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Sony Announced Hybrid Digital Camera
Anna Merikin writes to tell us that Sony has begun shipping a new digital camera, the R1. With the R1 Sony has married the big digital SLRs' sensor with the live preview display of the compact cams. But to do so, it is not an SLR although it is about the same size as one. The new architecture also allows wider-angle optics to be used, but it does not have interchangeable lenses.
Sorry, it's a Sony. Not interested.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I had a hard time trying to understand from the blurb what the whole deal was. It's a shame the slashdot editors are not interested in doing their jobs.
Ignore the rootkit and the other reasons we don't like Sony. Why would you buy a digital camera from Sony?
Canon knows optics. Canon makes awesome cameras. Try a Powershot or a Rebel, absolutely blows away everything on the market. Fuji makes a nice line of cameras also. Sony always seemed to be lacking in both their CCD and their glass quality.
Also, why would you buy an SLR without interchangeable lenses? If you're geeky enough to properly use an SLR, you probably won't be happy being stuck with one lense.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Who gives a crap how it works, the real question is what kind of rootkit does it come with?
Every living creature on earth dies alone.
They named it after a button on their game controllers, I so must have one!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
For me, the whole point of LSR:s is the ability to change lenses as needed. Yes, the better image quality is nice too, but it's not _that_ huge a difference anymore. And this one (apart from being a Sony) has the drawback of being the same size as an SLR camera, without the benefit of switching lenses. I'd happily have either a pocketable point and shoot (small, light, inexpensive and quick and easy to use) or a DSLR (good image quality, great flexibility). This halfway thing is not the right thing for me.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Yes, people will still buy from Sony. Why is that? Because, like it or not, they do offer products that some people will want, even if they also offer products that others despise.
I have talked to a number of people here in Britain about the rootkit incident. Basically nobody knows about it. I had my cousins in North America ask people there, and it was the same. The vast majority of people they talked to do not have a clue as to what had happened.
While the geek community may be horrified about what has happened, the general populace in both Britain and North America most likely does not give a damn at all. They are most likely not even aware of what had happened. Thus they will continue to support Sony.
As for Slashdot covering OpenServer, there's no reason for Slashdot not to. If some news item arises involving it, then Slashdot should post it. There are still many companies around who depend on UnixWare and OpenServer. It's still a very important product, even if the company which now owns them has done much to annoy the computing community.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The author also laments that there's no macro mode, which is kind of redeundant when you've already said you can't get any closer than 13 inches. And all for $1000!
Personally, I'd go with the Nikon D-series or a Canon Digital Rebel for a lot less with a few lenses and be able to actually get near some of my subjects.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0512/05120603sonydscr 1review.asp
Summary -- fantastic lens, but despite the large sensor inferior noise performance to entry level DSLRs.
I have discovered a wonderful
As long as I have to purchase another redundant proprietary memory format (Hello xD), that costs nearly twice as much per MB as SD and CF, then I don't want to be right.
Download Opera 9 (in the BETA forum)
Good review can be found here.
Wow. That's all I have to say. I mean, a new camera. And sony! And lenses which can't be exchanged (trapping you in to their own proprietary products and services), wow! This is all so surprising!
Strangely enough, pictures of objects showing the word $sys$ always end up being completely black...
No one but a tool would want a R1 though. RTFA, the lens is fixed, there is no macro mode, no burst worth speaking of (3 pics is not what I call burst), no video, no fast-switch preset modes (akin to Canon's Best Shot modes), ...
The only things it has going for it is 10MPix photos that you get on SLR and live preview that you get on compacts... I guess I should say "yay", but to me innovation sounds much closer to Panasonic putting an optic stabilizer on his FX8 and FX9 compacts AND at an affordable price (instead of the numeric "nonstabilizer" everyone else has).
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/photo_and_video/ digital-slr-reviews/fullstory.html
I'm not fat, just big boned...
great hardware.... right..... have you bought Sony consumer gear made recently? it is worse than their major brand competitors and about comparable to the decent generic hardware.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
But you know you'll still be first in line when the PS3 comes out.
Of course you'll have to push past me first.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'll admit that an EVF isn't perfect (even the A2's EVF needs more pixels), but I'll never go back to an optical viewfinder again. I look forward to better sensors and better EVFs
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I have a Minolta A2 - probably the best Electronic view finder on the market.
Its dreadfull(for image quality) when compared with the through the lens viewfinder of an SLR, there so much clearer and brighter.
its usefull for having grid patterns, histograms etc, but given the choice, I'd rather have the dSLR.
Also up until recently (with this sony aparently) running hte sensor, a LARGE sensor all the time suckd the battery power.
My friends canon 300d can take as many pictures with one battery (similar 'size') as my A2 does two - and I'm working in power saving mode (no LCD, eye sensor EVF etc.
Digital SLRs are not "completely stupid." One major benefit is that SLR design almost entirely eliminates the "shutter lag" that is common to most other digital cameras. The top Nikon DSLRs have shutter lag of less than 40 milliseconds; compare that to many non-SLR digital cameras where you sometimes wait half a second (or longer) between when you press the shutter button and when the picture is taken.
Digital viewfinders also use up MUCH more power than SLR designs. Nikon's DSLRs nowadays have a battery life of around 2,000 shots; most cameras that use digital viewfinders can only shoot a tiny fraction of that number without requiring a new battery or a recharge.
Finally, DSLRs allow established photographers to use any of the hundreds (thousands?) of existing lenses for compatible cameras.
Certainly there's a place for cameras with digital viewfinders. But DSLRs offer unique benefits that warrant a place as well.
This article appears more of marketing propaganda than actual truth. Take for example "he R1 offers something that's never before been possible on a large-sensor camera: a wide-angle (24-mm) equivalent on the basic lens" What about the (10-12mm)-(20-22mm) lenses that are available for current D-SLR's - that gives 16mm wide lens vs 24mm wide! Oooo ...
I read the review...it isn't any kind of hybrid camera. It is just a new CyberShot model. Still no through-the-lens, changeable lenses, etc. because it is NOT meant to be anything like an SLR. Canon has a similar line of products.
Vote for global prefs bug
Yes, it does seem stupid if you don't know how digital sensors work.
Without the "SLR mechanism", a lot of technical compromises have to be made. The biggest thing you'd be able to relate to is probably response time -- it takes non-trivial amounts of time to clear the sensor and switch the sensor into picture taking mode.
If you've ever wondered why every single point and shoot camera has a bit of "lag" between hitting the shutter button and the camera actually taking a picture, this is why. (on some point and shoots, the lag time is greatly reduced if you disable the live preview)
Buy an Olympus or Pentax. They are relatively cheap compared with Canons and the Nikons and their optics aren't too horrible. But then again all of your photographer friends will snicker at you. Sigma's are relatively affordable as well. But their lenses aren't known to be the greatest. There are a lot of affordable choices.
Beware: may install rootkit and ugly invisible mustache to your then-DRM'd digital pictures. May attempt formatting CF and/or HDD if rootkit is removed.
You can find a much better review <a href="http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews<nobr>/<wbr></wbr></nobr> r1.html">here</a>. It gives a much more detailed look at the features, but will be more useful still when they have completed the conclusions portion (awaiting production camera, as opposed to pre-production sample).
It's not just the rootkit, I stopped buying Sony products many years ago. The rootkit just confirms my previous experiences with Sony. They treat their consumers with in a bad way and place unreasonable constraints upon them. Anyone who bought a Sony minidisc device or any device that only uses memory stick knows what a pain Sony is. Also, the quality of their products have become quite questionable in recent years. There's been the CCD fiasco just lately, where bad glue made their CCDs practically come apart after a little while, and in my personal experience, both Sony Vaio laptops died just a little bit after their warranties expired.
When these things start appearing in stores, why bother going into one to buy one when you can get it a lot cheaper online? I haven't bought from the company myself yet, but I've seen it linked to on a lot of blogs lately. Something about supplying cheap cameras, so maybe some of you want to give them a shot; you might save some money that way.
http://www.priceritephoto.com/
Good-Tutorials
Isn't Memory Stick chock full of DRM goodies?
No. But feel proud that you are another victim of F.U.D.
Sony cameras will take vitually any memory stick, including the one, very rare, model called "Magic Gate" which has some DRM in it for music. Of the 15 or so flavors of Memory Sticks, I believe that is the only one that has DRM, and again, it's only for music. You can take off your tin foil hat, Sony cameras have no method for attaching DRM to your pictures.
From a user's point of view, the only difference between a Memory Stick and a CF card in a Sony camera is the size and price.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
A lot of amateurs who are used to getting the cool moving pictures at the back of their compact consumer cameras automatically assume that DSLRs are inferior because they "lack" the preview. One I know even _returned_ a 350D because of this. It is, of course, a totally useless feature if you're shooting seriously, for various reasons, and I must educate people about this to no end... those that instantly spring to mind would be
- Image quality. In a DSRL you see _with your own eyes_ whatever is going to hit the sensor, through whatever optics you've got attached. This is going to be superior to any crappy LCD, unless perhaps you're working with very low light coming through due to some weird filters, or something like that. I bet you couldn't even properly do a manual focus when neccessary if you didn't use your eyeball as a direct measuring device. My idiot cousin got one of these leet cams that actually have a fake eyepiece by having a screen behind it, and he was like laughing his ass off at my "old-fashioned" (350D) camera that didn't do the AD/DA loop between lens and his eye. Try explaining to people like that that he's just getting reduced quality... even in the debrief screen, a serious photographer is going to look at the histogram, NOT the shown image because it just doesn't tell you anything about the exposure.
- Battery life. You won't be able to keep the screen on for long before you run out of charge.
- You _need_ a proper posture to hold the camera steady when shooting, and the traditional way of doing it -- holding the camera to your eye and stabilizing against your face and body is the way to go. If you were going to shoot while looking at the back of the camera, your camera shake is going to be humongous, esp. if you've got long optics attached.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
So I tell people. I tell everyone, even if they aren't listening at first. I tell them that Sony hides software on their music CDs that can enable others to take their computer over. I tell them that all of the great minds at Symantec, McAfee and Microsoft never knew or even worse, possibly looked the other way. I then ask them, "What else does Sony do to us?"
I tell them that multiple states now have class-action lawsuits against Sony, and that some states and countries are investigating Sony for criminal behavior. I tell them that I cannot trust any of Sony's products anymore, because I won't know that they've done something to me until the damage has already been done.
Until I get some kind of assurance that this was a huge mistake, until I know who at Sony chose to do this and that they are fired, until a policy is in place that respects me, the consumer, rather than treats me like a guilty criminal that Sony needs to be protected from, then I will continue to tell people to protect themselves from Sony. Because there IS choice and Sony is NOT the only game in town.
I am now left with Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt over ALL Sony's products. Would you buy a VIAO? Would you buy a PS2? Would you buy anything from Sony that connects to the internet? Would you put a Sony movie in your computer's DVD drive and expect that Symantec, McAfee or Microsoft will warn you if they've attempted something similiar there?
I rarely buy music, or listen to it for that matter. I don't have to worry about my home computer. But I've spent countless nights helping friends, co-workers and family members by ridding their computers of all the crap that ends up on their systems without their knowledge. When I FINALLY get their computer functional again, having spent hours saving what they never backed up, what they get back is NOT improved or better, it's just where it should have been all along. I consider ALL of those hours lost time, time I could have spent with my kids or my wife. And that is precious lost time. I cannot put a dollar value on that. Nor will I give a dollar to anyone that creates that exact same scenario.
I cannot resign myself that nothing is going to happen. I cannot let Sony get a pass. So, in my own little way, just like Mark Russinovich, I talk to people, alot.
Lou
Please remember what Sony/BMG did with the rootkit. It was unethical to say the least. When I learned of this, I resolved to "vote with my money" and will no longer buy anything Sony. I know Sony Electronics aren't exactly the same as Sony music but (or should I say BUT) they have the same roots and and my refusal to do business with Sony anything is bound to make them think about things - but not if I am a lone voice in the woods.
Like-minded Geeks unite! Boycot those Sony scumbags who thought a rootkit was a good idea! Only the bottom line matters to them. Affect it!
I've never understood why Canon compact cameras are popular. They do tend to have decent lens quality. But: they have the slowest autofocus of any compact camera manufacturer. Enormous shutter lag. Lots of people who bought Canon digicams think they need to get a DSLR if they want 1 sec shutter lag. In truth, they just need to try a different brand.
Now people in this thread have mentioned that electronic viewfinders suck, there's also a technical reason: Large sensors, like CPUs, suffer from transistor leakage. The longer they operate, the hotter they get, and the worse they perform. By only activating the sensor when needed, you get a much cleaner image.
TFA is confused about sensor sizes. First, it says this:
But like an SLR, it has a huge sensor inside, 21.5 by 14.4 millimeters.
And then it says this:
Yet without switching lenses, the R1 also zooms in 5x (a 120-mm equivalent). Unlike the focal-length measurements of other digitals, these are true 35-mm camera equivalents that don't have to be multiplied by, say, 1.5.
The 35mm frame size is 36 by 24 mm, for a diagonal of 43mm, which is 1.67 times the diagonal of the sensor in the camera. So you have to multiply by 1.67 to get your "35mm equivalents". If you look at the front of the camera (pictured here) you can see that the actual focal length range of the lens is 14.3mm to 71.5mm, and when you multiply by 1.67, you get the quoted 24mm to 120mm. It is hardly new, or in any way a "feature" for a digital camera manufacturer to quote the "35mm equivalent" when talking about focal lengths. It is, however, totally bogus, IMO, because it tells you nothing about depth of field, which depends on the actual physical focal length and the distance to the subject. Given that the maximum apeture at the longer end of the range is f/4.8, your subject will have to be pretty close to get the claimed ability to use "that professionals' trick of blurring the background".
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
on SLR's there is half silvered mirror that bounces some of the light to special sensors at the bottom of the mirror box that are wired directly to the AF motor. these are the hardware AF modules.
on non-slr cameras, a software routine must run that has to dump data off the entire sensor chip (basically just like the LCD lag) and analyze it to determine the focus. its speed is determined by the chip refresh rate, the main processor speed and the efficiency of the software routine.
naturally, the dedicated hardwired AF modules are much, much faster. The autofocus in a pro camera like the D2X is insanely quick and accurate.
-
Sony, here's a list of recomendations from me regarding R1:
1. You NEED a movie mode in this camera. Decent movie mode alone would make it a cult gadget because with such a large sensor it would beat the crap out of camcorders three times the price (which is why I guess movie mode was not included in R1 - Sony makes camcorders too).
2. LCD on top is stupid. Give me flip-out-and-twist LCD that's on the back and flips out to the side. For the love of god make it 2.5" and at least 250K pixels.
3. At $1K I'm going to require some sort of image stabilization.
4. Better image processing. There's no excuse to having a good sensor and screwing up the images in software after they're shot.
The Canon A620 is a great little camera, but it doesn't come close to the R1 in high ISO settings. It also doesn't go anywhere near as wide.
the lens is worth the price of the DSC-R1 alone. That fact is not to be underestimated, it's a great lens which provides you with a very useful 24 - 120 mm zoom range (which will be sufficient for the majority of users). Doing the math it's pretty clear that you have to spend a fairly considerable sum on lenses for a D-SLR to get close to this range and the quality of the DSC-R1's lens
... being able to use whatever lens you want. I have a 24mm, 50mm, and 100mm, all between f/1.8 and f/2.8, which *combined* cost far less than the Sony R1. And, being fast primes, I bet they each produce better quality output than the R1. (And does Sony even have USM lenses?)
WTF?
If it's a 24-120mm lens, and it doesn't weigh 10 pounds, then it can't be very fast -- f/4-f/5.6, maybe?
Zoom lenses aren't easy to make -- which means if you want to be able to zoom, you sacrifice pretty much *everything* else: speed, size, weight, quality, complexity, and so forth.
But the whole point of an SLR with interchangeable lenses is
So the whole "worth the price of the R1 alone" / "have to spend a fairly considerable sum on lenses for a D-SLR to get close to this range and the quality of the R1's lens" is ignoring the rather large restriction "has to be a zoom, at the expense of all else". (But a similar lens for my system is only $225 new, anyway.)
The R1 may be a great new camera (for its price level), but the only way you can claim that one can't cover medium-wide-angle to medium-telephoto with an SLR, affordably, is to ignore most of the best SLR lenses available.
Actually, some of us love optical viewfinders because they're better. Better resoloution, better brightness, MUCH better response rate, easier to see in sunlight, etc etc. I used to use compact digitals (was never much of a photographer in the film days) with LCDs because I didn't know any better. Then I tried a DSLR, and the viewfinder was the thing that impressed me the most. 2 years and $10k later I wouldn't ever buy a camera with an LCD viewfinder again, they just aren't good enough, and don't really have any advantages. Low angle shots? That's why I was blessed with knees.
I think this is the future of photography.
I don't. The next few years will tell us who's right.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Yep. It's not like Sony Electronics pushes non-standard stuff like ATRAC and MemoryStick over widely used alternatives. No sirree!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.