Sony announces the A9, their ludicrously fast and most advanced full-frame yet

Sony just announced its most advanced full-frame camera for pro photographers yet. The new A9 will pose a formidable challenge to Canon and Nikon.

Here's what you need to know:

World's first full-frame stacked CMOS sensor (24.2MP)
Blackout-Free Continuous Shooting at up to 20fps for 241 RAW/JPEG images
Silent, Vibration-free shooting at speeds up to 1/32,000 sec
693 point focal plane phase dectection AF points with 60 AF/AE tracking calculations per second
Ethernet port for file transfer
Dual SD cad slots and extended battery life
5-axis in-body image stabilisation with a 5.0 step shutter speed advantage

Even though we haven't laid hands on the A9 yet it sounds like Sony has delivered an immense package with the A9. The clear headline here is speed. The ability for pros and sports photographers to never lose their line of sight while tracking a subject via blackout-free 20fps continous shooting is very impressive.

Not to mention, how many cameras have you seen with 693 phase-detect AF points? They cover 93 percent of the frame... that's an absolutely ludicrous number of AF points. Sony have also added a focus joystick on the back of the camera to help pinpoint your subject.

Apparently the new full-frame stacked sensor allows for data processing twice as fast as Sony's prevous full-frames and we also get Sony's sharpest electronic viewfinder ever.

The A9 true to its lineage remains a very capable video camera offering 4K (3840x2160p) video recording across the full width of the full-frame image sensor. When shooting in this format, the camera uses full pixel readout without pixel binning to collect 6K of information, oversampling it to produce high quality 4K footage with exceptional detail and depth. Recording is also available in the popular Super 35mm size.

Sony have also taken on board customer feedback and doubled the battery life (2.2x) of previous Sony full-frame models and added a second media card slot.

We love it when manufacturers take customer feedback seriously and react accordingly. We can't wait to get our hands on the A9 so we can give it a proper once-over, but if the A7 Mark II is anything to go by it is sure to be a triumph.