Thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video.
Today, we're talking about the a9 III,
a camera that has easily been your most requested topic
in the comments and on social
over the last couple months.
Now, I don't have a complete review for you today,
but I do have some test results to share.
I was waiting for Sony to send me
a final production copy of the camera
before I tested it too heavily,
and that's what we have here, so let's get undone.
(commanding music)
♪ Gerald Undone, he's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
"I'm Gerald Undone,
and my focus breathing is called meditation."
So, as I alluded to in the intro,
Sony lent me this camera to make this review.
I don't get to keep it.
No money changed hands,
and Sony does not get any input on this video's production
or get to preview before it's posted.
So, the main thing I was interested in testing
on this camera
was the dynamic range.
We already know the rolling shutter is nonexistent
because of the global shutter on the camera,
but historically, making a change like that
usually sacrifices dynamic range.
But before we jump into that, I'd like just to share
that this is probably my favorite body from Sony
when it comes to build and ergonomics.
It's not that different than something like the a7R V,
but it's a culmination
of everything good Sony's done so far.
We've got the R V's flippy, spinny,
twirly-whirly LCD screen,
an excellent viewfinder, full-size HDMI,
dedicated covers for mic and headphone,
four independent dials,
isolated controls for photo and video,
the alpha 1's drive and focus combo dial,
and an extra custom button on the front
that I believe is new to the a9 III.
The contour and slope of the shutter button
has been improved,
and there's a satisfying new clickiness
to the top thumb dials,
truly the best body Sony has made,
and I hope this design is carried forward to other models
in the future.
Internally, it has all the features we've seen
from the last half-dozen Sony cameras
plus a plethora of new stuff
designed to leverage
its incredible photography capabilities,
but for video shooters,
it maintains the new video priority display,
the at-a-glance main pages in the menu,
the log shooting mode with user LUTs, and so on,
but it's also the first camera
to borrow options from the vlogging line,
like the dynamic active stabilization seen on the ZV-E1.
It's also got the self-timer for video, the auto-framing,
and the AI autofocus stuff,
and it also has the new webcam protocol
that allows up to 4K30 over USB-C.
I honestly couldn't find anything missing.
If we've talked about it in the last few camera reviews,
it's almost certainly in this camera too
and in some cases a more refined version,
but there's even a few new additions;
like, now you can set the shutter speed to increments
that better line up with frame rate for 180-degree shutter,
like 1/48 and 1/96 of a second.
Still no shutter angle, though,
and inexplicably, still no 30p when shooting H.265.
So, we've got a new body
with a 6K stacked global shutter sensor,
all the bells and whistles Sony's developed
across their different camera segments,
their best autofocus, their best stabilization,
and, in my opinion, their best design and ergos to date.
So, how's the dynamic range? It's fine.
So, as usual, I busted out the Xyla 21,
and I ran some dynamic range tests,
so if you look at the top here, this is which test was run,
so in this case it's 4K24 at ISO 2000.
Now, keep in mind the base ISO on this camera is ISO 2000
when shooting S-Log3.
Normally, with S-Log3 on other Sony mirrorless cameras,
it's around ISO 640 or 800,
so this is significantly higher,
so that's something to keep in mind.
Now, if we look at slope-based DR over here,
with a score of 14.7,
that's basically how many stops we can detect total,
so this would be, you know, a 14-plus or a 15-stop sensor.
And then the numbers below that
are based on noise tolerance,
you know, how many stops
if you're willing to accept X amount of noise,
and normally, we look at the 0.5 or medium score,
which is a signal-noise ratio of two,
and in that case, we get 11.5.
Now, this is definitely a little bit lower
than what we would see on another Sony mirrorless camera.
Now, the only thing with the Sony mirrorless cameras
is we don't really know what's going on
in the processing pipeline.
We don't have any control over noise reduction.
There's generally no setting in the menu
to be able to turn it off or turn it down,
so if we just assume that noise reduction is the same
on, say, something like an a7 IV versus the a9 III,
then we would say
that the medium score is about a stop worse on the a9 III
because the Sony mirrorless cameras normally score
around 12 1/2,
sometimes a little bit more,
and this is at least a stop worse than that.
But I have a theory
that maybe the noise reduction isn't the same on the two,
or definitely, the way that the noise is processed
doesn't feel the same to me on the a9 III,
and I'll show you some examples of that in a second.
But first, let's jump through some other results here.
This is 4K24 at ISO 5000,
and the reason why I did this test
is because some people have suggested that they think
that ISO 6400 is sort of a second native ISO.
Now, I don't have any proof or official word on that,
but I do notice,
and you can see here if I flip back and forth
between ISO 5000 and 6400,
that there is, like, a flicker
and the noise does seem to clean up quite a bit.
Now, I don't know if this is just a new level of processing
that's implemented at ISO 6400 as we get into the high ISO
or if it actually is a dual native,
but I did run a test, and at ISO 5000,
you can see that we get a medium score of 10.2,
but at ISO 6400, it jumps up to 10.7,
so there definitely is an improvement.
Could just be more noise reduction,
or it could be some kind of dual-native situation,
but in either case, it's not a true dual native,
where we're getting back to our first native scores.
We're not getting 11 1/2 stops again.
We're still worse off than we are at ISO 2000
but seemingly better than if you were at ISO 5000,
so if you're using this camera for video
and you're shooting at ISO 5000,
ya might be better off just bumping up a third of a stop
to get to that 6400
and then, you know, compensating in another way.
Regardless of what it's actually doing,
it does appear to test a little bit cleaner,
so that's good to know.
And then 4K120 at ISO 2000, I wanted to test this
because this camera seemingly doesn't have any limitations
on the 4K120.
I mean, there are still some quirks,
where you can't turn on dynamic active stabilization,
and so on,
but it's not like it crops in
or does anything extreme in 4K120.
The framing looks the same.
The image looks the same,
so I wanted to see is the dynamic range the same.
And yes, still getting at least 11 1/2 stops even in 4K120,
so that's great news.
So, here I have a clip
of moving through the ISO ranges
on the a9 III and the a7 IV.
I compared it to the a7 IV because they're both...
Well, the a7 IV is 7K,
but they're both, like, 6 to 7K oversampled sensors
of the same sort of era,
and I wanted to see what does the noise look like,
so on top, we have the a9 III.
It starts at ISO 2000,
and I compared it, starting at ISO 800.
But then we're gonna move up
from ISO 800 to 1600 and then to 2000
on the a7 IV
to see at what point does the noise match,
and around 2000 here, I was like, "Okay, yeah,
I guess they look kinda similar when they're both at 2000,"
so I guess that's good to know.
But then as we're moving up through the range,
I noticed that 6400 wasn't really any better on the a9 III,
despite that possible dual native ISO thing,
so I thought that was kind of interesting.
If anything, it might be slightly worse.
And then at 12800,
I would say it's clearly worse on the a9 III than the a7 IV
and even more so at 25600.
There is a massive difference here.
And then finally, only the a7 IV can do 51200,
which isn't even an option on the a9 III.
So in low light, I would say the a7 IV still clearly wins,
which is supported by our Xyla 21 test results,
but if we take a look at another clip here,
we have the a9 III and the a7 IV both at ISO 2000,
but I boosted up the exposure in post
so we could really look at the noise.
Look at the right-hand side of the frame
and the darkness there,
and you'll notice that the a7 IV's noise seems
to be more smoothed out,
a little bit mushier,
possibly more processed,
where the a9 III's appears to be finer.
This was same lens, same focus,
same aperture, same everything.
So then I took a closer look
at the original Xyla 21 test results
and zoomed in
to see what was going on with the noise there.
Now, on the left, you can see a9 III
with no extra noise reduction;
on the right, a7 IV with no extra noise reduction.
So if we zoom in equally on both, we can see the same thing.
There's a bit more...
It seems like a less processed image.
The edges are more refined,
but there is noise throughout them.
There's a bit more color noise on the a9 III,
and you could see more noise,
more, like, snow in the shadows,
on the a9 III,
where that's all sort of smushed away on the a7 IV.
So what happens if we do noise reduction in post
to make the image on the left
look like the image on the right?
And I know we're getting a little bit wonky here
in terms of...
We're making a lot of assumptions
because we don't know what the Sony does internally, right?
But let's say we take something like this,
which I would say...
I did this in DaVinci Resolve, and it looks closer.
It looks closer than the previous image did
as far as what our blacks look like,
how we've kinda lost a little bit of that edge,
and how the color noise is quite subdued.
If we run this test on the left again in Imatest
to see the score for dynamic range
now that it more closely matches the a7 IV,
the medium score jumps up to 12.5 stops, a full stop more,
and pretty much on par with what we normally would get
from an a7 IV or another Sony mirrorless camera.
Now, to you, as a shooter,
you know, this could mean a few things.
This could mean "well, you know, gimme the a7 IV."
We're obviously excluding price,
and we're excluding everything right now.
We're just comparing images:
"Which workflow would you want
if everything else was the same?"
Well, you might say, "Well, the a7 IV image
is creating that for me automatically,
and I have to do less work, so gimme that."
But alternatively, you might say, "Well, in the instances
where I want to only put on a little noise reduction,
where I really wanna dial it in or I want this or that,
then the a9 III gives you more control."
Usually, I opt for more control,
but in this case,
more control is really just equalizing
what the a7 IV is doing internally,
and again, the a7 IV looks better
at the much higher ISOs
and can go higher, can go to, you know, 51200.
So I would still definitely give it to the a7 IV,
but it's not something
where I would immediately say the a9 III is just worse.
I would say that it's different.
It's noisier, for sure.
The image is noisier outta camera,
but you can work it a little bit to make it match,
where the a7 IV can't really be worked too much more
with noise reduction,
because it's already being processed
to, you know, the limit, I would say.
Finally, I also did a basic rundown test.
I set the overheating threshold in the camera to high.
I charged the battery to 100%,
then started recording in 4K at 24 frames per second
in my 23C, or 73.4 Fahrenheit, studio,
and the camera recorded for 2 hours and 16 minutes
before it shut down because of a dead battery.
I didn't have any overheat warnings,
but as we've discussed before,
this is highly dependent on your ambient temperature,
so all I can vouch for
is that you can get over two hours of record time
on a single battery
and that it likely won't overheat
in a 23C-or-less climate-controlled environment.
So, that's all I have to report today.
Lemme know in the comments what else you'd like me to test,
and also let me know how you feel about the compromise
of trading some extra noise
for eliminating rolling shutter completely.
Worth it? Or nah?
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Alright... I'm done.
(catastrophic music)