Inside Story: Testing Sony's Alpha 100 D-SLR

	© Russell Hart
	The watery view from a pontoon-fitted bush plane on the way from Anchorage to Denali National Park, shot with the Sony Alpha 100 D-SLR's 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 kit lens.

You'll find a very good, detailed analysis of the Alpha 100's features in John Owens's write-up for popphoto.com, so I won't go into point-by-point detail here. Take my word for it that the new camera is a feature creature, offering much more than its plain-vanilla, entry-level exterior might suggest. This may be because it inherits its capabilities both from the discontinued and always underrated Konica Minolta (nee Minolta) SLR system, to which Sony bought the rights, and from Sony's own EVF camera line, perhaps the best of its kind. Among the former's contributions are an installed base of KM and Minolta lenses that the Alpha 100 accepts in addition to its own optics, many of which appear to be from existing KM and Minolta designs. (By year's end there should be 19 Sony-brand D-SLR lenses, not including three co-developed with Zeiss.) Also from KM comes the Alpha 100's sensor-based image stabilization, which steadies shots made with any of those lenses. Together with the camera's high-ISO performance -- speeds go up to ISO 1600, and I shot at ISO 800 with less grain than you'd get from a comparably fast film -- this gives you much more leeway in handheld existing-light photography.

The camera's top-of-class 10-megapixel, APS-C-sized image sensor is from chipmeister Sony, as you'd expect. It's not the 10-megapixel CMOS chip of Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-R1, though, because it doesn't have to deliver a power-hungry live view. That probably contributes to the exceptionally long life of the camera's Li-ion battery, which seems almost inexhaustible.

The Alpha 100 also incorporates what Sony calls Dynamic Range Optimization (DRO). This hardware-based system is said to analyze and manipulate RAW data in-camera, before processing and JPEG compression, in order to recover shadow or highlight detail that might otherwise be lost. Because Sony didn't let us take our Alphas home from Alaska, none of us has had a chance to determine whether DRO is worth yet another acronym -- whether it really gives the camera a tonal advantage over its competitors. But the system did seem to tame the relentless light of Alaska's summer, holding good detail even in sunlit snow. The system appeared, in fact, to lessen the need for RAW mode, which of course the Alpha 100 offers. Yet the Alaskan subjects shown here were in fact all shot (using one of two "kit" lenses, an 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 and a 75-300mm f/4-5.6) in Large Fine JPEG mode. I'm of the opinion that RAW is oversold... but that's a story for another day.