A900 One Year Later

[douglasf13]

I am curious as to why most of the posters in this thread have not mentioned noise issues with the A900?  In early rounds of reviews including comps. with D3 etc. - the issue of noise always came up.  I noticed that the "one year later" poster...said nothing of the issue.  I love the feel of this camera in the hand-perfect, and like the Zeiss lenses...but am considering either the D700 or D3 for next cam. based on noise complaints.

The A900 has the best color in 35mm, and a dense CFA that requires more gain amplification because less light is reaching the sensor. So, it's a color trade off for high ISO. Granted, the A900 is still certainly usable at higher ISOs (if you don't use Adobe, outside of LR3,) and performs better than any aps-c camera at high ISO when compared at similar output sizes.

As for the Zeiss lenses, we can compare them all day to other lines and decide which has better sharpness, CA control, distortion, etc, but that really isn't what it's about. Here is a certain look that is relatively consistant across the Zeiss line, and some prefer it.

[brandtb]

Thanks Jeff/Erik/David/Tom for comments!  All fully understood.  I typically shoot at low ISO - and of course know that high and low ISO images are apples and oranges...typically.  I have two Oly E3's that I use on tripod for landscape and  architecural...now.  I also shoot a lot of agricultural scenes with animals.  I primarily shoot outdoors in daylight and it's fine for 90 % of my work. Example. Recently I found myself shooting late on a very windy day (gusts 20 mph or so)...sun was going down.  I had to bump up ISO to about 600  for shooting a pair horses e.g.. - to reduce chance of motion blur...especially in their manes and tails.  I HAD to get fast shutter speed or it wasn't going to work.  The E3 has always been a mixed bag in that instance and have learned to live with it...and I know ALL the reasons why (I happen to LOVE that cam. for a lot of other reasons)  As it happened there was one particular shot that was great...except for some bad patches of noise in some dark/shadow areas...and there is not a thing ACR 5.6, Ninja or anything else that is going to fix it.

To wit.  I am little tired of those instances ...and while there are relatively infrequent - I sometimes lose a really beautiful shot.  I am moving in the direction being a "full time" photographer at present (I have my first photography show this coming April) and am considering updgrading to another camera(s) for future work(am presently arch. and arch illustrator). I  want to try an reduce this problem to some degree in any new gear. This was not mentioned before, but I also want to add a PC control lens to the package on the next go round.  As far as I know, this is not a "viable" option for the A900.

Again, thanks to all for very valuable and helpful advice...