- The Good: Super SteadyShot anti-shake feature is excellent; default lens has better range than competitor models; 10.2-megapixel resolution means great images for large prints; important features accessible without going through menu
- The Bad: Noise is still an issue, despite dust reduction and anti-shake; macro shooting is not all that great; a little too much Minolta and not enough Sony
- The Verdict: A good debut that features a past design with Sony branding
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The birth of what is now Sony's Alpha A100 actually came from the demise of Konica Minolta's photo imaging business. But that didn't stop Sony from making this item their own.
Though the Minolta lenses and anti-shake technology were all part of this handover, their legacy won't really last long if Sony is serious about being a major player in the digital SLR realm. What they have here is an impressive debut, but does it foreshadow success for Sony in the longer term?
Shaking up the sensor
The big standout with the A100 is that the anti-shake feature works quite differently than competitor models. Typically in those models, the anti-shake feature goes through the lens, meaning that the lens does a lot of the work - in tandem with the sensor - to compensate for a user's itchy fingers.
The A100's "Super SteadyShot" reverses this, so that the sensor moves with the shake, leaving the lens to do its natural job of focusing and capturing the image. It's such a precise system that it doesn't seem to waver all that much no matter what kind of movement is involved. Any time you can take a pretty crisp photo in a moving car, you know that the anti-shake feature is dependable.
The only problem is that you won't know that it's actually working until after you've shot an image. The viewfinder doesn't articulate Super SteadyShot at all, so you won't get an idea as to how focused you actually were on the shot.
The only saving grace is a five-bar scale you can see through the viewfinder that tells you how well the system is handling the exposure. At five full bars, the A100 is having a tough time taking a good shot.
All it takes is a twist
Some credit should be given to Minolta for the design of the A100 because Sony didn't change it a whole lot, save for some minor contour aesthetics. The same goes for the button layout. Just about everything you could look for is within two dials on either side of the camera.
The right dial is your basic set of functions, handling Auto, Manual, Program, Aperture and Shutter Priority. Standard stuff, though they've included six presets that give you a head start on scenes like portraits, landscape and the other usual suspects.
On the left is a function dial that gives you immediate access to things like flash settings, ISO sensitivity, focusing, white balance, colour, contrast and sharpness.
The beauty of all this is that you don't have to deal with menus on the 2.5-inch LCD screen. The left dial covers a lot of the basics that photographers would look for in making quick adjustments on the fly. Taking away the element of untimely searching through an interface on the small screen is a good move on Sony's part
Cool images
The one consistency about the kind of photos the A100 takes is that they're usually on the cooler side, meaning that blues and darker tones tend to accentuate more than yellows and reds. This is okay, but it also depends on what you're shooting. For instance, shooting a landscape or architecture with a blue sky will give you some wonderful blue tinges that should create a nice colour balance within the image.
But assuming you were shooting a scene that was heavy on brighter tones, say, like a sandy environment or even a bright-coloured car, the A100 doesn't 'warm" up enough to those colours on its default settings. The good news is that this can be taken care of pretty quickly by using the colour and contrast features on the left dial.
The lens that comes with the A100 is also reliable and should be given some of the credit for all this. The default lens is a re-branded Minolta 18-70mm f3.5-5.6 that offers better range than some of the lenses that come with competitor cameras. This doesn't mean that the lens is the best out there, only that it does a good enough job for the expectations that a non-pro user might have.
When you start getting into specific shooting modes like macro and night shooting, results are a little mixed. Night shooting performs fairly well because of the Super SteadyShot, but macro isn't as clean. The range of the lens sort of defeats itself when objects get really close, and that's a real shame because the sensor is meant to be able to handle that.
The dust is gone, but where's the noise coming from?
The dust-reduction feature in the A100 is great in many respects because images don't blemish very easily, if at all. The problem is that images will still come out "noisy" despite the anti-shake features and relatively fast shutter speeds.
The reason for this could be that the sensor has a tough time compensating for the high 10.2 megapixel resolution, especially when shooting at 800 ISO or above. The big issue with that is that digital SLRs are supposed to be good at shooting photos in low light settings or in fast action, so this hurts the image of the A100.
But it could be worse. Most photos are usually taken in 400 ISO and below, so the noise issue might not matter as much to someone who sparingly uses a higher ISO setting.
A pretty good debut
Even if the A100 is viewed as a makeshift Minolta model with Sony branding, the camera still performs admirably well. Sony may have something great in their anti-shake technology, and it will be interesting to see if competitors adopt it or expand on it by coupling it somehow with optical stabilization.
And what you're getting here is reasonably priced at $1,099 with the lens included, on par with Sony's competitors. This is a nice debut for them, but whatever comes next will likely be quite different.