Photoclub Alpha

Canon has today officially announced the 15.5 megapixel APS-C EOS 50D. This is a 1.6X factor sensor, packing a density well in excess of the Alpha 350 - if Sony was to make an Alpha with the same pixel density it would be 17.5 megapixels, and a full framer would be 38.5 megapixels.

At the end of September 2006, I set off for a quick visit to photokina in Cologne, having parted company with Icon’s am-pro magazine ƒ2 and not really needing to report on the whole show in detail. Here’s the report I wrote then, with photos, and some thoughts for the 2008 show.

Well, it looks as if the 14th August UK press conference for exciting digital camera news may not be about the Alpha 900 after all - Sony has just officially announced that some colourful little Cyber-shot models with ISO 3200 capability will be unveiled there, and no mention of the A900. Roll on September 9th!

Here’s Sony’s release on the new Cyber-shots - I apologise for leaving the hyperbolic advertising style adjectives (unusable editorially, and just a waste of words) in place:

One of the problems with the Alpha 350/300 is that the Live View is linked to the settings when you use Manual exposure. It provides a form of metering, a relatively accurate preview of under or over exposure. This makes it impossible to use Manual with studio flash (AC mains strobe) setups. Currently, there is no menu setting to turn off ‘exposure preview with manual’ and enable ‘auto LV gain with manual’. But there is a solution.

Sony has announced the September introduction of the most powerful flash yet for the Alpha system, which incorporates a brand new body design allowing optimum bounce flash illumination regardless of how you hold the camera.

Following announcements that Sony has developed a backlight technique to enable extremely low noise exposures, we receive this press release which may or may not be related - a Sony CCD astrophotography camera capable of one-hour exposures and programmed sequences. Resolution seems a bit basic though.

Here’s a question which came in to my email just now:

“Could I process a RAW file in Photoshop to achieve a similar effect as if I had used a Polaroid lens filter?
Or would I be better just using the Polaroid filter?”

The answer is that you can never imitate the effect of polarizing light (which changes the way reflective surfaces look, and deepens or lightens the sky blue according to the zone of the sky relative to the sun’s position. But you can use Adobe Camera Raw (CS3 versions) to deepen skies you never thought could be rescued.

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.

Today I took delivery of a Sony 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G SSM lens. There is no doubt this is the best built Sony SAL lens I’ve handled (the CZ 135mm 1.8, 85mm f1.4 are a class above again). It weighs over 800g with its lens-hood, which is one of the most efficient deep tele hoods I’ve seen.

Now that there are five Sony Alpha DSLR bodies in circulation, with many owners of the original 2006 Alpha 100 considering a replacement, the differences between this ur-Alpha and the 2007-8 generation of Alpha 700, 200, 300 and 350 need examining.

Epson today announces the launch of its high specification professional A3+ photo printer - the Stylus Photo R2880. Aimed at professional photographers and keen amateurs, the printer utilises Epson’s advanced UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta pigment inks

The Sony Alpha 350 14.2 megapixel DSLR pioneers a new type of Live View, related to Olympus’s original Mode A of the E-330 where a beamsplitting arrangement allowed a video CCD to view the actual focusing screen of the SLR system.

Moving a DSLR - preferably without vertical grip because of the further imbalance created - to portrait format shooting on a small tripod ballhead produces an unstable arrangement where the head is stressed. The camera may sag unless the head is tightened, and if the lens is heavy, it may also unscrew itself from the normal tripod bush tightening. A L-bracket is the ideal solution for mounting your camera for a portrait session or any other situation where most of the images will be vertical.

There’s a lot of controversy right now about whether or not the image structure of the Alpha 700 files at very high ISO - mainly 3200 and 6400 - is as clean as raw processed results from other comparable cameras like the Canon 40D (does not offer ISO 6400), the Olympus E-3 (does not offer ISO 6400) or the Nikon D300. At the heart of this is the way different raw processors handle file conversion, and most specifically, the current performance of Adobe Camera Raw 4.3.1.

Sony say that the Alpha 100 has a 230,000 pixel rear screen and the Alpha 700 has 920,000 pixels. What they don’t make entirely clear is how many individual R, G or B pixels are used to create each ‘pixel’ of the image (complete RGB). In fact the 920,000 pixel screen is VGA - 640 x 480 - in display resolution, which is 307,000 pixels not 920,000. What is going on? We took some macro images to show you.

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.

On January 5th, Photoworld was lucky enough to be able to attend the dress rehearsal and official photo-call for the new Cirque du Soleil production at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and to put the Alpha 700 through its paces for high ISO fast action stage show capture. This article with large reproductions of the images appears in our Photoworld issue due out later in January.

SINCE September 2007 I have had for test the Canon EOS 40D, Sony Alpha 700, Nikon D300, Olympus E-3 and Nikon D3 in that order. The reports have been published in the British Journal of Photography, and later on in Master Photo Digital and f2 magazines (some are yet to appear, in February, in these titles). My own system is Sony Alpha but I have to be as objective as possible when field testing all makes. I also have to seek out the unique selling points, the reasons for owning any given model, rather than just compare them on a tick-chart feature basis.

With the Alpha 200 about to appear, I guess it’s time to sum up what I think about the Sony Alpha 700 and how it compares to the competition.

It’s the same on every web forum - if you post a digital picture which would be acceptable to a photo library or professional buyer, half a dozen grumpy one-liners will come out saying ‘That don’t look sharp to me’ or ‘there must be something wrong with your XXX’ (fill in D300, A700, E-3, D3, 40D as required). Then someone posts a hugely messed up image and people say ‘Wow! What sharpness!’…

The Sony Alpha Unseen Britain Challenge has embarked on its campaign to capture never seen before images of Britain with renowned photographer and climber Mike Robertson. Commissioned by Sony, Mike will tour the country scaling new heights and legendary landmarks to create totally new and exciting photographic images using the new Sony Alpha 700 (α700) Digital SLR camera.

I HAVE set up a pBase gallery with a large number of comparison studio shots, all the way from ISO 100 to the maximum, using the A700 and Nikon D300. It has some minor discrepancies in shooting conditions which I need to explain to anyone visiting the gallery.

ON OCTOBER 10th I left the UK London press launch complete with an Alpha 700 review camera. I’ll be covering the many aspects of the Alpha 700 performance in later reviews, but this camera is so good I wanted to get just something out to you right the next day.

The World Photography Awards (WPA), sponsored by Sony, is an international showcase of the best images taken by renowned and undiscovered photographers alike. From landscape to music and photojournalism to fashion photography, the WPA is the first awards of its kind and is supported by hundreds of the industry’s top photographers, critics, gallery curators, directors, founders and more.

Photo © Ed Robinson/OneRedEye courtesy WPA

PRODUCT shots of the Sony Alpha 700 have been released, and are shown here to our standard web page size of 600 pixels or smaller.

Marrutt Digital has introduced a range of luxurious leather-look professional Photobooks designed for professional photographers to produce Photobooks in-house in minutes, at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing using their own inkjet prints. They are exclusive to Marrutt, who are United Kingdom distributors for Lyson papers and Lysonic inks.

Weybridge, 22nd August 2007 - The stylish, slimline Cyber-shot T Series from Sony gains two feature-packed new models that make it easier than ever to grab great pictures (reads a press release issued by Sony UK).

More work went into this page than you think! While it was possible to get an idea of Sony’s lenses and cameras planned for 2007-8 from the group image, the individual press images have all been shot to different scales.

This review from the Summer 2007 edition of Photoworld has been expanded here, and covers the Remote Release IR-1n kit along with third party remote triggers and flash synchronisation options for the Alpha system.

THE Konica Minolta Maxxum/Dynax 5D colour modes and conversions are like a whole box of film choices in one roll. This article was written using the 5D in 2005. The modes of the Sony Alpha 100 are similar, but the colour palettes will vary from these results.

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.