Read Alpha-M-W's preview.. entusiastic and relevent one or 22 things he pointed out badly mostly good otherwise . Reading DPR's and after a few pages I already have an idea that the camera may be panned in the full review. he's very neutral through most of the preview. Then he hits the description of the top LCD (which they pointed out was lacking on the A700) and .. wow. the only above neutral things he really said were about the "really realy nice fast primes" he's saving for the full review. and he liked the CZ 16-35m


DPR:

Re the top LCD
"partly because the top LCD is about as sophisticated as an early 80's hand-held frogger game"

"you can see what's currently set (and change the setting using the dials), but they're not permanently displayed. The fact that the display appears to be based on a dime store digital watch also means that the values are displayed in what is occasionally rather crude and far from immediately obvious manner (High speed continuous, for example, appears as 'oooH')"

"I'm sure there'll be plenty of users happy to see an LCD on the top panel, even if it is verging on the redundant."

Now that everybody is moving to using the back LCD for the settings, even DPReview acks that the the top LCD is less important (It was more important when only CN had it).

Anyway, I found the preview very positive and didn't really put too much weight into the top-LCD comments!

I really loiked Frogger... it was my favorite Vic-20 game :/

Nice article. I think the neutrality in the review is quite obvious. Congratulations everyone

I'm straight and that is not neutral

DPR wasn't particularly neutral about the presence of the memorystick slot. Detect a little sarcasm?

That same sarcasm you might find among alpha users too who are strongly convinced that only CF cards are the right choice. Sooner or later MS will equal or surpass it, I'm sure.

BTW, it was mentioned about the new IDC, I think it should be a good one. No word or was I not so attentive?

I downloaded a 278 MB file from Sony site. It is the new Picture Motion Browser with new features (still didn't study it thoroughly). Hoped there would be embedded the new IDC too in the package, but alas...

The only thing on the A900 that I want on my A700s is the mode dial. It looks like the new firmware (have not tried it yet) has taken care of my other wish. The big, bright viewfinder would be nice but I don't want the huge files that come with it.

I stopped using my CF cards and went all memory stick. they work fine and there a lot smaller. we used CF in other devices at work and there were a lot of failures. the last ones we bought were 128mb so it shows how long since they've been used. I just don't like pins as contact on devices in 2008.. it's silly

The CF socket's pins are quite fragile and more than once I nearly break one from the card reader, I had to carefully bend it back in position. Still CF is just too popular on DSLR market, where almost every DSLR has a slot for it. I wonder why SD is not as popular as CF in DSLR.

For now, I'd say CF cards are it. They're the biggest and, ultimately, the most capable at moving and storing, having more room to work with. I doubt we could expect a new standard until that card becomes the limiting factor for write speeds. Don't count on increasing file-sizes to usher in a new standard, all that can do is sell more CF cards.

My only complaint is that Sony either isn't listening or refuses to make dual storage formats as useful as it could be. Why can we not write to both cards at once? I thought that complaint was clearly logged with Sony when the a700 came out.

Can you provide a URL? SonyEurope support downloads does not appear to include it.

David

Hi,

I hope I'm not wrong but I came by an update for the Picture Motion Browser at Sony website; http://www.sony.com. Dr. Harout may be pointing to the same one. The link is below. To view the available A700 updates you have to select your computer operating system from the drop-down-menu box at the bottom of the page. My operating system was Windows XP SP2.

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=DSLRA700

Yildiz