The α77's body feels superb. In hand it reminds me a lot of the 7D. The grip is snug in hand with a great tactile finish. The buttons. joystick, and wheels click, move, and turn satisfyingly. The weight is solid without feeling heavy.
Sony's 3 stage LCD hinge system is flexible and despite more moving parts than a single swivel feels solid and sturdy. The LCD itself is excellent and aside from the Canon 60D's LCD the best in class. My only complaint, addressable in firmware, is that if the LCD is positioned underneath the camera body facing the lens it does not change orientation. You see an upside down image. It's an odd omission since the LCD's orientation does change in any other position.
The α77's EVF (electronic viewfinder) is truly next generation. While not quite as convincingly spacious as Sony's own A900 pentaprism, itself the standard in today's digital 35mm bodies, it is close. The advantage of the EVF is that you get more information overlays and see the image you'll get.
In operation, the α77's AF is snappy and operations are swift with a few caveats. The modest memory buffer demands premium memory cards to keep up with the voracious amounts of data that the α77 is capable of capturing. The omission of more buffer memory is curious given that speed is the camera's strength. But the D7000 weakness is similar. My guess is cost required compromise and burst FPS won versus continuous FPS in the marketing department.
The reported micro lag between shutter and aperture wheel scrolling does exist and is noticeable but I haven't found it a major hinderance to performance just noticeable. When turning the system on there is also the micro lag that is again just enough to be noticeable but not a major performance obstacle.
I'm not a fan of the AVHCD format but there's nothing to complain about concerning the quality that the α77 puts out. I don't know how it compares against the GH2, as I didn't own the latter for long, but compared to the 5D2 the output holds its own.
Without widespread RAW support I've only shot JPEGs. Image IQ looks to be excellent at base ISO through ISO 1600. It looks like Adobe ACR 6.5 now supports A77 RAWs but I haven't shot in the format yet.
DigitalRev's Review on the light loss associated with pellicle mirror technology looks to be spot on. You do seem to lose about 1/3 stop of light sensitivity.
Problems:
In the field I found no major flaw in design, execution, or UI. But like all people I do have a list of nice to have...
- a dedicated Fn hot key.
- iimage/aperture preview button were opened up to a more generic Fn button.
- view stills and jpegs in the same playback screen.
- view histogram and/or level with other overlays.
- having an option to have the LCD orient itself with vertical/horizontal shooting positions
- having the LCD orient itself when in the bottom forward facing position
- a bigger buffer -- using the latest memory stick flushes the buffer significantly faster than SD cards
Sony's 3 stage LCD hinge system is flexible and despite more moving parts than a single swivel feels solid and sturdy. The LCD itself is excellent and aside from the Canon 60D's LCD the best in class. My only complaint, addressable in firmware, is that if the LCD is positioned underneath the camera body facing the lens it does not change orientation. You see an upside down image. It's an odd omission since the LCD's orientation does change in any other position.
The α77's EVF (electronic viewfinder) is truly next generation. While not quite as convincingly spacious as Sony's own A900 pentaprism, itself the standard in today's digital 35mm bodies, it is close. The advantage of the EVF is that you get more information overlays and see the image you'll get.
In operation, the α77's AF is snappy and operations are swift with a few caveats. The modest memory buffer demands premium memory cards to keep up with the voracious amounts of data that the α77 is capable of capturing. The omission of more buffer memory is curious given that speed is the camera's strength. But the D7000 weakness is similar. My guess is cost required compromise and burst FPS won versus continuous FPS in the marketing department.
The reported micro lag between shutter and aperture wheel scrolling does exist and is noticeable but I haven't found it a major hinderance to performance just noticeable. When turning the system on there is also the micro lag that is again just enough to be noticeable but not a major performance obstacle.
I'm not a fan of the AVHCD format but there's nothing to complain about concerning the quality that the α77 puts out. I don't know how it compares against the GH2, as I didn't own the latter for long, but compared to the 5D2 the output holds its own.
Without widespread RAW support I've only shot JPEGs. Image IQ looks to be excellent at base ISO through ISO 1600. It looks like Adobe ACR 6.5 now supports A77 RAWs but I haven't shot in the format yet.
DigitalRev's Review on the light loss associated with pellicle mirror technology looks to be spot on. You do seem to lose about 1/3 stop of light sensitivity.
Problems:
In the field I found no major flaw in design, execution, or UI. But like all people I do have a list of nice to have...
- a dedicated Fn hot key.
- iimage/aperture preview button were opened up to a more generic Fn button.
- view stills and jpegs in the same playback screen.
- view histogram and/or level with other overlays.
- having an option to have the LCD orient itself with vertical/horizontal shooting positions
- having the LCD orient itself when in the bottom forward facing position
- a bigger buffer -- using the latest memory stick flushes the buffer significantly faster than SD cards