As a novice photographer, it's tough for me to say whether Sony's $7000 a9 full-frame mirrorless camera is worth the money. What I can say is that the sheer speed and power of this machine make it the most impressive camera I've ever worked with.

This is Sony's most advanced camera to date and, although it's much smaller and lighter, it goes toe to toe with the top-of-the-line professional kit from Canon and Nikon.

The Japanese company's new 24-megapixel Exmor RS sensor uses a stacked CMOS layout which effectively means it can hand off data at a blistering rate. We're talking simultaneous RAW and JPEG capture, 20 times per second, with each and every frame individually autofocused and autoexposed.

It can keep this up for 10 seconds before it needs to take a breather, meaning a max of 200 photos per burst. And just as impressive is the fact there is no blackout during shooting, the OLED screen and digital viewfinder remain clear and readable throughout.

While this all proved handy for me just taking shots around the local parks, for sports or nature photographers it will be an absolute godsend. The a9's capability to track a subject and keep it in sharp focus while flying through frames is almost unnatural, an ability it owes to its 693 point focal phase detection autofocus, which covers almost the entire frame and can make 60 tracking calculations per second. In practice, assuming some large object doesn't come between you and your subject, this means you can hold the shutter button down during the entirety of the action you want to capture and you'll end up with dozens of brilliant shots to choose from.

The downside to this, of course, is that it becomes incredibly easy to take an overwhelming amount of photos. The camera makes an artificial shutter noise by default, but once you turn that off the thing is taking 20 shots per second with no outward audible, visual or tactile indication. The software tries to help you out but the reality is reviewing and culling your shots in camera is a slog when you can easily take a thousand of them in a session.

And 'overwhelming' is a good word to describe my interactions with this camera in general, at least at first. The general controls are straightforward enough, with a selection dial for shooting mode and a separate one for 'drive' mode, which controls continuous shooting. But then there are three kinds of autofocus to choose from, with additional options found in the menu to do things like "expand flexible spot". There are also a wealth of image format and storage options, for example you can store RAW files on one microSD card and JPG files on the other, or you can just fill one and then the other sequentially.

There are 35 pages of settings to tweak in the camera's menus, the majority of which were filled with terms I was totally ignorant of until I looked them up. Thankfully, there's also a 36th page you can customise with the functions you'll use most often.

Of all the overkill tangential features, there were a few a newcomer like me could appreciate — like the full ethernet port for quick transfers or the high-quality tiltable OLED screen — but I'd suggest anyone coming from a non-professional-grade camera, or even from a Canon or Nikon, will be in for a learning curve to get the most out of the a9.

At $6999 for the body, plus whatever you need to spend on lenses and accessories, the Sony a9 is beyond the reach of most hobby photographers. If you need beautiful images of fast-moving subjects though, and you have the cash, this is a phenomenal choice.