First impressions of A700

[OLDMAN BJ]

Well as i said on another thread, I decided to buy an A700 and a 70-300G to go with my DSC-R1. New gear arrived a few days ago, and for the first time, I decided to deliberately NOT read the manual. As I have had new gear before I knew to charge the battery and then format the card in camera to get it ready. Now lets face it the A700 is a fairly advanced beast, but do you know that within about an hour playing with the various menus I could find my way right round that camera. I think Sony did a brilliant job of making the A700 user friendly. I had the camera set up for what I'll use and to be quite honest once I've done this I really wont use much of the other stuff. I would say that 90% of all my shots will be using spot focus, single frame advance, center metering in aperture priority. I will also mostly use XFINE jpeg and have set the custom function to allow me to change colour temp quickly . I will use the XFINE jpeg because I like the DRO capability, and after doing some tests between XFINE and RAW, I just can't see any difference in quality when printed. Hopefully it will prove to be a reliable camera and so far I'm lovin it.

John

[HFnotts]

I would be interested in your views on the effectiveness of the in camers DRO as opposed to using a third party HDR software from a Raw image.

[Dr. Harout]

Congratulations John. Enjoy it

[OLDMAN BJ]

Thanks guys,

For me, I've decided to keep my photography as simple as possible. I have only two raw converters, RT and IDC. I did some tests and compared using the in camera DRO and then trying to adjust a raw to get the same effect. I just couldn't get it to look quite the same. DRO to me looks very natural. Now this could well be just my lack of experience using a good raw converter, but I thought why bother? Let the camera do the work for me. As I said, I couldn't see any difference technically between XFINE jpeg and RAW when printed, but it just means I have to be more careful when setting the white balance. Using the custom function to recall the white balance makes this quick and easy. If I want to do a bit of post processing in my software,(PWPro) then I load the file, do any work I need like colour correction, level curves etc and save to a tiff file. PWP is all I have ever used and it doesn't make any alterations to the original file. It can also do this to batch processing. Bottom line is I love the quality the A700 is capable of and I keep things as simple as possible. I'm a happy camper.

John

[lugnuttz]

I just got my a700 last week, and I agree, it is very user friendly. I am coming from using a KM-7D, which I still like how it feels in my hands better, but I am getting used to the a700 much faster than I expected. I am extremely pleased with the performance! Talk about a night and day difference! I am very happy with this camera and hope to enjoy it for a long time.

I do have a question if someone might know the answer... Is there a way to back off the RED color saturation in the camera itself. I found where the saturation adjustment is, but nothing for just the individual colors like on the KM-7D had. I shoot a lot of pics of live bands and sometimes the red overpowers everything. To remedy that I would just reduce the saturation for the red, which really did a good job balancing everything out. If there is something I am missing, can someone point it out to me, or is it just not available on this camera.

Thanks in advance!

[Dr. Harout]

I just got my a700 last week, and I agree, it is very user friendly. I am coming from using a KM-7D, which I still like how it feels in my hands better, but I am getting used to the a700 much faster than I expected. I am extremely pleased with the performance! Talk about a night and day difference! I am very happy with this camera and hope to enjoy it for a long time.

I do have a question if someone might know the answer... Is there a way to back off the RED color saturation in the camera itself. I found where the saturation adjustment is, but nothing for just the individual colors like on the KM-7D had. I shoot a lot of pics of live bands and sometimes the red overpowers everything. To remedy that I would just reduce the saturation for the red, which really did a good job balancing everything out. If there is something I am missing, can someone point it out to me, or is it just not available on this camera.

Thanks in advance!

If you shoot in RAW, then there are no problems. With JPEG however, you may notice variations.
Which firmware is on the camera?
And, of course, welcome to the forum.

[David Kilpatrick]

Yes, the WB Kelvin preset should be set to something which works for stage lighting such as 2800K or 3200K. This sets the blue/yellow balance. There is a second adjustment called Filter, which adjusts the red/green (or more strictly, magenta/green balance - the CC adjustment of the old Minolta colour temperature meter, where the LB adjustment is the Kelvin setting). Set this to minus values and you should tone down the reds. Also, reducing saturation can help.

You can not access the CC filter adjustment in Auto WB or preset WB choices.

David

[lugnuttz]

If you shoot in RAW, then there are no problems. With JPEG however, you may notice variations.
Which firmware is on the camera?
And, of course, welcome to the forum.

I will plan on shooting with raw & jpg, so if they look bad as jpg, I can fix them with lightroom if needed.

I installed v4 firmware right when I got the camera.

Thanks for the warm welcome to the forum! and the advice!

[lugnuttz]

Yes, the WB Kelvin preset should be set to something which works for stage lighting such as 2800K or 3200K. This sets the blue/yellow balance. There is a second adjustment called Filter, which adjusts the red/green (or more strictly, magenta/green balance - the CC adjustment of the old Minolta colour temperature meter, where the LB adjustment is the Kelvin setting). Set this to minus values and you should tone down the reds. Also, reducing saturation can help.

You can not access the CC filter adjustment in Auto WB or preset WB choices.

David

Thank you for the help David. I have a question though... As I go through your suggestions, I get to the color filter setting it just says M1, M2, M3,... etc, and G1, G2, G3... etc. So if I understand you correct, to dial down the reds, I need to adjust the settings to the greens? example G1, G2??? Am I right or not?
Thanks again for your assistance, I really appreciate it!!

[David Kilpatrick]

Basically, yes. You can only reduce red bias by shifting to green - it may not be what you want. Remember that selecting a lower colour temperature also has a big effect on how reds look. You may actually need to set the camera to 5000K instead of using Daylight, or whatever you find works best. Your best solution is to process from raw, then you can control every aspect of the colour.

David