Info on Sony Alpha 100...

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the incipient announcement of this new DSLR in another thread. While this is still preliminary and unofficial, it does seem to confirm much of what I heard earlier, plus includes some photos of the camera, lenses, and flashes that will be made available upon its release.

The main question, right now, is whether it will be generally available at around $1000 (as this site reports) or slightly below it (a source from Canada said the price would be $1000 CDN, which one would expect would make it less in U.S. currency). In any event, it appears to be taking dead aim at Nikon's D200, at a substantially lower price.

The sensor is probably the D200 sensor (since Nikon gets theirs from Sony), and the LCD sounds like it has the same specs also. In-body anti-shake is a great feature. If they can do all this for < $1000, that will really be something.

Maybe Nikon will drop their price! :toast:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0606/06060501sonydslra100.asp

Interesting tidbits:

* They claim to have a "Dynamic Range Optimizer" that will adjust the dynamic range of the colors before going into jpeg compression. Says it's performed hardware. So I suppose it will be there for RAW images also?

* Has both image stabilization ("Super SteadyShot") and anti-dust shake built into the camera body. Also a special anti-static charge coating on the low-pass filter in front of the CCD helps keep dust from clinging. The dust shaking occurs at power-off, so it doesn't delay when you turn on the camera.

* Uses the Minolta A-type lens mount, now called the Sony Alpha mount.

* 20 lenses ready to go. Sony and Zeiss have teamed up for three new lenses. Also a few "pro" lenses, in Canon-esque white, like a 70-200 f/2.8 zoom.

RAW is simply a record of the sensor (i.e. "photosite") readouts without any modification.

Digital cameras take those readouts and put them through a ton of processing to come up with an actual image. For example, say you have a 12 MP camera. What you get when the shutter is clicked is twelve million readouts from photosites in a Beyer pattern - in other words, six million green, three million red, and three million blue alternating photosites. The camera's processing engine first has to take those readouts and interpolate them so you wind up with twelve million actual 16-bit color values (i.e. "pixels"). The processing engine then modifies those values according to the user settings you may have (white balance, contrast, color saturation, sharpness, etc.). Finally, the engine takes that image, reduces it to 8 bits per pixel, and compresses it according to the JPEG format, so that the resulting file size may be around 7-10 megabytes (my rough estimate).

It would appear that the "Dynamic Range Optimizer" would just be another processor function during the first of those steps. However, since RAW bypasses all that processing, merely recording photosite readings in a special format for later processing on the computer, I don't see how DRO would affect it.