This is Sony's first true professional mirrorless camera.

The professional camera industry is going through a paradigm shift. From SLRs (cameras with a mirrors that flap with each photo and make the unique clack sound) to Mirrorless. You needed the mirror during the film days, because you needed to see what the lens was seeing. Now, you can capture what the lens is seeing from the sensor into an electronic viewfinder.

However, there is still an opinion that an SLR (Nikon or Canon) is a real professional tool. From built quality, to focus speed (phase detect), frames/second, battery life, dual card capture, etc.

Sony's new A9 is designed to go head to head against the top of the line professional cameras from Nikon and Canon. At least on many of the specs.

That said, I'm still not convinced it's going to be as robust as a Nikon D5 or Canon's 1Dx, etc.

I'm a Nikon user now (was canon for a long time) and I abuse my camera a lot. From rain, extreme cold, etc. And the camera continues to work. Many of my photographer friends on FB are unhappy with reliability of the Sony's A7 series and switched back to Canon and Nikon due to reliability issues. So even though the A9 has all the specs, it may still not be the camera pros shooting Olympics, etc. switch to.

It lacks super telephoto lenses, advanced lenses (such as tilt shift), and more flash options to make it a "true" professional camera.

I also agree on reliability. I broke an A7 II after 5 months of mild usage. I don't think the sensor stabilization system is ready for pro usage

They're improving on one front, they also launched a 100-400mm super telephoto lens today:

http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/sony-announces-the-new-100-40...

But yeah, they have a long way to go to match the lens offerings of Canon / Nikon.

The industry has been hammering nails into the DSLR's coffin for a while now, but to me this looks like the last fastener of all.

What this article totally misses is that this is Sony's flagship offering not for all professional photographers, but specifically for professional SPORTS photographers.

Sports photographers need super fast continuous shooting so you can get 20 shots of that epic catch in one shutter press and choose the best one. Likewise 1/32,000th of a sec shutter speed is twice as fast as most cameras' 1/8,000th of a sec fastest shutter speed, which helps to freeze quick motion.

The high number of AF points is a sports feature too - one area that mirrorless still significantly lags traditional DSLRs is that their AF systems are not as fast as the type used in DSLRs, which have dedicated AF sensors (mirrorless does AF off the imaging sensor), so a ton of AF points is one way mirrorless tries to narrow the AF gap.

> their AF systems are not as fast as the type used in DSLRs

Heh, my Canon 600D's autofocus is EXTREMELY slow D:

Yes, but 600D is not meant to be a sports camera :)

1/32,000th is 4x faster than 1/8,000th, no?

Might it also be useful for wildlife?

Yep, wildlife too. Sports and wildlife have been the weak points of Sony kits due to AF speed and lack of long native lenses (they announced 100-400mm lens today too).

I was immediately thinking of the hummingbird example and then looked up the stats and it has a wing beat 70 times per second; So this is more than fast enough as I would imagine are many other cheaper offerings for that refresh rate.

It's a large format sensor (35mm) which captures a lot of light which means that it works better in low light, without flash. Being mirrorless makes the lenses cheaper because of optics reasons (pro lenses tend to be very expensive).

>Being mirrorless makes the lenses cheaper because of optics reasons

Hmm, it should theoretically make wide angle lenses a bit cheaper because they won't have to use retrofocus designs. But I think the actual price of the lens is going to be determined by what pro photographers are used to paying for fancy wide angle lenses.

They'll be smaller and probably better, but not cheaper :)

35mm is full frame, not large format. Large format starts at 4"x5". Very few large format sensors have ever been built.

This is mainly for useful for sports professional photography. It enables you to get some great shots the easy(er) way and sell them to sports news outlets.

Now people with more money than sense will be able to take bad photos faster than ever before.

After autonomous cars will come autonomous cameras--the camera will be a better photographer than you are, so it won't need you to actually operate it. It'll just fly around on a drone. Have its own gallery shows. Win Pulitzers.