Digital Trends

It must be hard for Sony being number 3 or 4 when it comes to cameras, especially when it dominates just about every other category it enters—other than that little iPod thing the company wishes would go away. HDTVs? Sony is number one. Home audio? Camcorders? You guessed it. The list goes on but you get the idea. Sony wants to be a leader in whatever field it enters. As far as point-and-shoot digital cameras, Sony gives top-seller Canon a run for its money. Yet when it comes to more advanced and expensive D-SLRs, Canon and Nikon are the 1,000-pound gorillas in the room with Olympus, Pentax  and Sony trying fiercely to make inroads (with little success, I might add). Not that the competitors have bad cameras, it’s just Canon and Nikon have sold millions of film SLRs and there are as many compatible lenses floating around. So when it came time for those film folks to go digital, it was only natural they stuck with the Big Two since they had investments in glass sitting in their closets. To capture some of these buyers, Sony introduced the alpha DSLR-A100  well over a year ago and I liked the 10-megapixel D-SLR (around $700 USD with an 18-70mm lens). It was based on the Konica Minolta 5D, whose D-SLR assets Sony bought around two years ago; that camera sold well but still is only a relatively small slice of the pie compared to the Big Two. As Digital Trends readers now, the megapixel race continues and 10MP seems so 2006 now that 12- to 21.1MP models are here. And so is the new DSLR-A700, a beefy 12.24MP camera with much speedier response (5 frames per second compared to 3 with the -A100). We got our hands on the alpha DSLR-A700, based on the Konica Minolta 7D (not a bad thing, by the way), and put it through its paces. To find out if Sony will continue to be a D-SLR also-ran, read on…