Sony Alpha A77 Digital Camera Review

Motion

The A77 reproduces motion very nicely for a consumer SLR. Moving objects are smooth with only very slight trailing. There's a bit of noisy artifacting especially in the blue channel, and some interference in high-contrast areas. Autofocus is very quick and accurate. Overall, motion is really quite good. More on how CamcorderInfo tests motion.

The two mirrorless cameras in our comparison group showed the best motion results, thought the A77 outpaces the Nikon D7000.

Video Sharpness

As good as the motion was, the sharpness results are weaker than we had hoped for. At rest, we spotted 600 horizontal and vertical lw/ph, dropping to 575 and 550 lw/ph respectively when in motion. That's notably worse than any cameras in our comparison group. We have a hunch that a part of it is the translucent mirror, which allows less light to the sensor than a mirrorless camera or a DSLR with a locked-up mirror. More on how CamcorderInfo tests video sharpness.

Low-light sharpness is similar to bright-light sharpness: 600 horizontal and vertical lw/ph at rest, dropping to 475 and 450 lw/ph respectively in motion. The NEX-7 and OM-D E-M5 both outperform the A77, though we didn't run this test on the D7000 last year.

Low Light Sensitivity

Here's one area where we're sure the translucent mirror hurt the video results: The A77 crossed our sensitivity threshold at just 28 lux, in the ballpark of most point-and-shoots.