Photoclub Alpha

The Alpha System celebrates its Silver Jubilee or 25th Anniversary this month – though left uncelebrated by the inheritors of the Minolta AF legacy, Sony. They have no reason to draw fresh attention to the age of the system, as in four years they have taken it the same sort of distance that Minolta took the world’s first AF system in the late 1980s.

It’s not only Alpha’s 25th birthday. This is also the 25th birthday of modern AF SLR systems – all of them!

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For Photoclubalpha and the historic Minolta Club of Great Britain, the anniversary does matter. A good many of you out there have been members since the launch of the system, often using the earlier SR and X manual focus systems before that. We still have a 1985 Minolta 7000AF and it’s still working just as it did when new.

25 years before the first Minolta SLRs appeared – a folding Minolta Six of 1935

I don’t mind showing my age to make a comparison. I was 11 in 1963 when I took my first pictures with an SLR camera. My father had bought himself a Pentax S3 – and the camera it replaced was 25 years old, a pre-war Zeiss Ikon Kolibri collapsible 16-on-127 model.

When the Kolibri was made, 127 was the ‘vest pocket’ format of choice. 35mm was on the rise, but 35mm SLRs had not yet arrived. They were as much a thing of the future as digital SLRs were when the Minolta 7000AF was launched.

But within that 25 years, there was hardly a single camera system made with interchangeable lenses that did not become obsolete. Only the ‘frozen assets’ of the cold war kept some systems, like the Exakta bayonet and the Praktina, alive. New brands were launched, from the British Wrayflex and Periflex to the Italian Rectaflex and many German oddities. It was not unusual for an entire system to be come and gone within a few years.

Even in the following quarter-century, the high years of the Japanese 35mm SLR, the succession of lens mount changes was bewildering. Independent lens makers like Tamron and Sigma were forced to make systems using interchangeable mounts not just because the public wanted it. A dozen or more mounts were made for every lens and in the 42mm screw thread fit alone there were endless variants – Praktica LLC (Pentacon Electric), Olympus FTL, Pentax ES and more.

It was more or less a 25-year cycle – the SR system was announced in 1958, and really got underway by 1960. It was to be another quarter century before the AF system arrived. We are now a further 25 years on – can we expect a totally new camera system, once again, in 2010?

Minolta’s SR bayonet mount, introduced in 1958/9, actually remained basically unchanged all the way through to 2005 when the last manual focus model, the X-370S, was available. It survives even now as a mount popular in China where the Seagull range from Shanghai Optical includes Minolta fit models. That mount only ever had one major revision, to add a linkage for open aperture TTL metering. The introduction of programmed exposure and shutter priority was cleverly enabled by using the existing design of lens mechanism and improving its accuracy, while adding a simple reference lug to the ƒ-stop setting ring.

Nikon’s 1959 F-mount proved similarly easy to improve without any basic modification. Both these bayonet mounts celebrated half a century of production in 2008/9 – another landmark, which Nikon was able to celebrate but Minolta of course could not.

In an unusual move, probably designed to cut down the work of rejecting submissions which fail to make the grade, the on-line picture library Alamy has published lists of cameras (by make) which will NEVER produce a file acceptable to pass their Quality Control. It includes all the Sony Cyber-shots ever made as far as we can tell! They say: “Check your camera – do NOT submit any images from camera models featured on the list below. Camera models featured on this list do not produce files that are capable of passing Alamy’s QC standards.”

LONDON UK, June 22, 2009 – Eastman Kodak Company announced today that it will retire KODACHROME colour film this year, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon.

Sales of KODACHROME Film, which became the world’s first commercially successful colour film in 1935, have declined dramatically in recent years as photographers turned to other, newer KODAK films or to the digital imaging technologies that Kodak pioneered. Today, KODACHROME Film represents just a fraction of one percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films.

Adobe has released its Photoshop Camera Raw 5.4 Release Candidate, available immediately as a free download from Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com. The “release candidate” label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all customers.

My first tests with the Canon EOS 500D were posted on dphotoexpert.com, but given the number of search engines now flagging up this site for Canon 500D searches, I’m putting this post here as well.

This is an edited selection, shot in a mixture of 1080 and 720 modes, assembled using iMovie and written as a 720p final project for YouTube. Please feel free to link directly to the YouTube vid or to this page.

Tamron’s new ultra wide angle zoom for APS-C/DX is getting a bit of a blasting from reviewers. Now, when I see this happen, I get curious. Lens testing is often badly designed for such zooms, involving test chart targets at distances which are extremely close and result in very bad figures caused mainly by a strong curvature of field (dished, ‘cap’ shape relative to the camera) when gets worse in effect the closer you focus.

SONY UK has notified us of a press conference to announce an ‘exciting digital camera’ on August 14th.

They have also said that full details will be provided soon. It is possible this will be embargoed – we may attend a meeting on the 14th, but have to agree not to publish until a date later on, perhaps in September.

Update: it seems there is an international Sony Alpha press trip on Sept 9/10th to Edinburgh. Members of the Euro technical press have been invited, as a two-dayer with a stack of nightlife (the Festival and Fringe have just kicked into action today) it is an ideal location for putting the Alpha 900 and new 16-35mm and 70-400mm into the hands of journos. But it’s one week after the Sept 2nd close of the Festival itself, with the fireworks display. The Fringe is still running.

It seems very unlikely that the Aug 14th conference would be the long-awaited Alpha 900 launch since it is only a single day, or part of a day, and would not take place so long before an apparent pre-photokina pan-European press event. Judging by previous launches – Alpha 100, 2-day event in Morocco June 5-7th 2006; Alpha 700 2-day event on Lake Como Italy end of 1st week in September 2007; my guess is that the Edinburgh event is the big hands-on opportunity for the flagship full frame DSLR almost one year to the day after the launch of the 700. A very busy year, too, during which Sony has launched three other DSLR bodies and several important lenses.

Well, Edinburgh’s 45 minutes from my door and even if I am surplus to the tightly controlled A-list of such events I may be able to drop in and join them for a drink, as there’s one or two folk going I would like to say hello to. But then, Edinburgh is an airport! Just because the press gets to land there does not mean the city is where they are headed. I’ve been to big press events at Gleneagles (Kodak) and even in the middle of the Berwickshire countryside (Canon) in the past. It could be anywhere in Scotland – and some places in Scotland are not on our doorstep!

It costs me over one working day and around £200 to get to a London event (I’d rather by invited to almost anywhere in Europe than London in summer…) but whatever goes, the September date is an essential launch I am sure, and not just another Cybershot across the bows of the enemy!

- DK

The introduction of a £399 (street price, RRP £449) DSLR with 14.2 megapixels – with or without a useful type of Live View – should have been applauded by reviewers. It’s the single most important point about the camera. No other DSLR approaches this image size and resolution at such a low price.

The Sony DSLR A200 is now on sale, following the end of Alpha 100 production. Although it is without any doubt the Alpha 100 replacement mentioned by Sony executives in October 2007, when they first revealed that the 100 was no longer being made, it is not an exact equivalent and represents a mixture of upgraded performance and simplified specification. Because it has gone in two directions at the same time, the A200 poses a problem for A100 owners.

A mention of 16mm Minoltas reminded me that a few years ago I found a perfect kit – without outer box or instructions, sadly – at an antique fair. A daylight developing tank for the film turned up in the closing-down stock from Konica Minolta’s warehouse. I decided they should really find a new home together via the normal eBay route, but before they went, a studio shoot was needed to record them for our virtual museum.

Burlingame, CA, September 12, 2007 — FotoNation, Inc. (www.fotonation.com), a world-leading imaging solutions company for the digital photography industry, announced today that it has been selected by Sony’s Professional Printer Group to provide its award winning digital Red-Eye Correction technology for new professional Sony photo printers, Picture Station Kiosks, and photo application products.

IN 1998 Minolta published, for their 70th anniversary, a large poster featuring all the landmark cameras from their own museum and employee collections. Many of the cameras shown – all fairly small on the poster – were well used and worn examples. The original image-files for the poster, which we have archived, are of poor quality. They are Japanese inkset CMYK sharpened for pre-press, with very dark gamma. This page re-creates all the information from the original poster, complete with the photographs. This page has been updated so that each period now appears as a separate section – simply select the next page to move on after reading each one. Page 1 is 1928-39, Page 2 1940-1959, Page 3 1960-69, Page 4 1970-79, Page 5 1980-89, and Page 6 is the 1990s. If you know the period of the camera you want to see, go straight to the page.

THE LENSBABY was a novelty item when first introduced as a low-cost meniscus lens mounted on a flexible concertina tube with an SLR mount-fitting at the other end. Like the Diana or Holga cameras sometimes used by professionals to capture a feel of post-modern grunge, it used aberrations creatively.

DxO OPTICS PRO 4.1 is the latest version of a clever raw file processor which includes lens lookup tables to auto-correct distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration. It also lets you alter the look of Dynax or Alpha images so they match popular films – or other DSLRs by Canon and Nikon!

Shortly before the June 6th 2006 worldwide launch of the Sony Alpha digital SLR system the European press learned that major title editors would meet in Marrakesh for the unveiling of the Alpha 100. No-one anticipated being driven miles into the desert-like countryside of Oued Nfis for the experience of a night under canvas after witnessing feats of Berber horsemanship and a massive pyrotechnic intro! Read David Kilpatrick’s original report from the Summer 2006 edition of Photoworld magazine.