Sony Alpha A100
New Competition to the D-SLR Market

In mid 2005, Konica-Minolta and Sony shocked the industry when they announced a joint effort to develop digital SLR’s. As if that wasn’t shocking enough, six months later Konica-Minolta dropped a bomb on the camera market by announcing that they were withdrawing from the camera business and had transferred certain camera assets including the Maxxum/Dynax lens mount and related SLR technologies to Sony.

Say hello to the Sony Alpha A100; a compact, ten mega-pixel (CCD) digital SLR with a Minolta lens mount, Anti-Shake (now called Super Steady Shot) and a definite Konica-Minolta design flair. Along with increasing build quality standards, and adding nineteen new lenses (a few by Carl Zeiss), Sony has changed the name of the Minolta A-type bayonet lens mount to Alpha lens mount but it is virtually identical.

This means new Sony A100 owners can still purchase a huge volume of older Minolta Maxxum lenses and still have full compatibility. Kudos to Sony for not alienating Konica-Minolta’s old customer base!

When looking at the A100 it is easy to see the old Konica-Minolta family resemblance. The A100 reminds me of a refined 5D, virtually identical in size and overall shape but with a few more stylized sweeping lines and overall more professional feel. Despite this being a relatively compact D-SLR, the hand grip feels deep and comfortable with a nicely placed rear groove for your thumb. Plastic quality is about what I expected easily competes with similar offerings from Canon, Nikon, and Pentax.

The A100 also sports a surprisingly well implemented penta-mirror setup making the viewfinder image much brighter then I expected. It isn’t quite as good as Pentax, who still wins top honors in this area, but it is still much better then I’ve come to expect from cropped sensor cameras. As an added bonus, The A100 features an eye sensor just below the viewfinder eyepiece which triggers continuous auto focus as well as dimming the LCD monitor; a nice and very welcome touch.

Of course, all this doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot if the camera doesn’t deliver in image quality. Thankfully the A100 has a very nice and well defined image processor that holds its own against the latest offerings from other D-SLR makers. At 10 mega-pixels there is plenty of resolution and depth to make advanced amateurs more then happy (especially when shooting RAW) and final image output looks virtually noise free until the range of ISO 800 to 1600. At high ISO’s a third party noise reduction software package may be in your best interest, but I don’t know a single digital camera on the market where this isn’t true.

My only major complaint with the A100 is the fairly audible mirror slap one hears when clicking the shutter. Slightly annoying, but by no means a valid reason to disregard thoughts of purchasing the camera.

The only question now is how committed Sony will remain to the D-SLR market. It would be a shame if a photographer invested in D-SLR system only to have Sony bail on a moments notice to pursue other ventures. Still, with nineteen lenses announced at the cameras launch and a corporate promise of more things to come we can all certainly hope Alpha line of digital cameras is here to stay.