I come from years of shooting Nikon and Hasselblad professionally.
I have used a900 system almost exclusively over the last two+ years.
I don't have much experience with the Sony repair service but I'm getting a glimpse of a very poor, we don't give a damn, you are a total inconvenience to us type of system. But my main issue is not so much to do with the repair system. It's more to do with the quality of the equipment that Sony is making and selling. I can understand my a900 has some quality issues. It's a cheap piece of crap really, compared to the D3X. But it has amazing image quality and it was only $3,000.00 so I thought "why not". So I gave it a shot. I thought with these new Zeiss lenses this system could be tolerable. And it is. I could go on about the focus points and the auto focus but I work around those issues and have come to love the image quality that the combo produces.
I purchased the Zeiss 135mm lens. Beautiful optics. Too sharp at times. A month or two of use and the ring at the front of the lens that holds the shade is loose. No biggy. But if you are charging pro money for equipment, which the price fro these Sony Zeiss lenses suggests, it should live up to that price.
Most of my summer was spent shooting a coffee table book for a publisher. I've been using the Zeiss 16-35mm quite a bit and again I have no complaints about the optics. This lens decided to fall apart on a shoot day on location. It was unusable. I suspect a screw came out of the focus mechanism and got caught up in the zoom ring and seized the lens up.
This equipment has been used but never abused. I have Zeiss lenses I bought in 1982 for my Hasselblads and they have had hundreds of thousands of exposures put through them and not one of them ever needed to be repaired.
If Sony is going to charge pro prices for their Zeiss lenses, they should be of pro build quality. I have not seen any indication of this. After my total disappointment in all this I sent the lens to Sony repair and left a message with the product rep at Sony Canada explaining I was a pro and had been using Sony gear etc, etc and that I was a not a happy camper. He couldn't be bothered to get back to me.
So here I am with a toy camera system with great image quality and brilliant optics (love my 50mm 1.4) and very poor build quality. The camera vertical grip has now started to rattle with a piece of what ever floating around inside. My dilemma now is, do I wait for a new flagship from Sony or dump this system and head back to Nikon?
Thanks for reading. Had to bitch to someone.
G
If I already had a Nikon D3x I would not waste my time with the Sony. The Sony alternative seems to be for those who either cannot afford (or choose not to spend) the price of a Nikon D3x. But, as a person who already has the Nikon D3x, it makes no logical sense why you'd waste some further money on the Sony when (yes!) it is a cheaper-made camera.
Since you are asking for opinions in public, if I were you I would unhesitatingly dump the Sony et al, and use the vastly better-built Nikon you already have, especially given the distaste you have clearly developed for the Sony equipment by comparion. As a professional,
the build quality of your equipment is part of "professionalism" IMO (not to mention it just gives you, as a user, a better feeling using better equipment). In keeping with this, as a Canon user, I got rid of my EF-S lenses after experiencing the superior build quality of lenses like the 24-70L, 180mmL Macro, etc. (The EF-S 10-22 felt like a cheap, plastic toy by comparison.)
So I would dump the plasitcky toys and stick with professional equipment if I were you.
Jack
PS: Surprised to hear some of the Zeiss lenses were like that too! (Maybe they offer "dressed-down" versions for Sony??)
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