Sony Alpha A900

Buttons & Dials

The two control dials, one mounted nearly vertically up in front of the shutter, one mounted horizontally just above the thumb rest, work nicely together. There is some confusion about which control handles what setting in some instances. Sometimes either one will do; when setting exposure compensation, for example, or browsing pictures in playback mode. When navigating through the menus, though, the rear control dial takes you from tab to tab, while the front dial moves the cursor vertically through the list of settings. Working with the camera on a regular basis, though, we got used to these idiosyncrasies.

The controller that continued to bother us, though, was the multi-selector, which we’re inclined to call a joystick. For changing settings and moving through the menu system, you can use the stick if you like or ignore it and use the wheel controls, which we much preferred. But you can’t get away from it entirely, because pressing it in toward the camera body is the equivalent of an OK button, which we found uncomfortable to maneuver (especially when we were in a hurry) and imprecise.

We were less than thrilled with the positioning of the exposure compensation, drive mode, white balance and ISO buttons on top of the camera. There’s really no convenient or comfortable way to press them: they require you to remove your finger from the shutter button, and move your hand and/or the camera substantially to push a button.

Creative Styles

The Creative Style system is Sony’s way of creating packaged groups of settings to fit particular shooting conditions. The A900 is brimming with choices, 13 in all. Sony describes them as follows. Each is shown with a crop from our still life, shot in the specified mode, to show the real-world effect of the Creative Style.

Each of these Creative Styles can be adjusted with the following five settings: Contrast, Saturation, Sharpness, Brightness, and Zone. It’s simple enough to change these parameters for the 13 included Creative Styles; the options are clearly labeled on the LCD display, and settings can be adjusted using either the joystick or the control wheels. What’s oddly missing is the option to create your own mix of settings and save them as a custom Creative Style.

Picture Effect Samples
Standard Vivid Neutral Clear Deep Light Portrait Landscape Sunset Night View Autumn Leaves B/W Sepia More...

In-Camera Editing

Nothing doing. You can gaze at your stored images as much as you like on the way home, but you can’t adjust them in-camera at all.

Menu

There are basically two parts to the Sony A900 menu system: the traditional tabbed on-screen display you bring up by pressing the Menu button, and the Quick Navi screen, which makes all the settings displayed on the full-screen LCD information display changeable by pointing, clicking and scrolling.

The back information display toggles between two levels of detail by pressing the DISP button (it can also be turned off entirely in the same way). At either detail setting, pressing the Fn button makes this screen interactive. An orange highlight shows which setting is active — the highlight can be moved using the joystick. As for changing the highlighted setting, you can scroll through the available choices sequentially by rotating either control dial, or press the joystick in and opening up a menu screen of choices.

One smart feature in the on-screen menu system is the fact that all settings available on a page are immediately visible, without having to scroll down to discover them. Each menu section — Recording, Custom, Playback and Setup — consists of multiple pages. Turning the rear control dial or pushing the joystick horizontally moves directly from page to page. Turning the front control dial or pushing the joystick vertically moves up and down the menu pages, scrolling to the next page in order if you continue beyond the bottom of the current page.

Instruction Manual

The camera instruction manual is quite small, which is handy if you want to carry it in your pocket, but does lead to squint-inducing type sizes. The material is well organized, written clearly and adequately illustrated. There are lots of cross-references to other relevant sections as you work your way through the manual, which makes up for an index that could be more complete.

Software documentation is handled entirely through the individual applications’ help system. We would have preferred some kind of printed (or even disk-based) quick-start guide, but the writing and presentation are clear enough to making the learning process smooth, especially if you have enough screen space to keep both the program and the on-screen instructions visible simultaneously.