How good is good enough?

How good is good enough?

We all want to ‘improve’ in what we do, don’t we? (I except a very small number of people who I met during my working life, who were happy with things exactly as they were – I found it rather hard, in a brief spell as a union rep, to understand a couple of members who didn’t want a pay rise in exchange for what looked to me like a minimal, and probably interesting change in their duties.



My own work, at that time, was largely concerned with producing audit reports that were impeccably based on facts, precisely and accurately argued, and polished like a Leica front lens element. A few years later, having learned, from hard experience, that a roughly-right answer in good time always has the legs of a perfect report that’s a month too late to be any good, I adopted ‘good enough is… Good enough’ as my work motto. UK regulatory agencies, please note. It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.



And so to cameras and lenses. My ‘good enough’ is my Alpha 900: when bought in 2008, it was in many ways state of the art, though it lacked live view, mirror lock, and the lightning autofocus of the best Canon and Nikon models. But for the first time in my experience, digital challenged film for sheer quality, and the 900 filled all the deficits of cameras I’d owned before.

The herald of Sony’s move to full frame was the Planar 85mm f/1.4 lens, released a year before the camera: why else would you sell such a lens than as a portrait lens for full frame? In 2014, I bought one, and it was duly a little sharper than the Minolta equivalent it replaced.



Do I want to go back to using it as my main camera? No – because an Alpha 7 is smaller, lighter, faster to use, and quieter: these days, the 900 feels like a big lump in my hand, and makes me question who anyone would remain wedded to the Heftosauruses that Nikon and Canon sell for news and sports photography if they didn’t actually NEED an incredibly high level of weatherproofing and tank-like solidity. Cameras don’t need Chobham armour for most purposes!

But if push came to shove, the 900 does things almost as well as the 7: and I’d certainly get fitter, given that it’s 50% heavier as well as bigger… Heading towards 2 kilos with the 85mm… Can you tell which is which in the comparison pictures I shot this morning?