Does anyone remember the Sony SLT-a77 camera?

Ben acing the mile at a high school track meet. 

In the first decade of this century Sony came onto the market with an interesting camera. It was the Sony SLT-a77. The camera had an APS-C sensor and used a semi-transparent pellicle mirror which was permanent and stationary. It did not move when you shot your photos. Part of the light hit the mirror and was directed to a viewfinder/imaging sensor which sent the signal to an EVF. The rest of the image forming light also went through the mirror and struck the same sensor at the back of the camera. At the image plane. Once you hit the shutter it took some time to process and write the file. This caused a blackout or a freezing of the image in the finder.  It was an odd system and I guess it was done to get a mirrorless, non-optical finder experience but one which would allow users who bought the more traditional a850 and a900 cameras to use the same line of lenses on a new type of camera. 

The a77 used a 24 megapixel CMOS sensor in the APS-C size. The gripes from photographers about this kind of system were focused mainly on two things. The first was a long lag time and a finder black out between each frame. Sure, you could shoot at 12 fps but only the first frame would show in the find and it would be held there until you finished your burst. In the opinion of most photographers that lag and resulting blind spot of imaging made the camera impractical for shooting sports. But I am hard headed and decided to use it to record a number of my son's track meet and cross country performances. Learning good work arounds is like solving puzzles. I guess you could get frustrated and turn the table over, scattering the pieces or, you could work with the camera and discover ways to circumvent some of the operational issues. 

In some regards the camera had a lot going for it. The EVF was, at the time, state of the art with 2.36 million dots of OLED resolution. The AF used phase detection which made it fast and accurate to focus. It had micro adjust to fine tune lens to body AF integration. It was big enough to feel good in daily use and it took advantage of a really nice series of lenses. I think Sony can be grateful about their acquisition of Konica-Minolta in that regard. 

I had a couple of the a77 cameras and used them for a wide range of assignments over the course of a couple years. I eventually replaced them with the full frame (and, from an image viewpoint, a stellar file creator!). The things I remember best about using the a77 was how well the camera worked with Sony's 70-200mm f2.8 lens for the system. It was gorgeous. And, of course on the APS-C format camera body it was more like a 100-300mm lens with a blazing fast aperture. They also made a 16-55mm f2.8 that was almost as good. Sadly, when Sony introduced their full-on mirrorless family; the A7 series, those great lenses could only be used with a kludgy adapter that slowed down the AF and added too much bulk for bodies that were already too small. 

There were a number of SLT models at one time, culminating with the full frame, 24 megapixel a99 but in all of the bodies in the system the one major fault that pushed me to move on was their abysmal flash performance. The professionally capable flashes for the SLT series were expensive and fragile. They shut down quickly if they got hot and took a long time to be functional again if you tried to restart them. Not good for an event photographer at a fast moving conference. And when the flashes did work they didn't meter exposures especially well --- if at all. 

At one point I bought a Hasselblad lens converter that would allow me to use V series H-blad lenses on the a77 bodies and I had great fun putting stuff like the 80mm and 100mm Planars on the front. But that got old as the live view wasn't enough magnification to really let me manually focus well enough.

When it came to general photography the cameras were good enough but in theater photography at that time they were tremendous for me because they were the first cameras that offered good live view through the EVF. You could actually judge exposure and color in the viewfinder for pretty much the first time. The a77 and the 70-200mm gave me lots of great theater images but even in that niche the camera stumbled in that its high ISO performance was nothing to write a blog about. Noisy over 800 ISO and even noisier beyond. The a99 was a much better high ISO performer though it's been eclipsed by newer cameras. By a long shot. 

The SLT (Single Lens Translucent) technology was a direct descendant of the Canon RT film camera. That camera used a pellicle mirror solely to increase the cycling speed and eliminate the finder blackout, and the RT was a descendant of the F1 Pellicle which was a special order camera created by Canon for sports photographers. The non-moving pellicle (translucent is a poor translation for the concept) mirror of the F1 was also used to increase the frame rate and also to eliminate viewfinder blackout altogether. Actually great for seeing flash in real time. And if Sony had figured out a way to incorporate electronic viewing AND eliminate the black out between frames they might still have an SLT system out there. Now, with the hyper quick processing of the A7 variants the need has subsided. For the most part. It is important to know that the switch from DSLRs to mirrorless was not entirely direct. The SLTs were an interesting stop gap. 

There are a lot of them (a77) out there in the used market. A quick check shows that they can be had for around $400 to $450 used. Not sure about sourcing the lenses but I bet they are out there too. I'm looking for used a99 cameras and whatever the 50mm f1.4 of the that system was. But I'm not looking too hard. There's better stuff here now. But man, that was a good system for its time. Especially if you could slow down and use it the right way. 

And, yes. I finally figured out that when using an a77 for sports one would have to "lead" the subject by just a bit and then sort of follow the action instinctively during the black out. It could be done. It can be done better with the tools we have today.