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I have to catch up with some news I didn’t post in these busy Photokina days.
1) I got a news from a long time SonyAlphaRumors reader. He is selling his complete collection of Maxxum 900, 9xi an 9 cameras in excellent conditions on [shoplink 14320 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]. it’s worth to check it out for the tons of nice pictures you can see!
2) Four new VG900 videos: one, two, three and four.
3) Sony’s NEX-5R WiFi: Hands On With the Viewfinder Feature at Pcworld.
4) At a live event at CamerDiner Paul Genge said the Sony A99 can do uncompressed 4:4:4 Hdmi out signal. It really would surprise me if tat would be the Chroma sampling quality! Hope some of you guys can give me some more info about that.
5) Many testing videos on Mobile01.
6) RX1 at Quesabesde.
7) New Lensmate Sony RX100 Quick Change filter adapter.
8) Sony 18-135mm SAM f/3.5-5.6 Review at Photographic Central.
9) A Sony image stabilization test at Heise.
Editor’s note: In these busy weeks I got many mails and news from you and most of them never got an answer. The next days I will take the necessary time to answer you all! Thanks for your patience 🙂
31 Responses
Awesome work admin! 🙂 Thank you!
NICE RX1-link!! I hope you will post whatever news you got about this camera – I am so excited to see reviews and so on – this is my dream camera!
Magnus Wedberg? Mr. STF? 🙂
Carl
What? My name is Magnus Holm…
I still use my old Minolta 9000 that I purchased new in 1996 (shown far right) as my film camera.
Great old camera and one of the first AF cameras made
With the motor drive attached and a NiCad battery it would shoot at 7 FPS blowing through a 36 exposure in about 5 seconds.
One of the first? Either the 9000 or 7000 was first… That’s why it’s called “Alpha” mount.
Those cameras came out same time… I think, thought. The 9000 is the only AF camera with a manual wind too! Runs on two AA’s. Wish we had a retro digital like that. Very small FF digital with manual wind would be hot!
And with the 9000… just leave finger on the shutter and wind as fast as you can. It will shoot as fast as you can wind without lifting finger from the button.
I do think it was the first
And yes it did have the wind
in 1986 My apartment was robbed and my Nikon F3 and two lenses got lifted.
My insurance didn’t cover everything so I purchased the Minolta 9000 as a Nikon replacement.
Nobody had the AF and the other cool features that Minolta had so that what I got.
In those days Nikon was the top followed by Minolta and Olympus and Canon.
Both Nikon and Pentax had AF DSLRs a year or two before the Minolta 7000.
But Minolta was the first with AF + built-in winder.
And they were first to make an AF DSLR which became a success.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t have “D”SLRs before the Maxxum 7000. 😉
And actually, if I recall correctly, Minolta’s Maxxum was the first SLR to have integrated AF, but you’re right that Pentax and Nikon had some AF built into early lenses. There may have been a Contax system that used AF in one or two lenses, too, but that never caught on.
You could make a case that the 7000 and 9000 were two of the first DSLRs, they offered a VGA resolution CCD digital back called the SB-70 and SB-90 that stored images in analogue format on floppy discs.
http://siecleinventionphoto.elcet.net/gallery_pages/page_18.html
Though Sony and Canon made similar cameras slightly earlier, you had to buy separate cameras for the task, rather than just changing the back.
Whoops. Let that D in DSLR mean something else than “Digital”…
The 9000 is also the only AF film camera that can take a split prism focusing screen without messing up the metering. Works a treat with every A mount lens that isn’t SSM/SAM.
Hey cool THANKS!!!
Found some A99 sample photos. They look better than most of the samples I’ve seen so far.
http://www.nikolaovcharski.com/2012/09/photos-from-sony-alpha-a99/
Those look fantastic, thanks for the link.
Wow, the ISO 6400 and 12800 samples look amazing (at least at that size). Very impressed.
More importantly, though, the rest of the image quality looks pretty darn good from this jpeg engine at the other ISOs. Thanks for passing that along.
Sony’s sure come a long way in this respect. Time to save my pennies for the a99 (and by the time I’m ready there may even be an a88 with even more features, since that’s the way it tends to work — just witness the NEX-6 vs. the NEX-7).
Very convincing. I was having doubts about “noise” again as well as the hefty price tag in the UK of £2500. I will now have to wait for the price to fall as I think it is overpriced here against the D800 and D600.
will the rx1 evf’s eyecup fit on the nex7??? that larger eyecup seems so much more comfortable
Item removed from Ebay…
Looks alive to me.
Thanks for the links. I miss my old 1985 film Canon and the glass I purchased along with it. I still have some files in a shoebox. They look great! Today, we are very spoiled with AF digital and ‘live view’ and in body AND lens stabilization. It’s a great time in photography but we haven’t really changed the art – just the tools. So many choices and so little time.
Yes, very true. The tools, yeah, are impressive and will continue to evolve. We are now on the threshold of the full frame sensor era. Whether we have a ‘mom-and-pop’ P&S, APS-C sensor, full frame, medium format, etc., ultimately the creativity and imagination of the operator behind a lens or a box is what counts.
Actually the Minolta 7000 also had an available split focus screen and the 9000 could be factory modified to work with SSM/SAM lens. I belive that there are some folks in Germany who can still carry out the hardware upgrade on the 9000.
I have a 9xi myself, it’s a very cool camera. It’s nice to have 1/12000th shutter so you can use fast films in daylight with wider apertures, makes it much more versatile than my canon a-1
I don’t believe a single HDMI cable can carry the output of the sensor at 4:4:4. It seems more likely that this is a way of saying it has uncompressed 1080p output with no chroma compression.
Believe it or not, but read the specs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
(Yes, I also doubted it but than I checked the HDMI specs. But I think more interesting will be the image quality and bit-depth when color subsampling is at least 4:2:2.)
the FS100 also claims supporting 4:4:4 on its HDMI output…..but there seems to be a difference between what the camera records and what the output delivers….see this article for some insight: http://notesonvideo.blogspot.ch/2011/08/sony-nex-fs100-and-unimportance-of-rgb.html. So lets see how the a99 does it!
Have two 9000’s, one european (9000AF) and one japanese (9000 alpha). Both with md-90 (max 5fps), one with np-90, the other with bp-90. They just feel so cool working with, a whole different experience than a modern camera. A retro model styled after these would be awesome if somewhat unlikely. Too bad nobody is converting old slr’s… SSM conversion you say? Tell me more!
Correction – I checked with Sony directly after the LIVE show and confirmed the output is 4.2.2 – apologies for the confusion. Lots of stats to remember on the fly!
A new A99 hands on review has just been posted about an hr ago according to google. http://gearburn.com/2012/09/sony-alpha-a99-we-get-our-hands-on-the-first-full-frame-slt/
Sorry about that, too many 0’s… it is the Minolta 9 that can be upgraded. The minolta 7 (which was released after the 9) is fully compatable with SSM/SAM lens.