December 11, 2005 6:00 AM PST
A camera that has it all? Well, almost
- Related Stories
-
Sony to repair defective camcorders
October 4, 2005 -
Sony plans broad reorg, 10,000 job cuts
September 22, 2005 -
Study: Camera phone market will top digital cameras
August 10, 2005 -
Nikon's photo encryption reported broken
April 21, 2005 -
Video or still? You needn't choose anymore
February 10, 2005 -
Picture this: A new breed of cameras
February 3, 2005 -
Can Sony reinvent itself as cool?
January 20, 2005
Sony's approach to innovation has produced the R1, a camera that shatters a longstanding law of digital photography and takes spectacular photos.
The New York Times
The story "A camera that has it all? Well, almost" published December 11, 2005 at 6:00 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
Content from The New York Times expires after 7 days.
20 comments
Join the conversation! Add your comment (Log in or register)
End of story. I'm not the worlds greatest photographer - still don't make a living at it. But if I can't switch my half a dozen lenses - what good is it ?
It's still just a point & shoot idiot camera, if I can't put my Sigma 170-500 lense on, perhaps with a 2X converter & shoot wilflife, without disturbing it.
If I can't put on one of my wide angle Sigma for wide-open landscapes, it's no good for me.
The only qualifier - sometimes the new technology, which is introduced on low-end camera gets improved until it works right - that's when I'll look for it on an SLR.
is that when they're charged up, they attract dust. And so every
time one changes a lens dust enters. And when the sensor
charges up, the motes are attracted to the sensor, and each
piece of dust covers pixels.
Also, this sensor may be "massive" in terms of comparing it to
PHD (push here dummy) cameras, but it's still smaller than the
full-frame DSLR sensors that are at the same megapixel size as
this camera, which means they will produce much better photos
in terms of sharpness and lack of noise. Still, they cost at least
thee times to eight times as much as this camera.
It looks like a great compromise camera. But that's also it's
weakness. Still, for many people, it's the perfect comromise.
fingernail sensor enclosed in all the small digitals. I long for the
days of a little rangefinder tucked in my pocket. My Canon 1D
Mark II cameras are incredible, don't get me wrong, I can make
them perform magic and jump through hoops I could never
jump through with film, but they are huge. Try being descreet
with one or two of these things hanging off of you. The minute
you walk into a room, you are the center of attention.
So here's what I want. Take the Contax G2 and put the Leica
brightline viewfinder in it so I can get it to my eye and compose
quickly. It must have quiet auto focus as well as the ability to
manually focus with realtime feedback in the viewfinder. Next,
jam a chip in there that will let me get a clean 100-400 iso/asa
and maybe even 800 if need be, but I'd settle for 400. Little or
no shutter lag is a must. I need three options for exposure/
metering choices- manual, aperture priority and shutter priority.
The lens would ideally be say 24-105 f2.8. It can be a fixed
mount. If I need the big glass, I've got the big cameras. I just
want a quick, quiet and discreet tool to stick in my pocket for
those fleeting, decisive moments that we've all been chasing
ever since Bresson coined the term so many years ago. <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://" target="_newWindow">http://</a>
www.henricartierbresson.org/hcb/home_en.htm
handful of lenses. I have discovered that for the way I shoot, I use
one lens (Sigma 18-55) about 75% of the time. This equates to
~28-88mm. I wanted more pixels and the extra range at both
ends are a bonus.
The R1 is a wonderful package for me. There is a braindead design
problem with the size of RAW file and the macro capabilities could
be improved, but this will not be leaving my bag for quite a while.
Further , from the prices I have seen, most if not all SONY products are overpriced anyway!
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html</a>
I, for one, will not easily forget the DRM farce. And I will make sure that others remember, too.
"move along folks...nothing new to see here"
Just an uninformed reporter, posting about what he doesn't know. This feature is available in a few DSLRs out there.
Olympus' E-10/E-20 fixed lens DSLR allowed for the using of the LCD screen to frame a shot. I know, I owned one and on more than one occasion held the unit upside down over my head to get above crowds at concerts. (Sure, it's not quite as big a sensor as the new batch of DSLRs but that's because those are 4 yr old models. So you're touting a 4 yr old feature as new.)
Canon's 20Da also allows you to do the same thing. This is a modified variant of their 20D with a focus on Astrophotography. Thus they allow the LCD to display what is seen.
- Saj
as for why pro's/serious amateurs prefer to use a viewfinder: it helps to steady the camera, adding a "third leg" to the tripod that braces a handheld camera (two hands and the face). in addition, it doesn't usually suffer from wash-out on bright, daylit scenes that make it difficult to compose the desired image.
mark d.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://members.cox.net/mddoiron" target="_newWindow">http://members.cox.net/mddoiron</a>
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://colossalstorage.net/home_display_lens.htm" target="_newWindow">http://colossalstorage.net/home_display_lens.htm</a>
SLR stands for "single lens reflex", meaning you view the scene through the lens by way of a mirrored pentaprism. The SLR was the king of 35mm film formats because professional photographers could switch off dozens of specialty lenses, from super-wide angles to super-telephotos to macros, etc., to achieve the effect they wanted. When digital came along the makers of sensors were reluctant to offer sensors large enough to fill the same space as a 35mm photo frame, and so real camera companies held back from the market while photocopier makers dabbled in producing little pocket digital cameras. The large ones with fixed lenses, like this particular Sony we're talking about, were labelled "ZLR's"--"Zoom lense reflex".
After a while real camera makers were able to obtain sensors that almost filled up the 35mm frame size, meaning real camera companies could take all of the hardware they had developed for interchangeable lense photography and make it work for digital, usually with a little bit of size conversion (i.e., some loss of wide-angle capability and gain of telephoto for the same lense). At the present moment while the author of this article sits in his dreamland you can go to the local Best Buy and find DSLR's from Canon, Nikon, and Olympus that have the lcd screen on the back (and have had for a few years) as well as the option of looking directly through the lense in the viewfinder. Real artists and photographers know the value of interchangeable lense systems and how to use them, which is why traditional lense/body SLR's (even SLR's that display digital images rather than letting you look through the lense) are here to stay.
Though it's nice that Sony is offering up a new ZLR for the market that lets you take high-resolution images, resolution is not the defining technical characteristic of an SLR--lense/viewer architecture and lense families are--so all of the "technical" explanation here was hocus-pocus from someone who doesn't really know...
Anyway... this has been more of a rant than a comment, but the point is if your buying this thing, then you don't have a clue about what your doing. In the world of photography, there really isn't any middle ground.
^a10