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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.
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!
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.
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
Carl Zeiss obviously suck at amking glass then eh?
I wont buy sony anymore, doesnt make their cameras poor, though I dont see the thought behind buying an SLR (ish) camera without the mirror or the switchable lenses...
Why would you buy a digital camera from Sony?
Not everyone is as into optics and cameras as you are. Sometimes people just want something that will take pictures or video, even if the quality isn't completely perfect. Not only that, they don't want to spend many pence on it.
Do you know what people do? They go down to their local electronics retailer, and buy cameras from Sony. They may not be the top of the line, but they'll work, and they may offer the best return for what is spent on them.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
To Quote dpreview of the R1:
"I'll start as I shall no doubt finish this little piece of editorial, 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. "
The cameeras problem is not its lens, its in its image processing:
"The second issue is image processing, take a RAW out of the DSC-R1 and run it through Adobe Camera RAW and you can see just what that lens / sensor combination is capable of, however you really need to be pretty dedicated to shoot RAW all the time, 20 MB per RAW file and around 9 seconds to write; I did note that some of our forums users are converting the Sony RAW files to Adobe DNG to save space. That's not to say JPEG's aren't good, they are very good, but you get a whole new appreciation for just how much crisper images could look converting in ACR."
And the fact that your still better off buying a dSLR.
If I may add to this a bit, even Canon consumer cameras are the best. Easy to use, competitive pricing and excellent picture quality. I think it's pretty much undisputed at the moment that Canon make the best digital cameras bar none.[/canonadvert]
Anyway, People in general are lemmings, they buy what is advertised, what is "recommended" to them by salesmen. It's not true for all people granted, but it's a sad fact that a very large portion of people are like this. I find it sad that people are no longer customers or people, they're consumers.. they consume, they buy what they're told to buy and like the lemmings they are they jump off the cliffs.
And in order to inject some humour into this post they also occasionally blow up after ten seconds with an "Oh no!" just before they see oblivion.
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.
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
I find that while canon does good cameras with great image quality, they are still highly overpriced, and excruciatingly SLOW (in the compacts). IMHO, 3 seconds for the camera to react to my pressing a button (the shutter button on the A520, A410) is absolutely shameful.
As for the Rebel, I find the post-processing the camera does to be terrible, specially in high-iso. Obviously, it works great to impress the guys at DPReview who take pictures of a uniform gray chart. But when it comes to picking out details, I find the Nikon dSLR's to give much more natural results, even though they give visible grain.
So, my point is, Canon makes decent cameras, but they're not the best at everything, not by a long shot. Other brands are out there to stimulate competition, as they all have their strong points. Sony have the fastest compact cameras, bar-none. Sure the image isn't as good as a Nikon or Canon, but it's certainly good enough, and it's much better being able to capture the picture _when_ you want it, than to have a great looking picture of something you didn't want because of shutter lag.
Well... Enough rambling. That was my 2 canadian cents worth
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.
You've never used a camera with a good viewfinder, I'll bet. Even my Canon Digital Rebel has a somewhat sucky viewfinder, but it's so much better than any EVF could possibly be it's not even funny.
With a real viewfinder, there's absolutely no lag as you pan around. The image is perfectly sharp. Manual focus varies to not-hard with the Rebel to near-trivial with a good viewfinder. It works just fine in low light: I can set up a shot lit by a single distant candle without trouble, something truly impossible with an EVF. And on and on.
Exposure is trivial to check after the shot on the display on the back of the camera, especially with the histogram. Any camera made in the past few decades will include at least an exposure meter in the viewfinder, and modern ones will include aperture / shutter speed, shots remaining, focus confirmation points, and anything else you might want. You don't need to magnify an optical viewfinder, as it's already sharper than any EVF could possibly hope to be.
If you really want to know what an SLR viewfinder should be like, pick up a Canon 1 series (or whatever Nikon's equivalent is). Or, even better, try a rangefinder--there's few better ways to look through a camera lens than the way Leica does it.
When you've got an EVF with instant response, at least a few megapixels, and the exact same dynamic range and color rendition as the camera's sensors, we'll talk. Until then, even the best EVF isn't going to compare to a low-end SLR film viewfinder.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Speaking as someone who used to sell these things, I second your thoughts. I wouldn't get a Canon or Nikon low-end camera for myself or someone in my family. At the higher end -- where the customers are somewhat more discriminating -- they make great gear, don't get me wrong. But at the low end they rely a lot on their brand name and cut a lot of corners.
Fuji, Olympus, and Minolta are all better in terms of consumer grade cameras than Nikon or Canon's entry level, IMO. Although they all have their good and bad years, and Nikon had some great prosumer equipment in the past (the Coolpix 950 comes to mind, that thing was great), you need to pay some money with Canon or Nikon to get into their non-crippled gear. Fuji -- possibly perhaps because they have a brand name that's associated with cheap drug-store film to most people -- gives a lot of bang for the buck. (Although I think they made a mistake with those xD cards.)
Anyway, just my two cents. I worked at a big camera retailer and we used to push Nikon merch like it was our job -- because basically it was, Nikon had great sales incentives -- but when it came time to get a gift for a friend or family, or pick up an inexpensive digital for myself, I went with the "second tier" brands.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."