People should really temper their enthusiasm for product hype over product reality before making great claims!(not referring to anyone here, but more generally in the net as a whole .. read some of the hyperbole and it hysterical).
Firstly! many claim that battery life is DSLR like. No way, nothing like it, never will be until they make the battery much bigger(and hence heavier) and body larger to suit.
Seen many claims that battery will last 600 exposures. Yeah right, that's one spec, and for a pro, 600 is only just pushing it .. so take many batteries just to be sure. Luckily they also introduced a multiple battery charger that suits this camera .. I reckon as a pro that accessory is a must have.
Read the actual specs and for a pro the expected battery life is barely consumer oriented compact comparable!! .. nothing like a DSLR. Battery life for a pro is one of the paramount specs they need to be mindful of.
With a DSLR, in general you don't need to worry about battery, you generally get between 800-1000 from most DSLRs at this level.
Hidden in the specs that I've yet not seen is that the A9 claims 600 exposures, but this is only if using the LCD screen, ie. not using the EVF!!
Apart from the odd hard to get image where the LCD is useful, what pro worth their reputation shoots with the LCD full time?
They all use the EVF, as the EVF is the drawcard for this type of camera, and Sony's spec says about 480 exposures when using the EVF!!!

480 exposures is not even comparable to a heavily used second hand Nikon D3300!!

In terms of professional tool, Sony really needed to work on that single factor.
On a shoot(any type, wedding, portrait, studio .. whatever) if you're always concerned about battery life and always keeping an eye on the battery indicator, you're not keeping you mind focused(pun intended) on the event at hand.
Having to change out 3 batteries in the time even a lowly consumer level DSLR won't need any change .. not really comparable to the 3000-ish exposures you'd get out of a single digit CaNikon.


Quote Originally Posted by MissionMan View Post
last time I checked mirrorless was still growing and DSLR was still declining and Sony knocked Nikon for the number two slot, even if it was only for a couple of months. ....
Nah! I'm pretty sure they're all shrinking. DSLR shrinking faster than mirrorless, so the percentage factor for each company/body type changes continuously. You're reading that Sony's market share has increased .. not the same thing as their sales figures are higher than before. Just that by comparison to other manufacturers, they're not as dramatically low.

If you read Thoms blog he gives some decent reasoning as to what may have happened with the Sony/#2 posi.(marketing/promotional deals .. and currency of their latest products). Nikon's are all mainly older compared to Sony's.
If you carefully read the specific fine print, the marketing blurb about this specified that the position change was in terms of dollars .. ie. specifically not in units!
If it were measured in unit volume, they'd not have needed this fine print detail. Apparently what Sony does a lot is that they sell the A7's in kit form(as most folks buying won't/don't have a native lens) and then the kit sale is at an elevated price.
At that elevated price point, the Sony is registered as a full frame camera, but the $ value is still registered as the kit(because they don't separate the prices of the individual body and lens in the kit) ... this leads to 'greater value' products(where Nikon sell mainly D610s, D750s and D810s rather than in kit form). And Nikon's (US) promotional push was in Nov/Dec(for Christmas), whereas Sony's promotion deal season was in Jan/Feb.

As for the pros switching, Fuji has gained a fair amount of market share already in wedding photography where long lens like the 400 f/2.8 aren't required. How many pros need long lens? Wedding ohotographers? No. Portrait? No Studio? No. Landscape? no. It's only Wildlife and sports that require it.[/QUOTE]

This is true, but then again many of those types of photography could easily be done with any non 20fps camera body, and more specifically a higher res(say 42Mp) camera such as the A7Rii!
The photographer type that those specs are marketed towards seems to be more so those sports/wildlife types .. where they have no real competition in lens lineup, and would take many years of hard graft to catch up as well.
And then, as they don't have the history of those same lens types as per CaNikon do .. most of the lenses they do create at that end of the spectrum will all be super massively expensive by way of comparison too!
They should easily be able to get a 300/2.8 and 500/4 to market as they did buy into the brand that once was Minolta, and they have some background with respect to those lens types.
But they'd also need a 200/2, 200-400/4 and a trio of super capable teleconverters to suit all those lenses.

BUTT(a deliberate double butt here!) what would really be the point of that kind of exercise, other than to simply try and unseat the two established players in a small(but elite market segment) in some way?
When the lenses get that big, the advantage of that small body is diminished massively and the of the small compact lightweight body is redundant. In fact the ergonomics of cameras mounted onto on long lenses, are more favourable towards the larger camera bodies anyhow.
In terms of strength and durability, I can't imagine that the a9 will have the weatherproofing capability that a single digit CaNikon body will.

In reality this camera would appeal to D810/5DMkIV upgrade path types ... rather than the D1/1DX types.
And in this situation, the 20fps would basically be a redundant specification. The price is massively beyond both the CaNikon products (and astronomically beyond the Pentax K1) by comparison.

I think a few buyers will get into it early on, but only for the cache factor(ie. braggin rights, gear heads with more $'s than ȼ's .. etc).
As a long term product without the backup of the required accessories(ie. full lens list, GPS, etc) I can't see it as a commercial success(yet).