What is the best sports and wildlife camera?
The Sony A9 III is the first full-frame camera to include a global shutter. This means it provides professional photographers with the fastest continuous burst shooting rate at full quality – a blistering 120fps for 24.6MP raw and JPEG shots.
There is no blackout during burst shooting, and thanks to the global shutter – which means that all of the sensor’s pixels are read simultaneously – there is no ‘rolling shutter’ distortion that can occur with ordinary sensors.
This implies that quick subjects and camera motions, such as panning alongside speeding bikes, are totally possible without fear of photo distortion. This record-breaking mode for a full-frame camera also comes with surprisingly few compromises.
Such burst sequences are only available for 1.6 seconds, but they do have continuous 759-point autofocus (using Sony’s AI AF technology for the best-ever subject identification and tracking performance) and auto exposure.
The Sony A9 III’s excellent features don’t stop there. The Sony A9 II successor can freeze action at 1/80,000s (another record), but this is limited to 1/16,000s when shooting continuously.
The camera also has flash sync speeds at any shutter speed and is powered by the Bionz ZR processing engine, which is reportedly eight times faster than the processor in the A9 II.
The A9 III’s in-body image stabilization system provides up to eight stops of adjustment, allowing sports and wildlife photographers to shoot handheld with confidence.
In contrast the A9 III is primarily a mirrorless camera for sports photographers, many of whom will hope to use it during the 2024 Paris Olympics, it also has some excellent video features.
It can shoot in 4K/60p (upsampled from 6K) and 4K/120p slow motion without cropping. The A9 III will be an excellent tool for hybrid shooters who need to capture a combination of images and video, thanks to 10-bit 4:2:2 All-I recording, 16-bit raw output, and compatibility for both S-Cinetone and S-Log3.
Sony pushes the camera envelope once more
While Canon and Nikon have worked hard over the last decade to match Sony’s level of camera innovation, the A9 III demonstrates that Sony is still the great boundary pusher – one of the reasons why we picked the tech giant as our brand of the year in the TechRadar Choice Awards 2023.
We’ve seen several fast sports cameras in the past, such as the Sony A9 II and, more recently, the Nikon Z9. The Z9 was the first professional camera to do away with the mechanical shutter entirely, instead relying on a stacked 45.7MP sensor to provide a purely digital shooting experience.
On paper, however, the Sony A9 III has surpassed it once again by becoming the first full-frame camera with a global shutter. While typical stacked sensors, such as the one used in the Nikon Z9, are quick, they can occasionally suffer from difficulties such as rolling shutter or limited flash sync speeds.
Since global shutters read all of the sensor’s pixels at the same time, the disadvantages of traditional electronic shutters are no longer an issue. That implies the A9 III can shoot at 120fps (although in 1.6-second bursts) and support flash sync at any shutter speed.
It remains to be seen whether the Sony A9 III’s use of a global shutter has any drawbacks, but we’re getting hands-on with one right now and will bring you our initial impressions very soon.
