(Dear All, this article came out in the March 2008 edition of pERSONAL fORTUNE—the monthly magazine of Business Mirror—entitled For the easy life: Sony takes aim at the single-lens reflex market. vICsOL)

LIFE is indeed easier for the photographer. Gone are the days when even the amateur must calculate and fine tune focusing distance, lens opening and shutter speed in relation to ambient light and ISO rating in order to take a picture that is considered passable. Automation took care of all that and more.
    The digital camera even knocked off the most dreaded equation in photography: darkroom work. No more developers, fixers; no more wash and bleach. The MacBook Pro and Photoshop took care of those messy and dangerous chemicals.
    The latest contender in the realm of digital single lens reflex camera is entertainment and gadget conglomerate Sony Corp. Its Alpha series has become the company’s flagship and the A700 has come head-to-head with Canon’s 40D and Nikon’s D300. This article though will not go into the nitty-gritty of comparisons and distinctions, as well as the technical differences in digital artifacts in images shot at ISO 400 and above among the three cameras.
    The A700 gives the photographer the option of using Compact Flash memory card after the A100. It would have been fine, except that the default seems to favor the memory stick, and photographers who’ve encountered this situation interpreted it as a proprietary issue skewed toward Sony products.
    It’s a bit annoying, although the photographer can easily override the default by going to the menu and choosing Compact Flash under the Memory Card setting. Hopefully, Sony’s technicians will have remedied this annoyance in the A800.
Because the A700 is basically aimed at the advanced amateur—so are the 40D and D300—the novice may be inundated by the array of buttons and dials on the top and back of the camera. Only after a bit of extensive use changing the ISO, white balance and drive settings in the heat of a shoot would their significance come to light.
    Sony has designed the Alpha series, particularly the A100 and its advanced brother, the A200—sold in Thailand since January; available by March in the Philippines—to wean Cyber-shot users from point-and-shoot to single lens reflex photography.
    A note of comparison and a to backtrack a bit, the Alpha architecture is based on the Konica Minolta Maxxum D series. Sony has acquired the entire camera division of Konica Minolta in 2004. The A700 uses a CMOS sensor, the A100 the CCD or charged coupled device. Sony explains in documents available to the public that a CMOS sensor is faster and produces less digital artifact, or noise. It also has a Bionz image processor—Sony’s latest image computing device that it claims is optimized for the sensor to take up to 5 frames per second and process up to 18 raw12.2-megapixel files.
    Despite the digital camera, photography remains a tool-based preoccupation. Thus, considerations like exposure—the amount of light that should reach the film, or light sensor in digital terms, to capture a scene—remain the photographer’s call. This is what make’s photography as exciting as when the birth of the medium was officially proclaimed in August 1839 at the Institut de France and, at the same time, Louise-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was honored as its inventor. The power of the photographer remains in making a decision on exposure and getting it right.
    Today’s cameras have seen a transition from instruments of limited capabilities during the first half of the 20th Century, compared to the slew of automatic SLRs that came out in the 1970s, to sophisticated digital gadgets that give the photographer options based on level of know-how. For example, by turning the dial on the top left of the A700 to auto, the camera becomes a virtual point-and-shoot. All a photographer needs to do is aim and press the shutter release button. The computer, or processor that is at heart of today’s gadgets, does the rest, from calculating focusing distance, lens opening and shutter speed to white balance and ISO sensitivity. The difference being the A700’s hefty size and weight compared to the real point-and-shoots, like the Canon’s G9, or Nikon’s Cool Pix P60 or Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-W200.
    Today’s advanced amateur uses the camera to take what is known as street photography—taking pictures while strolling in the city or the forest—portraits, landscapes and still life. For this article, the A700 went through the rigors of travel—Bangkok, Thailand, and Singapore. Thus, a number of photos that border on a theme of travel accompany this article.
    What is noticeable about the A700 is its responsiveness to its settings, like a brand new car that drives well. For example, in Bangkok on the Chao Phrya river, I bracketed for three consecutive frames at one-third exposure levels apart. Despite, the difficulty of the ambient light—the scene perpendicular to a bright mid-afternoon sun—the camera was able to capture images that are correctly exposed. (By the way, all the images here apart from having been resized are unedited. Meaning, they weren’t corrected for brightness, contrast, sharpness and tonal values in Photoshop.)
    The same holds true for pictures I took along Singapore’s Promenade by the harbor. The camera was able to read the light correctly—an essential element in taking good pictures.
    In restaurants in Makati, Bangkok and Singapore’s Dempsey district, using the macro mode with flash on programmed automatic, the A700—hand-held—delivered more than passable images that would likely whet the appetite of foodies and stylists alike. This is because of the anti-shake technology that is built into the camera body—a legacy of the Konica Minolta design—and compares with the vibration reduction technology of Nikon and the image stabilizer function of Canon. Unlike Sony’s though, Nikon’s and Canon’s are built into the lens.
        Even in indoor low light conditions with high ISO settings, the camera produced images with passable tonal transitions even to those with a discerning eye.
    Despite being the new kid on the block, compared to Canon and Nikon—leaders in the field of digital single lens reflex camera—Sony has come up with a fine instrument in the A700. This camera is definitely a tool in the box that makes life easier for the photographer.