performance. Now granted, none of those are qualities that any medium format digital back (MFDB) system currently excels at or even attempts to excel at. That is just not what medium format is intended to do. Medium format digital is for the achieving world-class image quality when you have the time, perseverance, patience and right the conditions to plan and set up a shot and know that you just nailed it. I knew this going into the system, and I was looking forward to it slowing down my shooting and making me more methodical, which in theory would end up in superior photographs. My theory was partially right (for me anyway). It slowed me down, I had to take more time in taking a photograph and thought about the shot more before pressing the shutter. I ended with some of the best shots of my life with the Phase system. However, I also missed an untold number of images due to the disadvantages mentioned above. Gone were the days of shooting light and fast, or low-light handheld (my favorite) shooting. I took a significant amount of handheld 1600 ISO (the highest on the P30+) images with the camera, a lot weren’t worth the effort and would have been better served with a lower ISO and a tripod. But with the ponderous nature of a tripod, most wouldn’t have been taken at all.
All of that is just icing on the cake when you think about ridding yourself of a five-figure loan at the same time.
In walks the Sony a900. I have to admit, Sony wasn’t even my radar when I started looking at getting back into the 35mm DSLR market. A prior sour taste in my mouth from Canon (which is original what sparked my switch to Phase One, a story for another time), and the continued static on the forums about Canon’s poor QC, left me with Nikon. The Nikon D3x at 24.6 megapixels (MP) is currently the only camera in Nikon’s lineup that would be acceptable to me. The rest are too low of resolution (you simply can’t go from 31.5mp to 12mp, your eyes would instantly catch on fire pixel peeping at your images). However, the D3x has a much lamented $8,000 price tag for the body alone. If I wanted to save any money, it wasn’t going to happen with that. The Sony a900 on the other hand, shares the same 24.6mp sensor as the Nikon D3x, but with a $2700 price tag instead. All said and done, I bought 3 lenses (2 Zeiss), the a900 body, extra battery, and an RRS L-plate and was still under the price of the D3x body. Sweet!
The a900 has a fantasmic build quality and confidence boosting feel. I was shocked. The body is reassuringly heavy (not a plastic toy feel like some other bodies) and the Zeiss lenses are an absolute knock out. You have to feel them to believe it. Even the lens hoods are made from aluminum instead of plastic. Something my $3500 Phase AF-D lens can’t even match. The system feels professional from the ground up. This is not a toy.
It has some great nifty features, but let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The body has built-in vibration reduction, which means that the sensor moves to compensate for handshake when shooting with slow shutter speeds. Furthermore, this means that ANY lens you put on the a900 is instantly vibration reduced. Canon and Nikon both implement vibration reduction in the lens, meaning that you have to specifically buy those types of lenses. Mamiya/Phase don’t offer vibration reduction of any flavor. Score one big point for the Sony. It doesn’t make a shit of difference how many beautiful megapixels your camera is if the image is all blurry. 65 million blurry pixels might as well be the same as 8mp blurry pixels. This in and of itself gives me a 2-4x stop improvement in low light shooting over my Phase One.
Next comes high ISO quality. The Phase One P30+ is built with microlenses over each pixel, which gives it a light gathering advantage over its brethren. I was able to get some usable shots at 1600 ISO. “Usable” is different for each person, but for my fine art work, noise generally doesn’t bother me as long as I’m expecting it and can work with it and not against it. The Sony a900 will shoot up to 6400 ISO however. I believe that the a900′s 3200 ISO matches the noise level of the P30+ at 1600 ISO (at least, maybe even 800). This gives me a 1-stop advantage. Pair that with the 2-4 stop vibration reduction, and we’re looking at a 3-stop advantage, easy, maybe even up to 5-stops. That’s not to say that 3200 ISO on the a900 is pretty, because it isn’t. But I think it’s usable, especially if you massage the noise in post processing and work with a high quality RAW converter (read, not Lightroom, again, a story for another time).
Next comes AF. So far, the autofocus in the a900 has been superb! I have had one small issue creep up on me twice though. If you focus on something very close, and then try to focus on something at infinity, the system seems to hang. It will try to hunt in the macro focus range instead of racking out to infinity to find its new target. Perhaps it’s user error or something I haven’t figured out. The AF speed and accuracy is without complaint, pretty awesome. I have yet to have any significant focusing errors in my images (a couple with loose focus here and there, but I attribute that to the wicked shallow depth of field of shooting at f/1.8 more than any AF error). Speed is fast, and the system shoots to focus with authority and purpose. No focus hunting other than the above situation, even is very very dim conditions.
The Zeiss lens quality is absolutely amazing. I’ve read reviews and accounts of Sony’s G and Zeiss series lenses being the best in the 35mm industry, and I now believe it. It blows any Canon lens I’ve ever owned (including several Canon L-primes) out of the water. The sharpness is on par (and sometimes, I believe a little better) than the already ridiculous sharpness of my Phase One and Mamiya prime lenses. I didn’t know what a sharp lens was until I shot with my Phase system for the first time. I purchased the Sony Carl Zeiss 135mm f/1.8, the Sony Zeiss 16-35mm f/2.8, and the Sony 50 f/1.4. I have yet to shoot with the 50 f/1.4 as the other two are just so amazing. The only downside I’ve noticed in lens image quality as compared to my Phase system is chromatic aberration and bokah. The CA seems to be a lot more noticeable with my Sony system, but I’m not sure whether to attribute that to the lenses themselves, or the lens/sensor combination. The P30+ uses a much larger physical sensor size, with no antialiasing filter, thus light rays hit the sensor at less oblique angles than they might with the 35mm sensor size of the Sony. Certainly, the CA I’m seeing in the Sony is no worse than anything from my Canon days. The bokah seems a little strange with the Zeiss 135mm as well, but it may be just be an aesthetic adjustment for me. I’m so used to shooting with the Phase One 150mm AF-D f/2.8 wide open, which produces a very shallow depth of field on MFDB, thus the background is very diffuse with creamy bokah.
Lastly, I would say the overall image quality differences between the two systems is slight and inconsequential for my purposes. There are some differences in dynamic range, color fidelity, noise, shadow clarity, and overall smoothness. I could, but I won’t go in to depth on those differences here; this post is boring enough. However, I have no doubt I can continue to create high-quality fine art images. The Sony produces more noise at lower ISOs than the Phase, but it’s just as sharp, focuses better, and is significantly more versatile. If you need the utmost in image quality without a care to convenience or speed, the Phase One system is for you. A year and a half ago, I thought that’s what I wanted, but I’ve changed my mind. The a900 has rekindled my love for photography and my inspiration to get out and shoot.
Sprinkled throughout this post are images that I’ve taken on a lunch time walk around Fort Collins. All are taken with the Zeiss 135mm, mostly wide open at or near f/1.8.
Here are three 100% crops (pixel for pixel) from larger images just to show the sharpness. I can confidently state that my Phase system could not best these in terms of sharpness, and I’d put them up against CaNikon anyday. Click on the image to view the full-size.
