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I wanted to love the a99. Followed it for almost a year here on this site. I have an a65, which I absolutely love. I do half video/half photo and the video that comes out of the a99 is so soft it saddens me. I know because I’ve pulled a few .MTS samples into Vegas Pro and really broke them down. I think Sony did this on purpose, though, since they have cameras like the FS100 that they *THINK* would go extinct overnight if the a99 shot sharper video. It’s a shame though, because I wanted to love it so much. Settled for a D800. But if Sony gets their video act together in a future SLT, I’d consider switching back. No 60 FPS is going to suck. Along with some other things.

How would you know what Sony will come up in the future and whether it is a good investment or not?
You suggest the D600? Yes you save money but you will spend that money on cleaning material to deal with the oil on the sensor…just check out all the tons of threads with people complaining about this problem. (dpreview!) The D800, plenty of refurbished models…sure – all the ones with the left af issue. Leave alone the lousy service people get from Nikon.

5DMKIII…great idea, particularly if you want to deal with banding issues…
Sony has not said that they will drop the A mount. Much more they are releasing new A mount lenses.
CZ lenses are the best ones on the market and only for Sony models do they work with af.
The grass is NOT greener on the other side IMHO.
Stef.

When I invested in my lenses I did the rounds of all the manufactures and the cost of the Canon and Sony equivalents were almost identical and the reviews for the Sony’s Ziess range sold it for me. They had just the right range of focal lengths available too, result. This made getting the A99 a no brainer ;-}

Si

PhotoNut, do you know why there are so many D800 and D600 cameras on eBay at the moment? As someone who sells these things daily let me tell you why:

1.) 1st generation shipments for both of these cameras were loaded with issues. And I mean loaded. Bad OVF set, off color LCD panels, off-sett AF matrices, the extreme dust issues of the D600, the lesser but still prevalent dust issues of the D800. The 10 pin remote connector popping out. Not one but TWO battery recalls. This is sloppy, sloppy, sloppy quality control and many folks felt burned by it. Understandably so.

2.) Half the people who purchase the D800 don’t want to purchase the right lenses for it and discover that their “investment” in older F mount optics is for naught because none of them can resolve 36mp for less than $1500 new. And that’s the CURRENT lineup. The legacy lenses don’t mean a thing on the D800, by a vast, vast majority; while most of them still have issues with the AF on the D600. Tell me again how they’re so innovative.

3.) Even if they DID invest in the lenses, the D800 file sizes are extraordinary and they don’t have a computer good enough to handle batch processing more than three RAW files at once without locking up.

4.) Despite what forum blathering would lead you to believe, a lot of people shoot jpeg… and neither the D600 nor the D800 have a jpeg engine worth discussing… leaving the user looking for the easy way out no option other than to shoot RAW, which they are trying to avoid, or find a better jpeg engine in a different unit.

As I tire of explaining: the D600 doesn’t play anywhere NEAR the same league as the A99v in capability… in fact the differences between the A99 and the D600 are more than the differences between a D3x and the A900… and that was a $5000 gap. Where were your rants about value then?

I could go on for a bit but this will suffice. The D800 and D600 were both released not entirely ready for prime time. Both Canon and Nikon, whether you like it or not, sir, feel a considerable amount of heat from Sony at the moment and rushed their FF releases to make it in time for the Holiday season… and we’re stuck to deal with the questions afterward.

You know what we haven’t had any issues with, or any defective swap outs for at my company, or even any returns of for that matter? The gdmn Sony A99v, that’s what. And that has caused even our Nikon and Canon fanatics on staff to start selling it. Because even they’ve begun to notice the unfortunate trend of quantity over quality at the big two… and, universally, when they finally pick it up, the A99v blows their minds. Because this is what the beginning of the future of DSLR photography looks like. It doesn’t look like ageing Canon or Nikon architecture. It looks like modern Olympus, Sony, and Panasonic architecture. It may even look like Fuji. But Canon and Nikon, no.