Sony want to dominate in the Digital SLR market and rather than go it alone in developing new lenses and other SLR camera technology they bought out Konica Minolta a Company that had great camera technology but were struggling to compete in the world of digital photography.
If Sony want to win the SLR crown in the mass market the new Sony Alpha DSLR-A100K Camera is a neat compact camera that screams of all the good old fashioned benefits one use to find in a film SLR Camera, it actually feels like a camera should feel, the big difference being that one is able to see images as soon as you have shot them.
The new Sony Alpha DSLR-A100K, is a compact, ten megapixel (CCD) digital SLR with a (Konica) Minolta lens mount, Anti-Shake (now Super SteadyShot) and a definite cross-breed appearance. It's fair to say that while this camera may share some components with previous Konica Minolta digital SLR's Sony's involvement has brought external styling, build quality and finish up to a higher standard.
The lens mount is now is called the 'Alpha mount' and Sony has announced no less than 19 lenses which will carry the Sony Alpha branding (although many are based on existing Minolta lenses).
The camera is easy and responsive to use and won't frighten the first time SLR user. However I warn buyers that you do need to spend some time getting use to the setting as simply putting it on automatic and shooting will not get you the best results.
The quality of the images we saw in the camera viewer were excellent however I like a lot of camera users have now got use to using an LCD screen to view and set up shots. With this camera and because it is a digital SLR all shots have to lined up through the eyepiece with technical information being displayed on the screen prior to shooting.
A neat feature is the automatic rotating of the data when one moves from vertical to landscape. A big problem that I had was that with two computers I was unable to boot the camera into the system to download images. The camera should have appeared as a USB device on my PC instantly and despite re booting the system it still failed to recognise the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100. It however boot into a notebook.
In the end I took the memory out of the camera and manually loaded the images into Photoshop.
