Click to Enlarge Most photographers shooting from a boat rolling on the waters off Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula might wish for image-stabilized lenses. But I didn’t need them. I was shooting with the shake-beating camera body of Sony’s new Alpha 100 DSLR. This meant that every lens I put on was, in effect, a stabilized lens. Whether it was the 300mm tele (450mm equivalent with the camera’s 1.5x 35mm lens factor) I used to scope out sea lions on a boulder-strewn glacier-carved island or the 18mm wide-angle that made the comical little puffins look even funnier, I didn’t have to worry about blur. In fact, even when enlarged, the shots were tack sharp thanks to 10.2 megapixels of resolving power. Click on gallery icon above to view photos.
A close look at the details of this new camera is posted here in Michael J. McNamara’s Hands-On report as well as in the August issue of Popular Photography & Imaging. A full test in the Pop Photo Lab will be performed as soon as production models are available. But with a near-production version in hand, I got an extensive field test of the camera during a two-day Alaskan adventure that Sony put together in early June to introduce the Alpha 100 to the press. Shooting in these wild, varied, and sometimes extreme conditions clearly demonstrated this camera’s mettle.
I came away especially impressed with seven aspects of the Alpha:
--Blur-busting
--10.2MP sensor and fast processing
--LCD
--Easy operation
--Battery life
--Lens variety
--Wireless flash
And found two features to be a disappointment:
--The pop-up flash
--The Eye-Start function
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