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The A77 uses the exact same 24.3-megapixel APS-C sensor as the NEX-7, and to similar effect: its photos look fantastic. Photos are sharp and clean, though they do get a little softer as you move to the corners and edges. Colors are accurate and clear (even though they don't always look it in the viewfinder), and details are remarkably well-produced — even shadows and reflections in windows came out crystal clear. Dynamic range isn’t perfect, and I got a lot of blown-out blue skies, but fortunately the HDR mode works well in those situations and it’s not a huge problem anyway. White balance was occasionally slightly off, especially indoors — the A77 tends to assign everything a slightly warmer color temperature than I’m used to, though it’s fine outdoors. I expect near-perfection from a $2,000 DSLR, and the A77 definitely lived up to my expectations in terms of image quality. The in-camera image stabilization is a particular strength, letting me shoot at the telephoto end of a 70-300mm lens in a relatively dark room and still get clear shots.
Low-light performance is solid, but not overwhelmingly impressive. The A77's native ISO range goes up to ISO 16,000, and though I wouldn't recommend pushing it that high, photos are still decent even at that level. Photos are basically noise-free through about ISO 800, and only the slightest bit soft through about ISO 4000. After that you're definitely dealing with significant noise and softness — the latter due in part to the aggressive noise reduction in the A77 — but it's really not a problem until you're over about 8000. If you're shooting photos to upload to the web, you're probably safe even at ISO 8000; just don't try and print photos beyond about ISO 4000. Those aren't nearly the see-in-the-dark numbers you'd get from a recent full-frame DSLR or even some of the A77's direct competitors like the Nikon D7000, but they're in range of most APS-C shooters. You can also customize the range of the Auto ISO setting, which every camera company ought to allow. By default the A77 will only go up to ISO 1600 in Auto mode, but you can set it to go as high as ISO 12,800 — I set it to ISO 3200 and it worked out really well.
24.3 megapixels is insanely high-res, and while it's overkill for some users I can't imagine anyone for whom it won't be enough — you’ll be able to crop and zoom to your heart’s content as you process your photos. Photos are 6000 x 4000 pixels by default, which comes in at a pretty large 8MB per photo, and upward of 25MB each if you're shooting in RAW.
The laggy performance I discovered in the menu system is made all the stranger by the fact that the A77 does everything else impressively quickly. The camera can turn on and capture a photo in a little under two seconds, and it only needs a fraction of a second between photos — in single capture mode, I shot 78 photos in 45 seconds. The continuous shooting mode, though, is what’s most impressive: the A77 can shoot 12 full-resolution frames per second, and captured about 25 frames in two seconds onto my Class 10 SanDisk SD card before the buffer caught up and it slowed down a bit. The shutter lag is so low that I actually had trouble only capturing one frame if I was in a continuous shooting mode — by the time I’d pressed and released the shutter, I’d taken more like three or four frames.
What’s really crazy about those speeds, though, is that I took those pictures shooting in Live View, with every shot perfectly in focus. That’s the awesome advantage of an SLT camera: since it’s reflecting light to the autofocus sensor at all times, even while capturing a photo, the continuous autofocus is insanely fast. The A77 always uses phase-detect autofocus, which is far better than the contrast-detect autofocus that other manufacturers use in Live View; it measures light rather than contrast, and can automatically jump to focus rather than having to test and check until it finds a sharp point like contrast-detect autofocus. The A77 has 19 autofocus points, 11 of which are crosstype sensors — it adds up to a really fantastic autofocus system, and I found myself switching to manual focus far less often than I typically do. Focusing stumbles a bit in low light — it hunts a lot, more than I expected — but it’s fantastic in good lighting and certainly usable in poor light.
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