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I got my 99 yesterday. The EVF is very responsive. I have no wait time for it to fire up unlike when using my 5n with the EVF attached. Big test comes tonight. I will be using it inside a gymnasium. I cannot wait to see how it fares. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Well I just got back from shooting in a crappy gymnasium. The lighting is so bad that the white balance changes by the second. I used a 70-200G zoom so I did not have the benefit of the dual focus system. Despite this the focus was incredibly fast and spot on. Way better than my 850 under these conditions. The EVF was a non issue. There was no lag at all during the cheer competition. I did find that at times I could see the camera metering differently for the lighting because the image in the view finder would change. This was a little annoying but I imagine this was going on with my 850 but you do not get to see how the camera is seeing until you take the picture. I attribute this to the constantly changing light conditions that are subtle to the human eye but not to a camera. Its those shots that you could not figure out why they came out a bit off and different from a just previously shot even though the metering appeared the same. There was absolutely no waiting for the EVF. When I placed my eye to the view finder the image was there.

I was hoping for better iso performance. I was hoping for completely clean 6400 and and out of the camera printing even at 12800. OK so my expectations are probably the problem not the camera. I have yet to print any of these pictures out but with a bit of editing in LR4 , 6400 are better than 800 on my 850 and 12800 looks to be very usable. I want to print out a shot at 12800 to see if it looks as good as on the screen. Actually, the noise is only an issue when you zoom in or significantly crop the photo. I usually shoot in manual but actually shot in shutter priority tonight. The auto iso is wonderful. The ability to set the iso range is as it should be but one must not take logical outcomes for granted.

This camera is a great deal more than my 850 and I of course am still getting to know agent 99. I am half tempted to try my 70-400G at the competition tomorrow. I know I will be taking it with me. I took some video, but I have yet to look at it. The only true con I have at this point was the speed of shooting. I was shooting probably too many photos and I missed several shots because I was waiting for the camera to complete writing to the card which is an extreme pro scandisk. However, I was also writing to the second card slot as well which was a slower card. I never had the ability to do this before so I don’t know how that effects the speed of the camera. OK maybe it was the fact I was kicking the tires on this new vehicle because for a 3 minute routine I took 218 photos.

The lock button on the selection wheel is a nice add. I am going to print some of the photos that I took tonight and tomorrow. That will give me a good indication on the 99′s iso performance. The focus is an A+ and the colors are true. Another test will come in a few weeks when I start shooting Football under the lights. If this camera can continue to spot on focus at high speeds and the 6400 is good than I think 99 and I will have many years of enjoyable photographing adventures. This looks to be a very fine camera. Tomorrow is day 2 and I cannot wait. This is going to be fun.