Sony DSLR-A100

Reviewed December 2006

Image Quality

The DSLR-A100, or Alpha 100, is Sony's first interchangeable lens digital SLR camera. The Alpha 100 is the result of the fusion of Konica Minolta SLR and Sony's experience. It borrows a lot from the Dynax camera designs, but also shows Sony's imprint, be it by its 10-megapixel CCD, or the incorporation of a Super Steady Shot stabilization system that allows any compatible lens to be stabilized, a strength of this approach, as opposed to building the stabilization into the lens.

By avoiding making any changes to the Minolta A lens mount, Sony has ensured that the Alpha 100 is fully compatible with Minolta lenses. Moreover, Sony has announced the introduction of 19 lenses of its own, some re-badged Minolta lenses, while others are Carl Zeiss designed.

Of these two lenses, the performance of the 18 to 70 mm at its widest angle is somewhat disappointing. At the widest angle, and at large apertures, the image sharpness is quite soft and becomes progressively softer towards the edges of the frame. Past the widest angle, however, the image sharpness increases noticeably, becoming quite good around the 35 mm mark, all the way to maximum telephoto position of 70 mm.

At its default settings, the Sony Alpha 100 produces images with pleasing colours, but which also exhibit a slight accentuation of blues and greens.

And, as is the case with a number of other recently introduced digital cameras, the Alpha 100 is equipped with Colour Modes. These colour profiles are designed to control how the image is processed internally in the camera, optimizing contrast, saturation and sharpness, and offering the user the possibility of tweaking the result through controls over all three settings.

The multi-segment metering, based on the readings obtained from 40 segments of the frame, is usually the most reliable. But when required, the spot metering mode, and the fact that it is linked to the focus point, can be very useful.

Similarly, another advantage of the Alpha 100 is that it offers the possibility of optimizing dynamic range, making it possible, for instance, when the D-R+ setting is used, to capture more details in both high and low light areas of an image while leaving the average areas untouched.

Between 100 and 400 ISO, noise is not readily discernible. As of 800 ISO, however, it starts to appear in the shadow areas of images, but these remain entirely useable, especially if they were shot using the RAW format. On the other hand, images shot at 1600 ISO are visibly noisy, and the noise reduction process engenders a loss of sharpness that is noticeable.

In addition to its sensitivity range of 100 to 1600 ISO, the Alpha 100 offers two other settings: Lo80 and Hi200.

The Alpha 100 is capable of recording two types of image formats: JPEG and RAW. JPEG images captured using the Fine quality setting are usually free of artefacts although the compression tends to be stronger — 9:1 to 14:1 compression ratios — than comparable image quality settings on other dSLR cameras.

RAW format images captured with the Alpha 100 are as good as one can expect with a 10-megapixel SLR. The quantity of details the camera captures is excellent, and the format is well-supported by the software Sony supplies with the camera.

The built-in flash must be manually raised to be used, even when the camera is set to Auto or to one of the Scene modes. The flash generally gives good results with natural colours, but left to its defaults, the light it yields may not always be sufficient. In such cases, its power can pushed using exposure compensation, and the results are usually quite good.

Furthermore, the Alpha 100 is equipped with a Minolta style hotshoe, and Sony is now producing compatible units that enhance the camera's capabilities (HVL-F56M, HVL-F36M or Macro Twin Flash Kit HVL-MT24AM).

The Alpha 100 is one of a growing number of digital cameras that offer an affordable step up to SLR photography, and the capabilities it offers.