NEW SLR CAMERA AND YES ITS A SONY!SONY’S ALPHA DSLR-A100 IS THE COMPANY’S first attempt at bringing a digital SLR to market. You may find this camera familiar,since it’s almost identical to the Konica Minolta’s 6-megapixel D-SLR, the Maxxum 5D. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise since Sony essentially took over Konica Minolta’s camera business last year.
But is the Alpha a rejuvenated 5D model or simply a rebranded device? It turns out that the A100 is somewhere in between.New features include a 10.2-megapixel CCD,instead of 6, which is suitable for making very large prints or signifi cantly cropped photos. There’s also an anti-dust technology system that uses a staticfree coating on the CCD, combined with vibrations to keep the sensor clean.Overall, the Alpha A100 shoots very good pictures, especially when used outdoors with ample lighting. The image stabilization feature worked well, and the burst mode let me shoot literally hundreds of consecutive shots on the CompactFlash card, which must be purchased separately. Testing revealed some problems, however.Using a high ISO setting produced more noise than I like to see. I also found that the resolution is low for a 10MP camera; in fact, it scored more like an 8MP camera on my resolution tests. In addition,the camera took a sluggish 1.3 seconds to boot up and fire off a flash shot, and it had a relatively poky 1-second recycle time.As a first digital SLR, the Sony DSLR-A100 offers consumers a lot to like. But given the price, competing D-SLRs offer better picture quality and more innovative features.