Reviews for Sony alpha DSLR-A700 12.2 Megapixel Digital SLR Camera Body Only

Could the shuddering at shutdown be the sensor dust removal system at work? There is probably a menu setting that allows you to disable this feature.

I was able to get off about 14 shots in compressed RAW format with little or no delay in continuous shooting mode in two attempts. If you see a freeze after taking several RAW shots, this is normal and occurs because the on camera buffer needs time to write to the memory card. This delay can be mitigated by purchasing a 266X or faster CF card.

The shake when you turn the camera off is the sensor vibrating to remove dust. This is part of the design and is not a flaw.

The shuddering at shutdown is the sensor dust removal system!

here's a shot that I took in Georgetown tonight, one of the first shots that I took with the camera...ISO6400 1-250 F4.5 with the High ISO NR set to off. It probably still has a little on there. Sharpening and contrast set to -3. You can see the chroma noise even at 1MP, and the key here is to not overexpose, that just brings out more noise in the light flare. The thing is that it is PLENTY fast and you can shoot whatever you can see, comfortably. I could have taken this shot at ISO1600 probably, but the point is that the performance extends down to where you are shooting 1-8s ISO6400 handheld and there's no way that you can touch that with a 30D not to mention a 400D. It just can't be done. Your options are a D300, the 5D and its ilk, the new D3, and maybe a few old pro CMOS Nikons, I think the D2X might have an ISO6400. And this camera, but this is the only one that you can throw a $130 lens on it and take this shot. Handheld.

wow, I can't tell the difference, looking at them here. Well, since you can see the chroma noise easily at 2MP, I'll try to post a 2MP shot. It took me about 5 minutes in NI to clean it to an acceptable level with no real loss of fine detail.

Now, I won't say that this camera doesn't have IQ problems, for example it's known that the jpegs suffer from too much NR, but they look fine to me on my computer (if not full of detail at 100%) and really that's all I ask for. And the RAW output is full of fine detail, so if you want a 12MP shot full of fine-detail, then just shoot raw. I'm much more interested in getting a "well-rounded" camera that can shoot day and night with low noise, than getting a 12MP shot full of every bit of detail in the scene. Though it can do that too, if you shoot raw :) And they say that lens-based IS works better than CCD-shift under zoom, but does it really work all that much better, that you need to pay extra for every lens? And if you're really worried about that, why not just use a tripod? This camera is just fine for a "duffer" like me, it gives me what I need to take the type of shots that I want to take. Speed. And lots of it. With high SNR.

one last try...this is a 1MP downsampled version of the original ISO6400 file

ok, Day 2 :)

I figured out that the best combination for good fine-detail and low noise but not too much contrast is to shoot landscape with the NR on low. Standard or neutral are too flat and bring up the noise in the midrange and high shadow areas. This camera has a fair amount of noise beyond ISO3200, so it's as much a matter of managing that as it is getting the speed available with ISO6400. Also it does not meter all that well...it's not like you can set it to -1EV and the shots will be consistently at -1EV. You really have to check the exposure afterwards. Maybe the solution to this is to shoot program because in manual mode the exposure is *so* dependent on exactly what is in the frame, and at night that is quite variable as (oh yeah) the CCD shift IS system does not steady the image for the exposure meter (or the viewfinder), only for the sensor. I can see the argument for a lens-based IS system, but this CCD shift sensor is *extremely* effective at taking camera-shake out of photos. I will just have to trust the camera more, and shoot out of manual. Anyway. This camera is crazy-fast...there is nothing wrong with this shot. There is no camerashake in it at all. It's 1-15s ISO5000 F5.6 216mm in 35mm format, so I guess that's about 150mm on the lens. Handheld. In the cold wind coming up the slope at the base of the Washington Monument. This just blows away my Sigma 18-200 DC OS lens. I have some shots at the full 300mm of the lens down to 1-6s that were perfectly stable. And this is just a crappy Tamron 75-300 F4.5 lens that I picked up at the store for $150, to have something to go on the a700 body. Not a $1100 Canon 70-200 F4 IS, and *definitely* not a $1600 Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS.

I don't know, the other day in another review I posted a bunch of 1MP shots and they posted just fine (at the right size) here I can't get it to work. It's ok, all that you are missing, really, is the noise :) there is not much fine-detail in a night shot, anyway.

...last but not least I got the SAL18-250 for the Sony A700 which just seals the deal. This is an awesome lens. The lens alone made the trade worth the money, it is what I always wanted for the 400D but could not find. What is so awesome about it? It's sharp across the frame at all focal lengths, even wide-open, so the focus is very good...a lot better than the 400D with the Sigma 18-200...there's no need to run DxO on it, to do lens correction. It has a little barrel-distortion at 18mm but otherwise it's practically flawless. One thing has come up with the a700 that has a bunch of owners screaming...it seems that Sony, in its infinite wisdom, was not willing to leave well-enough alone and put in some NR that comes on at high ISOs, ISO1600 and up, it seems, that shows up even in the raw files. It is not a big huge amount of NR, and some NR has to be done because the camera is noisy at those high ISOs (it seems to have a "sweet spot" at about ISO2500), but it is there, it is in the raw files, and it is making a bunch of people very upset. I personally don't see it as much of a big deal, because I know that I will have to do some heavy-handed NR to get the noise down at IS03200+. After spending a couple of days looking at this I can't see any real reduction of fine-detail that would not have to happen anyway. But, if you're going to buy the camera it's something that you would probably want to know about. There is a blog and everything on this with the Sony Alpha group and they are trying to mollify the user base and there is a big push to just have a setting to disable NR entirely.

We will see if that happens...the firmware is up to rev 1.3 and it hasn't happened yet. Either way life will go on and you can either buy this camera or a D300 or the D3 or a 1DsMkIII and that is the only way that you are going to get ISO6400 in a DSLR (ok maybe the Olympus E series has it but that's 4-3rds, meaning a smaller than APS-C sensor, meaning even more noise thus even more NR). Plus this really is an awesome lens, the SAL18250, and there is nothing like it for EOS. I have not put any test shots up because really all the "action" here is happening at high ISO and 100% viewing, and I'm not going to get into that, here, not with a 12MP imager that shoots at ISO6400...suffice to say there is noticeable loss of fine-detail at high ISO when viewing at 100%, but the images look just fine at full-screen. Even the FD that *is* lost is not substantially more than I lost with the 400D or 30D when shooting at high ISO. The noise pattern is just different. If we were talking about an image that was noisy and full of NR at ISO200, like the Nikon S4 (S2?), that would be a different story. This camera is, like most DSLRS, fine until you hit high ISOs, and then you will either want to overexpose or underexpose to keep the noise under control, but at *least* you have the option. The choice. The battle is not to maintain fine-detail at high ISO. The battle is to control the noise. Same as it ever was, just depends on who does it how, and when. So I'm not going to get into that. Suffice to say that there is significant noise even at ISO3200, in the raw files, even with this "raw-file NR", and it gets worse from there. I would not want to use anything more than IS02500 by choice, for this reason, if noise in the image was a concern. If not, if you're looking for speed, dial it up. It's in there....this is a camera jpeg that I shot last night at around 9pm, looking east down the Potomac back to the US capitol, from the Key bridge. Notice that the cars are not moving. That's because I shot it at IS04000 with the SAL18-250 at F4.5. Again, this is a camera jpeg, with the High ISO NR set to low, shot in natural mode (which is why it is a little green, but I noticed that the 400D applies a little green tint, too, in "natural" mode, just not so much as the A700). I have not touched this photo other than to resize it for PG. You tell me if it is too noisy.
With this camera and lens I was able to shoot happily from this bridge even better than with the 400D and the Canon 70-200 F2.8 IS. The focusing was much better and the SSS was stable down to 1-10s even out to 250mm on the lens. It made a tough shoot easy. But it is too noisy to just crank it up to ISO6400 and shoot. You have to balance the speed against noise. I shot it just fast enough to keep it above about 1-15s...some were soft but I got some good ones even that slow, even down to 1-10s.
The last shot is an ARGB ISO6400 shot, a jpeg from Bibble Lite 4.9.9, with no NR at all, no adjustments at all. You can see that there is plenty of fine-detail even at ISO6400. There is also a lot of noise. This works fine for close-ups but it isn't anything that you'd want to use for landscapes, you're just not going to get that noise under control without a major loss of fine detail. That's fine...generally there's no need to shoot at this high of an ISO when shooting landscapes, even at night shooting handheld. ISO2500 and 3000 will do the job with a lot less noise. The camera jpegs tend to be a lot cleaner and darker than the raw output, I think to keep the noise under control, but you can also overexpose and mask the noise too. All in all it is quite a fun and rewarding camera to shoot, and if you want to get really "high-quality" low-noise shots from it at night, you can do so...just use a tripod and shoot at low ISO. But it is not absolutely necessary to do that, if you can stand a little noise in your shots, and a little NR on them. And really, overall, especially with this excellent lens, the SAL18250, there is just no way that an EOS camera can hang with it and still keep the same zoom range. You can get a fast and sharp EOS lens, or you can get a long and sharp EOS lens with IS, but you can't get a fast, long sharp EOS lens with IS. Game, set and match to the A700.

...oops :)

well it's Christmas, so you get a free review "triple bonus-pack" :)

(I flagged the last two copies of that big reply as "inappropriate" so that maybe someone would come by and delete them...they're redundant...)

"I figured out that the best combination for good fine-detail and low noise but not too much contrast is to shoot landscape with the NR on low. Standard or neutral are too flat and bring up the noise in the midrange and high shadow areas."

...if you shoot anything other than standard or neutral, the camera will apply a heavy tint to the image. In the case of landscape, a green tint (which now that I see it, is very common), and drop the exposure -slash- increase contrast, and the noise will not be as visible. The other option is to shoot standard which gives a lot more midrange and also a lot more noise, but then keep the ISO down to keep the noise under control. I get very good results between IS01600 and ISO3200 shooting either raw or standard or natural. I have to experiment with the night and sunset settings, but landscape is too green (at least, at night) unless I push the exposure. This camera has very colorful output, I'm not sure if that's good or bad. But I've been trying for months to get this shot handheld...I couldn't even get it with a tripod, with my FZ5, much less handheld. I just could not get it with the EOS lenses that I tried on my 400D, not with anything that I would carry, anyway. Even if you could get enough speed and keep the noise down, the problem of getting a good focus remained. Suffice to say that sharpness across the frame was less than ideal with the Sigma 18-200, as well as the focus quality. You can see for yourself how sharp this SAL18250 lens is, and how well it focuses. This is an untouched camera jpeg. I ran raw files on these shots but the camera jpegs are actually pretty realistic if the exposure is hot enough. These are all between ISO2000 and 3000, handheld. The last one is a 1-4s exposure at 35mm effective, F4.5, ISO2000.

...for those of you who demand to see raw output...1-15s ISO2500 F4 56mm eff. handheld out of Bibble Lite 4.9.9b

Now aside from nitpicking the IQ, I think that the real "draw" here for subframe Canon owners is the availability of the SAL18-250 lens. It's like putting a supercharged V8 motor in your car, it just runs rings around anything that I could find for EOS. Now, the camera itself is light and not too big and fits well in my hand, has a great viewfinder, the controls are well-laid out, the menu system is good and it keeps all my settings through a power cycle, and the lens itself is smaller, lighter, and more powerful and focuses a lot better than the Sigma 18-200 on my 400D, so the camera itself is a good fit for me. If the only problem that it has, relative to the 400D, is a slight "washing-out" of fine-detail at high ISOs due to in-camera NR that I can't turn off, that is a 900:1 tradeoff compared to the 400D, because you'd get almost the same loss of fine-detail, if not more, at high ISO, with the 400D (and it's only going to IS01600) and the 30D too, and it's really going from ISO1000 to ISO2000 to ISO4000 because the ISO ratings are underrated. You're going to get at least as much noise out of the raw files, and a compare amount of noise and NR and loss of fine-detail in the jpegs, for any given ISO. But you do not have the ability to tweak the IS0 as much as you do with the A700. So you're stuck, having to apply heavy NR or shoot too slow or use a tripod. You can't set it to 2500 or 3000 and hit that sweet-spot that you just can't get to with either the 400D or 30D. You might get close with the 40D, but that's as much as the A700...and then you still can't get the SAL18-250 lens, or anything close to it, for EOS. Not buying this camera and the SAL18-250 lens for a Canon is like not buying a Ferrari for a Porsche because the Ferrari has a watercooled V8 and not a watercooled flat-6 and you're so used to the sound of a watercooled flat-6, that ripping V8 scares you, it's new, it's different, it's not the same. The A700 is not a Canon. That's *ok*. It's actually *better*. Try it, shoot it for a while, and then go back and look at your Canon shots. I'll bet that you'll be impressed with the A700 and glad that you tried it. Here is an ARGB ISO6400 out of the a700 with the 70-300 F4.5-F5.6 lens and an ISO3200 (really ISO4000) shot from the 30D with the Sigma 18-200 DC OS lens. The 30D shot is a camera jpeg run through DxO for lens-correction, and the a700 shot is an IDL (sony software) raw file run through Neat Image. The 30D shot is from about 100m to the right of the A700 shot so the reflections are different. But you tell me which one has the better exposure. All you can see in the 30D shot are the lights. If you just want to see the lights, great. But why are those lights there in the first place? Because they are in buildings that need lights in them! Last but not least I put up a tripod shot from my S2, at ISO50, just so you can see how much fine-detail is missing from those shots. There is no question that they are missing fine-detail. Both of them. That is the tradeoff that you make when shooting handheld at high ISO. The A700 simply does in the camera what you would have to do in software anyway. At least, until they put in a control in the firmware to allow the user to turn off in-camera NR entirely. Then you can muck it up for real, on your computer :) The idea behind shooting handheld at high ISO with a DSLR, is that you can't do a much better job with a midbody or P&S on a tripod, because they are too slow for the shot. They will always be cleaner at low ISO, than your DSLR at high ISO, no matter what DSLR you get. The idea is that you don't have to carry a tripod around with you, to get good shots. But to get *clean* shots, you will either have to apply a LOT of NR or shoot slow to maximize SNR, or shoot too fast to minimize visible noise, or shoot at low ISO. There's no way around it, and this camera is not magic. But neither are Canon CMOS DSLRs. The point is that the a700s weaknesses are the same weaknesses that Canon DSLRs have, and its strengths can't be matched by Canon, because Canon apparently has no interest in putting out a good superzoom for their DSLRs. They're not even willing to do something as simple as keep all the camera settings through a power-cycle. But enough already. I can simply tell you through personal experience that if you are an amateur, casual shooter like me, if you get this camera and the SAL18-250 you will be happier than if you go with a Canon DSLR. The cameras are really no better and the lens-selection sucks a**.

ISO6400 raw + Neat Image, 1-6s F4.5 120mm effective, handheld.

...same shot with the gamma turned down to 0.8...this is with that crappy 75-300 F4.5-F5.6 lens that they are now giving away, with a 75% in-store rebate. It's still much sharper across the frame even wide-open than the Sigma 18-200 DC OS is at F8. The point is, you can play games with the exposure and contrast and hide the noise, just as much as you can hit it with a NR program. There's no need to hammer it if most of it is in the background and all you need to do is either over or underexpose to mask it with signal. In this case I just dropped the exposure slightly by lowering the gamma, and all that chroma noise went into the black. But I could only do that because the shot was overexposed in the first place. And what about the "loss of fine-detail" at ISO6400? Well, it's a 12MP image. How much fine-detail do you need? If you need more than this, shoot it with a tripod! But you're still ahead of the game because you have a sharper lens and you're probably going to get a better focus.

...if the scene is low-contrast you can mask the noise by overexposing. If it's high-contrast, then underexpose. But you can do this after taking the shot by adjusting the levels, contrast, brightness and gamma. Get the noise down as much as possible before applying NR and then you need to apply that much less NR. That is the weakness of doing it in the camera. Sometimes the in-camera NR is just sub-optimal. Sometimes it is fine. Here are two ISO6400 shots, the same raw shot but the jpegs are one IDL output the other BB4 output. I did no NR on them at all. Just reduced the gamma. The shot is 1-6s ISO6400 F4.5 120mm effective. Handheld. So then if you do NR on these you need to do a lot less and the end-result is a lot better...I basically did that and sharpened the image in the NR process, with Neat Image, and got this final result.

End of week 1 with the Sony a700 and the SAL18-250 lens...ok it's not perfect...the focus isn't perfect (it hits about 85% of the time in low light), the lens isn't perfect (it seems to be sharper and-or focus noticeably better at or above F5, shooting wide-angle [but still it is nowhere near as dull wide-open as the Sigma 18-200 DC OS, that is just not a concern anymore]), the SSS isn't perfect (it seems to have an effective limit of "sharp results when viewed at 100%", of around 1/20s, with the occasional hit below that), the controls aren't perfect (I still find myself fighting the camera to raise ISO and take the same shot again, with a 2-second review time) and the NR isn't perfect (there's some issue with NR even in the raw files and it looks like the D300 has it beat in terms of overall fidelity)...no, it is not perfect...but it is a solid "B" of a camera and lens. It is definitely better than the 400D and the Sigma 18-200, so that's a non-issue now. The 30D was just slightly better with that lens than the 400D was, it focused better than the 400D in low light but not as good as the A700 with the SAL-18-250 lens, and it had more speed than the 400D but it doesn't have the speed or the fine-control over ISO that the A700 has. Plus it had more noise at ISO"3200". Plus, it uses that dumb status LCD which was really beginning to bother me when shooting at night, it would always cut off before I was through looking at it. The A700 is much easier to use than the 30D, and much faster and sharper than the 400D. It could be a little bit sharper, faster and cleaner. It could use the D300s' NR scheme and an 18-250 F2.8-4.8 lens. But for $1700 sitting in this camera, it is a real good deal. It performs about as well as I can expect given what it can do and the conditions in which it does what it does. All I can do now is put up shots where it has either "hit" or "missed" but clearly it is "hitting" a lot more than the 400D and the Sigma. No question about it. And, stuck behind that lens, the 30D is not a whole lot better than the 400D. And even *then* the A700 will have more speed. You simply cannot fake ISO6400 with an ISO3200 camera and you can't fake having a good lens with a bad lens............................................now, having said that, if the D300 is better than the A700 (and it probably is), then it must be awesome. I would be very happy with the A700 and the SAL18-250 if I didn't know anything about the D300, but I'm not ready to part ways with it or pony up the extra dosh for a D300 and the 18-200 VRII lens. I'm just going to have to stick with what I have for a while, luckily, I don't see anything really "offensively" wrong with it. It is not like the 400D and the Sigma 18-200 where it missed focus so often that I pretty-much had to upgrade. This is a good functional DSLR and lens that just begs the question of whether it is worth the $1700 that I paid for it. Not whether it is good enough to buy and shoot. No question about the latter. It is a good DSLR and a good lens. .........................................now, really on that note, your options would be say a $600 camera and a $1100 lens (a used 30D or 20D plus a good mid-zoom Canon lens, say the 24-105 F4), or you could get a $1500 camera and a $200 lens (a used 5D or the D300 plus say the 28-135F4-F5.6 IS or the 18-133 VR DX lens). I would say that the very best IQ that you could get would be the last combination. The 18-133 DX is an awesome lens, just a little short. So you would have to kick in a 55-300 or something. The 5D would give you very low noise and NR but not a lot of speed, plus you would now lose focal-length in the lens (and you'd have to get categorically-better lenses to go on it). The 18-200 VRII might be competitive with the Sony SAL18-250, it's probably close, so you'd win there but you'd have to pay $500 more for the camera and $300 more for the lens. It's a question of splitting hairs, but if you're going to split hairs, they will fall Nikons' way over Sony, any day. ...so I'm not going to put up any more shots, here. This is a good rig, and for about the same money you could get into an even better Nikon rig albeit with a shorter lens. There's not much more to say, that's of any value. I shot this camera tonight for 3 hours starting a half-hour before dark and I enjoyed it pretty well. The results were about 85% of what I had hoped for. it impressed in some ways, not quite impressed in others, but nothing really "bad" came out of it. And I found out pretty-much what I needed to know, to see what to do next. The next step is to rent a D300 and the 18-133 VR DX and see how they score head to head, toe to toe, mano a mano. They both have the same speed, the D300 has more features but most of the additional features, I don't need. It will be a question of image fidelity at high ISOs.....of course, the real question is how much better can the D300 be. Because if it can't be a whole lot better, than it isn't worth swapping the camera and lens. I can walk back to the store and swap the A700 for a D300 any day in the next week. Aside from the "political" issues in doing that (the store owners never like it when you do that, no matter what they say), it will take time and money to swap this hardware.

Here's a quick one...I was walking back to my car tonight, and I passed this guy taking a shot of the Rosslyn skyline with a tripod. I had to try it...I took this handheld at 1-13s IS05000 as craw, ran it through Bibble 4.9.9b, increased the contrast by 10 and reduced the gamma to 0.9 to knock down the background noise, then ran it through Neat Image with a 40-40 and sharpening at 80.It looks very nice, clean and smooth but with good fine-detail. I tried this with an ISO6400 shot but there was a little too much noise for NI to remove without turning it into watercolor. Just for comparison here is the same skyline taken earlier with the camera sitting on a railing.

...so you can see a) the sal18-250 is not quite sharp edge to edge even at F5. It's not bad, certainly it is a LOT sharper than the Sigma 18-250 even at F8. An DxO can fix this sort of thing up without a problem, I have yet to get the lens-correction to work in Bibble but I could definitely live with this even without any further lens corrections. Now, the raw output needs some contrast and sharpening which is why I ran it through Neat Image using the sharpening of 80. But you can see the real difference is that the handheld shot is not *quite* stable...but the shots from a rest (I left the SSS on by mistake) are not quite sharp, either. I was more impressed with the handheld shot than the shot from a rest but the fact of the matter is that I have tried to take that shot wide-angle from a rest many times with many cameras and it is a biyatch to get in sharp focus. That shot is a biyatch to get in sharp focus, period. It works well if you shoot tight but that means focusing on only one, maybe two buildings. It is just a hard shot to get, even on a tripod. Beyond that, it's a little underexposed, there's not much dynamic range in the shot, so I boosted the contrast again, by 8, and adjusted the high levels to increase exposure, and then it looks ok. Not too hot, not too flat. It could still use some sharpening, but it's ok. It would be really hard to match this shooting handheld because the stability just would not be there. You can deal with the noise. You can't make the shot stable if it isn't. That's why the speed is so important, you'll never get it stable if you don't shoot fast enough, and you can always underexpose it later in PP, to knock the noise down. You have two options to get a hot exposure, shooting handheld: use a fast lens or shoot at really-high ISOs. This camera rates "adequate" for me for that reason. I cannot de-rate it because it is missing a lot of fine-detail at high ISO, I just don't see that. It probably is, but I can't see what is not there. Even so, I think that the only way that you could truly "justify" a D300 would be if a) you didn't want to take any chances on IQ (but you had to shoot handheld anyway), b) you *never* shot off a tripod (which would eliminate the need to worry about high-ISO performance) and last but not least, c) you got the lenses to let it strut its stuff so that the camera could actually see what is there. There is no sense in getting a great camera with a ton of fine-detail and then putting a dull lens in front of it....so you're looking at a $1700 camera plus $1500 lenses, to take high-ISO shots during the day, and maximize fine-detail...you're going balls to the wall, to get that last erg of performance from a DX sensor and lens...but what if you're just a casual shooter, like me? Is it worth it to drop $3500 into a DSLR and lens, just to take some shots will walking around? The one thing about staying with the Sony a700 and the SAL18-250, and accepting them for what they are, is that it caps your investment at $1700...but still, it really does depend on how much better the D300 is, with decent glass. If for about the same price the D300 is noticeably better, then how can you not switch? I think that we need to try it with at least the 18-200 VRII. Which is not a really sharp lens, wide-open, and it compares well with the SAL18250 in terms of length, at a $400 cost-penalty on the D300. The D300 with that laser-sharp 18-135 can't help but to be better, just like any Canon would be better with the 24-105F4 than with the Sigma 18-200 DC OS. Try it with the worst lens that you would want to get, then you can see if it matches your shooting style better. Anyway this is about the best "night shot" that I got, tonight. From a rest at IS0320....raw, slightly PP'd.

Here's another handheld one that came out pretty good, it was very stable and well-exposed...1-10s ISO5000, I took the raw output and ran it through NI 4040s80 just to clean it up a bit. Left the exposure alone just for comparison. Still there was just too much background noise in it, for my tastes...so I boosted the contrast slightly, lowered the gamma slightly, and that's the final version here. I could have done a little better if I had moved in closer (so the lens was F3.5 instead of F5) but not much. Shot it at IS03200 or something like that. Well, that would have cut the noise significantly. Ok, maybe a little better than this. But still, this is skirting the limits. The key thing is, on a tripod I could have increased exposure, cut the noise *and* stabilized the image. But again: if we are going to shoot from a tripod, then why buy and carry a DSLR? So it's a Pyrrhic victory...you win in losing, you lose in winning. You win in not having it come out as well shooting handheld as if you had shot it from a tripod but in not having to carry, set up and shoot from a tripod, and you lose in trying to match a tripod shot with a DSLR that you supposedly want to just carry around and shoot for fun, without carrying a tripod....still. What if I had just shot it with a D300 instead?

well, so, ok, I rented a D300 and I bought an 18-200 VRII to go with it and I took those same shots. I had to buy the lens because all the had to go with the rental were some incredibly-expensive primes and short zooms.

And that was last night, and about 24 hours later I bought my own D300...and let me tell you, it was hard to find one. I had to go to 4 stores to find one with it in stock and I bought the LAST ONE there. They had sold 9 that day before me. Let me just say shortly that the a700 is ok it just is not as good as the D300. With the 51pAF system the D300 focuses a little better and the image has less luminance NR on it (apparently this is happening even in the a700 raw files) and overall the a700 image looks like a 6MP image interpolated up to a 12MP image, when next to an image from the D300. It is much clearer and sharper. The problem is at high ISOs where I think the Sony approach works better. So I have not actually returned my a700 and sal18-250 lens. I have 2 days to return the body (I got the lens later at a different store). There is not much to say here. The a700 with this lens is better than my 400D or even the 30D with the sigma, true. But the D300 with the 18-200 VRII is a little better, still.

now this message is for a700 owners in general who are still wondering how much of a debacle this issue is, of "raw NR". After doing a good day of testing both an a700 with the sal18-250 and the d300 with the 18-200 VRII I can tell you that there is a slight, but noticeable, advantage in the d300 camp, in terms of fine-detail. Yes there is NR in the a700 raw files but there is not a huge difference in fine-detail. But it is "perceptible" in terms of the full image. The D300 images simply look sharper and clearer with more detail. The a700 is not bad but the D300 is better. Plus, at least using Bibble Lite 4.9.9 as the raw converter and the colorimetric tone curve, the output for the D300 looks a LOT better than the output for the a700. The colors are natural right out of the raw converter, the images crisp and sharp. The D300 jpegs have slightly more texture and are slightly but distinctly sharper than the A700 jpegs, as well, but the D300 jpegs look a little washed out with much less contrast and saturation, and the a700 has more customstyle presets for this but in the end what it does is basically apply a green tint to the image while the D300 jpegs are actually overexposed. More or less tint is applied depending on what customstyle you select. But the A700 Bibble output is hardly all that different in either color or texture from the camera jpegs (it predictably looks worse, with less contrast and saturation), while the D300 Bibble output just looks great. You don't even have to do anything to it, really. Short of tweaking the in-camera settings, I would rank it D300 jpeg;a700 jpeg (but very close), then a700 raw:D300 raw with a big edge to the D300. The take-away is that one is tuned for the casual jpeg shooter who wants extended ISO range with lower noise, and the other is tuned for raw shooters, people who are willing to put serious time and effort into their images and whose first instinct is to make raw files and then head to their computer to do PP. If you are going to shoot mostly jpeg, especially if you don't plan to play with the images very much, the a700 should be just fine. Without a doubt people who are into PP want the D300. Assuming that there are no major problems in Bibble with converting A700 raw files vs D300 raw files, but even so, the camera jpegs are very linear and definitely "off to the right" in terms of exposure.

I still say that on ease of use the a700 wins but clearly in terms of features the D300 has it beat. In the end, the A700 is "good enough", like a good Panasonic P&S (certainly the jpegs look like Panasonic P&S output), but for those who want "natural-looking results", the D300 would be the way to go, no question. I would not say this if the D300 output from Bibble looked slightly better than the A700 output. It looks a LOT better. But you will have to shoot raw to see the real difference. If you look at nothing but camera jpegs you will wonder what all the fuss is about, they really do look practically the same when shooting only jpeg.

216 Comments about: "Response to Alpha DSLR Comments"

1. Dec. 31, 2007 4:59pm | Posted by: touristguy87 The moderator is reviewing your comment.

…I am not going to say that you should not do NR in the raw stream, before the raw files are
formed, not at all. I won’t say that, pedantically.

But it has to be *good* NR. It has to be the kind of NR that gives you good, clean, sharp images.
The in-camera NR is not sufficient to do this in and of itself, therefore there simply has to be
consideration taken for doing it with standard 3rd-party tools.

What you guys are doing gets rid of about 40% of the noise. That’s fine for a start. If you have no
intention of doing further NR on the image, you could live with that. But people are not buying
these cameras to produce noisy shots, as you very well know. They just can’t really be “fixed”, with
any tool that *I* know of, without eliminating *all* of the fine detail with massive NR and exposure
and contrast.

The Sony NR routines and raw-processing software will definitely give you oil paintings at high ISO.
The D300 shows that you need not accept that compromise.
2. Dec. 31, 2007 4:52pm | Posted by: touristguy87 The moderator is reviewing your comment.

Sony guys, I’d say that this is a non-issue. Whatever it is that you are doing to the noise at high
ISOs, it’s wrong if you want to do any further NR on the images. I like the A700, I think that it’s
a lot easier to handle than the D300 and I’ve got mine set up just the way that I want it, in spite
of the fact that the D300 has a lot more customizations, it doesn’t have some important ones that I
want it to have. And the front wheel is about as useful as the little front wheels on a rail
dragracer. Even so they’ve got you beat hands-down on this NR issue. Whatever it is that you are
doing increases the grain size of the luminance noise so much that Neat Image, for example, can’t
really work well with it…if you imagine that it is reducing the luminance noise by reducing the
contrast between the noisy pixel and the surrounding pixels, then with the D300, because the
luminance noise grain is so small, it has no problem doing this. NR just blends the noise into the
image. With the A700 the “noise grain” is so much larger (due to whatever it is that you guys are
doing) that when NI runs on it it creates these sizable blotches where the “noise” was. And it is
real easy to see and looks pretty bad unless you use a lot less NR than with the D300 raw files. The
way to deal with that is to reduce the exposure (or increase contrast) as I’ve said before and push
as much of the noise into the black (or at least the deep shadows) as possible, then run NI on it.
But you can imagine what that does to the exposure of the shadows, and while in the end you can get
the “noise numbers” to be about the same, the D300 shot looks a lot better.

These shots just look really good, about as close to a low-ISO shot as you can get while still
shooting at high ISOs.

In the end the D300 raw files not only have more fine-detail to start with, but it is easier to
clean the shots in PP and that is before you even start talking about color tints. It is a
no-contest win for Nikon. The a700 is fine for jpeg shooters and there is even some potential in the
raw files at low to moderate ISOs. At the highest ISOs you will want the D300 for good, clean
images with moderate exposure and contrast. Simply because their image-processing engine is more
refined, and, just more professional. They do not try to do to the raw files what I have to admit a
whole host of people have pointed out, should not be done to raw files. And the results are clear to
see if you can work with raw files from both cameras.

Now, if you want to do that, just go here:

http://www.rawsamples.ch/index_en.php

and get some raw files and play with them.

I used Bibble 4.9.9b and Neat Image 5.8.

ok before I say or show anything else let me just say that I kept the D300 and Nikon 18-200 VRII and ebayed my A700 and the SAL18-250. And it was long hard choice to do that. Three things carried the day on this. One, the lens is great and I can buy it at any time. Two, Sony might actually fix this problem and then I could buy another one. Three, I will always be able to get my money back out of the Nikon gear. Since then a couple of things have come up which have tilted it even more in the D300s favor and one thing has come up which has tilted it a little back into the A700s favor, but for now I'm pretty-much set with a good camera and lens that takes good photos and has good color and noise properties and a good zoom range and focuses well, that I can shoot handheld around the clock, given any sort of decent light, and THAT is where I wanted to be this time 6 months ago. Everything else is starting from this point. And then I bought a Canon A650 just to round things out.

Let me see if I can explain what it is about this camera that made me sell it. It is basically a lack of confidence in the IQ. Physically, holding it in your hand, the camera is very nice. The SAL18250 that I got for it is really nice, long and sharp. A dream lens, almost. I got a lot of good shots out of this camera and having finally found one that solved the problems that I had with the 400D, I was reluctant to let it go, so I gave it a LOT of rope. But it still hangs itself. To explain...look at the attached jpegs. These are out of the camera, using one of the camera photo modes, I forget which, but still. Probably natural or standard. I guess standard since that's what the exif says but you can't completely trust the exif on this camera. Anyway in general natural and standard are lighter than landscape and portrait and since this is a light shot I will say that it is standard mode. Now, again: I will say that any camera that can take these shots handheld in twilight at ISO400 or 500 and have them come out this clean and sharply-focused is a pretty decent camera. So let me say that first and move on from there. These are about 1-100 F5.6 ISO400 handheld. About 20 minutes before it got dark, the sun is coming down really fast and I'm running around trying to get out some shots with both the a700 and the D300 before the sunset ends.

...the trick is what you see after it gets darker than this, and when you try to sharpen the images, and, when you begin to work with the raw files. Remember two rules. One, just about any camera can take good shots during the day, at low ISO. Second, this is an $1800 camera and lens. It had better not just be good for shooting during the day! Anyway when you work with the raw files you see the sort of manipulation that Sony goes through to get good shots out of this camera in low light, and frankly it's pretty scary. Put it next to a D300 and it is even more scary. The shots from this camera are generally pinkish-brownish compared to just about any other camera that I've owned...they have a "natural tone", to them. "Earth-tone". And that scares me because from experience I've seen that miss and miss badly. Second I can see Sony adding green tint to the images. Third I can see a lot of contrast and exposure-shifting. Put that all together and look at the noise in raw mode and try to sharpen the images and you see things like this.
Same shot raw out of Bibble with 3 different sharpening levels applied, no other monkey-business. Handheld 1-8s exposure, ISO500.

...continuing on as it gets dark, you begin to see a lot of brown. Now, that's not unexpected...the 400D and 30D will also shoot brown, too, under these conditions, but this is even more "brown". And I found out later why that is but let me just say that it is not "bad", but it definitely made me say "hm". "very natural-looking". Actually it isn't but I am just using that as a label, for now. Think "earthy". Well, the first thing that I noticed when I tried the D300 is that you get images that are more natural-looking (and I mean the real-deal) at night. Like the last one. And before anyone screams, no, I don't have the exact same shots from both cameras, but I do have plenty of other shots, the same shot from both cameras. I need to do a little more testing but I had seen enough from the a700 coupled with some basic facts about it, to know what to do, so I acted while I could, and I will continue to explain. But this last shot is a D300 shot. Not having the a700 anymore I can't duplicate it, but I have duplicated most of the earlier a700 shots with the D300 and what you see here is consistent with those other D300 shots.
Note, I have said nothing about noise, or NR, yet. That's a whole different topic. And I'll get to it.

so it turns out that today I found out what is happening here with the brownness. The A700 is making an effort to correct the white-balance for anything other than "daylight" 5000k. This includes cloudy days, indoors, streetlights and spotlights at night. Their method of doing this correction is to boost the blue channel. Boosting the blues is causing a ton of blue chroma noise to come out into the image shadows, along with the luminance noise from all 3 channels plus the extra gain causes more luminance noise too. The end result is a shot with great exposure but a lot of noise, this just gets worse as the ISO goes up when you shoot in the dark, which is exactly what I bought a DSLR for. To compensate for this Sony is having to do all kinds of fun things in the camera. It turns out further that this is a common issue with cameras with limited bit-depth in the IP chain, and in fact, if you go back and look at any old point and shoot shot at night or in low light at high ISO you will see the same thing. A lot of blue chroma noise (it might even be luminance noise too but it is blue, basically). And Sony apparently said that they didn't want their new $1200 DSLR to have a lot of noise, like the A100, so they cranked down on it hard in the camera. Both in the jpeg conversion...and in the raw conversion. You cannot escape the NR in the A700. Now, at full-image, it is hard to see that NR, but you will see it if you ever look at 100% or if you increase the sharpening. So it is losing fine-detail *and* gaining noise all at once. Still, this would not be a big deal if you don't shoot at high ISO at night, and indeed the camera is really ok at low ISO and on up to about ISO2000, say. But you can see the hoops that it has to go through, and your normal P&S doesn't do this because it doesn't go up to ISO6400. If Nikon had not used almost the same sensor in a DSLR that came out within two months later and if that DSLR did not have MUCH better color and less noise than the a700, this would not be an issue today. It would be the only ISO6400 camera on the market short of the Canon 1DsMk III. And no one would care about it. People would accept what it gives them and be happy.

But with Canon showing the way up to ISO3200 for years and Nikon doing a lot better job with basically the same sensor, the crying began in earnest, because, frankly, it doesn't match even the 30Ds' IQ at high ISO and the 400D gives it a real run for the money even at ISO1600. The thing is, the same advantages lie in store for the a700 as before. It's a lot cheaper, smaller, easier to use, has SSS for continuous IS with all lenses...it's very fast and focuses very well and is very sharp with the SAL18-250. The thing is that the images are just not natural-looking in low-light and at night, and I do not mean that as a marketing term. I mean it for real. The D300 is just more photogenic, it gets the WB much more closely to the real temperature, and starting even at ISO200 it has more fine-detail than the a700. But it's more expensive, clunkier, heavier, and harder to use and literally the lenses are not as good as what you can get for Sony, if you are talking the 18-200 VRII vs the SAL18-250. Nikon used a 14-bit data path to give them more highlight headroom for this very problem of the required color-shift for night-lights, which means they cut the reds instead of boosting the blues, this got the IP right in the camera, the noise is less of a problem, there is more fine-detail and it is just a better camera for taking photos given a good lens. All further comments about the D300 will be made in my D300 review. I am sure that this phenomenon will be thoroughly examined in the near future. Just watch the news. You will have to examine this when you buy a new DSLR, if you want the most for your money. But if you were to buy an A700 after reading this, I would not say that that was a dumb move. IN and of itself it is a decent, versatile camera. Certainly better than any P&S on the market and no doubt it has a fast sensor. I would just have to change the WB on all my shots, in the long run, and then, not look at them too closely. I am already sure that the Nikon 18-200 VRII is not as good at long zoom as the Sony SAL18-250. That lens is great. The Nikon lens is just ok. If you shot in at least decent light all the time, the A700 would be hard to beat. But is that why you want a DSLR? I got one to shoot handheld in ANY light condition, all the time. During the day I can just shoot my Canon A650 or A610. I could have just kept my S2 and been done with it. And at that point, I had a philosophical (well, actually a $1300) difference with the a700 that I just could not rectify. Not as it currently sits. And it did not look like Sony was going to fix it anytime soon. Even if they could, which they probably could not do.


But I can always buy that lens and if there is a better version of the a700 without this problem, I will return to this issue. For now I shoot the D300 in peace.

...certainly no camera is perfect and you will always find flaws with whatever you buy, but you have to at least be able to own and shoot it in peace. Otherwise it is annoying every time you use it, And you sit there watching it wondering how much money you are going to lose before you finally get up off your butt and sell it. But as a straightforward utility camera, this is a great camera, and during the day, it's just fine. Not the best but definitely not bad and with no obvious overt flaws, except that the color is a little brown. But my favorite color is blue.

just...not right.

...body to body, the D300 is a better camera in almost every way. No matter what the feature-set holds, you have to look at the images. Nikon has just made a good camera, all around, it is better, and the a700 is ok, but has real weak points. I will say no more about it. In my opinion, this is a done issue. Buy what you want, shoot what you buy, live with it or sell it. Life will go on.

...not just how much money you are going to lose before you sell it, but how many shots it is going to blow. With the 400D I never had to worry about the *color* or WB, it always took great-looking shots once the camera got a good focus. I prefer the D300 for that reason, too. Peace of mind. Maybe the lens is not as sharp, but gee, at least the shots don't look funky. It just asked a lot of me that I was not comfortable giving to it. But was it "bad"? No. I have a lot of good shots from the one I had. I have a lot of *great* shots from the D300...this will never end, you know. Truly I have some great shots from the a700 too. But mostly during the day. That is just too narrow of a range of competency, for an $1800 camera and lens.

...I think that you should never shoot over ISO2400 with it except for very close subjects, and if that was the case you would be reasonably happy with it. But you still would have to deal with the color tint. That tint will haunt you as long as you own the camera.

...the color is basically off, there is significantly more noise, the noise grain is screwed because of NR even in the raw data, the jpegs have a heavy green tint, and the focus quality is not quite as good in low light as it is during the day. And it is very good during the day. The D300 does not have these problems. This is what you see when you look at the images. The feature set is what you see when you look at the camera. It does not even have the IQ to match my $600 400D not to mention a $800 30D. What it *does* have is a great feature-set and great lens support. It needs at least two more features to keep up with the D300. A 14-bit IP engine, and no NR in the raw data. And, yeah. You basically trade that for SSS and a $500 cost savings in the body and another $200 in the lens, plus a sharper lens to boot. But man that is a huge trade and I don't like it. In the end there are four things that count. Speed, noise, color accuracy, and sharpness. The D300 ties on the first, beats the a700 handily on the 2nd and third, and loses very slightly at long focal lengths but clearly wins at everything short and medium, with the last. It is not even that it beats the a700, that is the issue. The A700 is not good enough ON ITS OWN to be my sole camera. Much less a justifiable $1800 camera purchase. If I had to take it to Istanbul or somewhere 5000 and $2500 miles away, for a week vacation, and shoot it as my sole camera, I would not be happy with the prospect. It would help me to weed out some of the 5,000 shots that I would take with it, but I am sure that it would screw up some great shots. With the D300 you have to deal with a little lens-softness now and then and of course the extra bulk and weight but fundamentally it is a very solid camera. Easily worth the $2500 that I paid for it. It's like having a nice steak dinner in one hand vs a funky Oriental meal that you've never had before in the other hand. You don't even know if you'll like it, not to mention how much you'll like it. You may be bored with steak but at least you know that you're going to like it if you eat it. Which one are you going to depend on, if you have to choose one or the other? You might even be willing to take a chance and try the funky Chinese meal, but you won't *depend* on it. And I tried it for 10 straight days and still went out and bought a camera that was 40% more expensive. Clearly I was not happy with the a700 *that much*. Or ready to buy it and keep it and take it out shooting, *that much*. I was happy to test it for two weeks against the D300 and maybe my Canon A650, but keep it as my single, main camera? No. Certainly not against the D300, and not even on its own. But it will not take much to fix its "show-stopping" problems. But Sony has to step up to the plate and do the job right. They can't do "cheap Oriental product" on an $1800 DSLR in this market, and get *my* money. Sure, someone will buy it...a whole lot of people will buy it..just because it's a Sony...because it's not all that bad...but a whole lot of people voted for George Bush just because he was a Republican. and you see how *that* turned out. I just got the feeling too many times that it could take the shot but it would not be anything that I would want to show to someone else. I could not in good conscience and with confidence say that I bought this camera and I knowingly kept it and I like the shots coming off it. To me it began to look like an $1800 paperweight. Very stylish, handled well, fun to shoot, but still. I wouldn't reach for it to take good pictures in anything but the brightest of daylight conditions, ISO100-250 maybe. Shots like this. Even here you can see that it is a little-bit..."brown". Maybe it could use a little contrast, who knows. It is sharp across the frame, but, again, the colors are off.

sorry about the double horses.

I meant to post this one, there.

...now, note...clearly you can boost contrast and reduce the exposure and so forth. But do you know that you can start with what this camera gives you and get a good shot like that, almost every time? I don't have to do any of that with the D300 to get a good-looking shot straight out of Bibble. Maybe run a little NR on it, straighten and crop, and that's all. Plus I know which one focuses better in low light, I know which one has good fine-detail, I know which one sharpens up nicely and is easy to clean without stripping out the fine detail. I am POSITIVE that the D300 is a better low-light camera without ANY of the flaws that the a700 has. The only conciliations that it makes are weight, cost, ease of handling, and sharpness across the frame given the Nikon18-200 VR lens. It is a good, worry-free camera. The A700 is an ok camera that requires you to give it a little slack and not worry so much. The D300 is not just "better". That would imply that it is even better at doing what the A700 does. No. It does what the A700 *should* do but *cannot* do, and does it well. And just as importantly, it is good enough on its own for me to not have to worry about it. I would never have that confidence with the a700, there are too many problems with it, too many things "not quite right". The SAL18-250 is a great lens. That is what I wanted in the body and I wasn't going to get it with the a700. I wasn't even going to get "good". Just "ok, especially if you like salt".

If you don't mind a little bit too much green and brown, and blue noise, in your shots, and the occasional missed focus in low light, and the battery going dead in about 4 hours of shooting, it's just fine. Really, all of this I could deal with except for the funky brown color shift under lights. I will put up with a lot of idiosyncrancies for a great shot. I will not put up with them for a bullsh*t shot. I won't even care about the "feature list" even if it a great one, but the camera takes BS shots. I cannot see the cameras' feature-set when I am looking at the images on my computer, and the bottom line is, do the images even look as good as the ones from my old Fuji A345, not to mention my better cameras like the Canon A610? By the way, it is almost impossible for a camera to beat that A610 at low ISO, in terms of IQ? But it has to at least beat the old Fuji A345. If not, then it has to go. This camera had to go. The color cast kills it. The funky noise grain and raw NR is just icing on the cake. It's like driving a car without a roof. Sure, that wind and sun may be great during a nice warm spring day or summer night, but, the rest of the time, isn't it a pain to not have a roof on your car? Doesn't bundling up against the wind and putting on rain gear get old? But like I said, it was great when I had two or three other cameras that picked up the slack. I could not afford an $1800 DSLR that was only good for day shooting, and a $2500 DSLR that was even better except when it came to really long zoom shots, because of the lens. And I wasn't going to hang onto it and watch it become, like, worthless in 4 months when Sony came out with a better DSLR without the same problems. So it wasn't just one thing, it wasn't just the IQ, it wasn't just the noise, or the performance, it was a bunch of things that all came together in the D300 that made me feel good about keeping it and selling the a700 with the SAL18-250. But it is not that I don't regret it from time to time. But it would not have worked out for me.

...the best lens that I've ever had on my 400D was the Canon 70-200F2.8L IS. Now that's a sweet lens, $1600 and 5 pounds.

The a700 with the SAL18-250 was just as effective, if not more effective, in low light, even out to 250mm on the lens. Giving up 2 stops to the 70-200. But you cannot compare the IQ of the two cameras on those shots. One was noisy and had a color cast (is it green or brown? You decide!). The other is clean and the colors are almost what they should be. The shot is no better than the weakest link. The A700 body cannot keep up with even a decent lens, not to mention a great lens like the SAL18-250. You would have to put an awesome lens on it just to get the noise under control, and then you would still have to deal with the color cast. You might as well just go back and shoot the f-ing Canon! The only advantage that the A700 gives you here, is that it can shoot through that SAL18-250 lens and take the shot easily shooting handheld. And I will tell you. That was really sweet. I definitely loved the way that this camera handled. It is just too bad that the images were not up to an acceptable level. No one should have to pay Nikon prices to get a decent image. Sony had a big opportunity in their hands...and punted it. Backwards, out the back of their own goal.

...the mall is not that putrid pea-green, the railings are dark green. It's like a whole EV overexposed, or something.

...do you like green?

Now the thing is, ok, maybe this can be fixed by playing with the tint controls in Bibble, or something.

Maybe one day you can find a standard tint that you like, that will solve problems like this. Maybe.

Definitely it has a good lens, in the SAL18-250.

...nah, I don't think that it can be avoided without jumping through some serious hoops.

....but the bottom line for this camera is clear. It'll get noisy at high ISO but that's ok as long as you keep the image small. It'll shoot funky colors but that's ok as long as you are wowed by the apparent fine-detail and lack of noise resulting from keeping the image small. The lens, if you get the sal18-250, is almost never going to be a problem, in terms of sharpness, so, if you are talking about postcard-sized images without a lot of fine-detail, this camera will be ok, allowing you to shoot handheld as you see above by streetlight only. And you can take pretty good shots during the day at low ISO. It does the job, of taking photos handheld around the clock, pretty well. As long as you keep the shots small, don't look too closely at them and don't sweat the colors too much. It's, like, the ultimate point & shoot, except of course it's a DSLR. And looking at it as a P&S, and again, ignoring the brownish color cast, it's an excellent camera. But to me the color cast makes the shots off it look cartoonish, not to mention fake. I just could not take the night shots seriously that I took with this camera, except as an "art experiment". They most definitely don't look real, if only in the colors. If that doesn't bother you, then this might be an excellent camera for you.

"...nah, I don't think that it can be avoided without jumping through some serious hoops."

I upgraded to the pro version of Bibble 4.9.9b just to check this. All the other white-balance settings just alter the colors slightly. The basic brown-green tint remains. There is no way in bibble to, say, dial in a WB temp of 2500, and fix it. You can go into Paint Shop Pro, say, and boost the blue channel by about 25% and that generates a nice pinkish-purplish building but at least the stones in the gates are the right color. I mean, you can play games like this to try to get the color balance right. Or just get a D300.

This guy talking to himself must be a Nikon employee on vacation.

See here for hundreds of real world Sony Alpha A700 photo examples that show the outstanding Alpha IQ all the way to ISO6400.

http://www.sonolta.com

-Sonolta

...I can't believe that you spammed my PG review!

well, but seriously. Doesn't it make nice postcard-sized shots, as long as you don't worry too much about the color balance?

...I'm sorry, I still have to say that what Sony is doing in their jpegs is applying a ton of contrast to mask the noise. The higher the ISO the more contrast they apply. I'm looking right at it in the raw output from Bibble, and using Exifpro I can see the embedded jpegs in the raw files. They are not only heavily contrasted but they have a heavy green tint to help darken the shot. The shots out of the raw converter have a reddish-brown tint with a lot of red-blue noise, cruddy blotchy noise. The heavy contrast and tint push that noise into the black, at least in the shadow areas, but they also make all the light areas (and the fringe of lamp-light) green (and they are still noisy).

This camera does not require an expert "photographer". It requires an expert image-processor. Actually it requires a makeup-artist ...what the camera is doing is giving the impression that it is ok to shoot at high ISO, by doing so much to hide the noise without applying a lot of NR. It is an interesting approach, and, yes, it is going to result in a very large dynamic range, because that's what applying a lot of contrast does, it increases dynamic range. Especially with DRO active by default.

But aside from applying a heavy green tint to the whitish areas of the shot, it is simply nuking the shadow detail. It gives you great contrast, of course, the lights stand out bright and clean and the shot has very low background noise, but still you can see noise in the highlights that are not quite white and the color and luminance resolution across the shot is very rough. Things are either bright or dark, with very little in between. Transitions are abrupt. Unnatural. The shot looks like pop-art...an oil painting with florescent oil.

During the day this is not a problem because you don't need to shoot at such high ISO, so there is not so much noise in the first place and you don't need to apply so much contrast and tint, to hide it. But if you *do* shoot at high ISO you can't apply a heavy green tint to hide the noise, so you have to use more NR along with the heavy contrast.

And that is why your hig-ISO shots show such heavy NR....on the other hand, judicious use of ISO solves this problem, for the most part, and allows the a700 to bring out its heavy guns. The fact that it can stabilize a non-IS lens, allows the lens to be lighter, smaller, cheaper and better than most IS lenses would be on competing cameras. It still has to deal with an inferior focus system relative to the D300, and it still has to deal with a rougher noise grain relative to the D300, but it can put the lens advantage to great use when it gets a good focus and shot at a low-enough ISO to minimize the noise in the first place.

another example...now, these were shot in Adobe RGB (generally any file that begins with an underscore is an ARGB file) but exifpro 1.0 now will do the mapping to convert it from aRGB to srgb on display. So even if these look a little light in your browser (because your browser can't do the color-mapping properly), trust me, they are highly tinted even when viewed properly. The Bibble 4 output has a heavy red-brown tint and a lot of noise everywhere, and the camera jpeg has a heavy green tint and not much background noise.

here's the missing camera jpeg shot of the Capitol and Washington monument to go with the one two posts above...see, at 640x480 you can barely see the noise and hardly distinguish the green tint. Trust me it is very easy to see it all at 2MP. But for small shots and small prints this is not a big problem.

...so, you see, the problem with this camera when shooting handheld at night (which is what I got a DSLR for) is that you are stuck with the choice of either taking a noisy, grainy blotch brownish-red shot or boosting the contrast and tint enough to reduce the noise so that you can do NR on it to reduce the noise to tolerable levels but not kill all the detail. And that is if it focuses well. And the shot is stable, and exposed well enough. However, during the day, it is great, because the SAL18-250 is just a wonderful lens and nice and sharp across the frame. It is a great day camera, for landscape shooting. But you have to ask yourself, is this why you bought a DSLR? For me the answer was clearly "no". I did not spend $1800 to buy a camera that can take slightly better shots outside during the day than my A610 or S2 or even my FZ5. True, it focuses better at night (actually, it focuses better period) than my Sigma 18-200 and Canon 400D, but that is still not "enough". I wanted, and got, a camera that would let me take shots like this at night, handheld. And have them come out nice even at 2MP, even at 8x12". http://www.flickr.com/photos/12219276@N08/2216890679/in/photostream/

...And I got one.

...its sole problem is that the SAL18-250 is both sharper and longer than the Nikon 18-200VRII. That is a really, really good lens.

...really, the Jefferson Memorial is not green at night. Now again, you can play around with the tint, WB, whatever, knock yourself out. Maybe one day you will solve this and the shots will look natural. Who knows. Most camera stores will give you two weeks to return the item with at most a 15% restocking fee. Buy one and that very nice SAL18-250 and try to get the tint right in those two weeks. This shot should be white with perhaps a light tan tint on the stone.

ok, slowly, just out of sheer dogged persistence and the chance that maybe the problem is that I don't know what I'm doing when converting the raw files, and repeatedly playing with Bibble and comparing the camera jpegs to the Bibble output, and just trying to get the best possible raw output in a reasonable amount of time for any camera, I'm starting to see now that the difference between the a700 camera jpegs and the raw output is that there is a lot of contrast and a heavy green tint along with the in-camera NR. Suppose you don't apply the green tint and NR but you do apply heavy contrast. That knocks down the high ISO noise that you get at night...but it also darkens the day shots. The Bibble output for the day shots looks just fine, if ok it needs a little contrast depending on the exact exposure. But the night shots really benefit from added contrast because that knocks out most if not all of the visible and blotchy red-blue chroma noise. Ok so doing that, what do you get? Well, then you have to get a good focus, and a good hold. This shot is a bit beyond the capabilities of the A700 with the SAL18-250. A wide-angle landscape shot but not that wide angle. It just didn't get a good focus. This camera and lens is not very reliable at night, for focusing at subjects that are more than a stones' throw away. The D300 is significantly better at this (although not foolproof). Still, *if* you get a good focus, then you have a decent chance of getting a good shot. But that applies to every camera. And so, with any camera, you should shoot it under a wide range of lighting conditions until you are familiar with its focusing characteristics. And confident in its ability to focus. Except for the nearly out-of-control image tinting, I could have been happy with this camera. The focus reliability is WAY WAY FAR better than my 400D with the Sigma 18-200. Though the colors are blooming crazy. This shot was sharpened in Bibble with strength 200 sensitivity 6 and the contrast boosted to 40 before downsizing and cropping.

...so I would say that if you want a good utility DSLR and you're not all that concerned about color accuracy (no matter what you hear from testers), this camera would not be a bad way to go. The a700 and the SAL18-250 is a very potent package. Like an open-sighted Remington lever-action rifle, it is big and bulky and has limited versatility, but still, you can put down a lot of varmints with it and it's not too heavy or expensive to buy and carry, and not too tricky to shoot either. If I were to buy one again I would still have to turn down the tint and I would be worried about the focus reliability at night but at least I wouldn't be worried about the lens. That's an awesome lens. Seems to be susceptible to strong internal reflections, though. It does not have the "natural" look that I would want, but it definitely can take decent photos in a wide range of shooting conditions. And the SAL18-250 lens is a "plus" no matter how you look at it. I have not seen a lens anywhere near this good for general-purpose shooting. And I have looked at a LOT of lenses. If you tend to shoot mainly in good light, if you know you're going to be shooting ISO3200 and below and mainly in decent light, this camera would be hard to beat once that lens was put on it. If you plan to do a lot of shooting at night, too, get the D300. It just focuses much better in low light and the colors are much easier to get straight on it. And even if the Nikon 18-200 VRII can't really hang tough with the SAL18-250, you can at least get DxO lens-correction modules to fix the output now with DxO Pro V5. A good deal for an extra $165. The problem is that, really, I think the a700 just cannot match that SAL18-250 lens. It's an ok camera. That is a great lens. I keep hearing about test results saying that the A700 is extremely accurate in its colors and has 10EV of dynamic range etc. In my own hands, in shooting it myself, I just did not see it. Sure the DRO boosts the dynamic range and sure cranking up the contrast boosts the dynamic range too but I can do that with the output from *any* camera. What I want, what I need, is for it to have good, solid, consistent focus, and good solid consistent color with controlled noise. I would have to rank the 400D and 30D above the a700, in terms of color and controlled noise. Their weaknesses were the focus system. But I would have had to give up the color balance to get a better focus, if I had stuck with this camera. I just did not want to take two steps back to go one step foward. The D300 gives me much better focus with a better lens in the Nikon 18-200 than I had in the Sigma 18-200 with the 400D, and the color is just about as good and the noise even better controlled. I can shoot the D300 at IS01600 no problem, day or night. The a700 and the SAL18-250 will, deservedly, appeal to many. For me the Nikon hardware gave a better overall balance. The appearance of the DxO LC modules was the final piece of the puzzle. Given a boost in lens sharpness across the frame so that the two lenses were about equal in terms of sharpness, I could deal with a slight loss in zoom range if I had much better controlled color, much better noise grain and more fine detail, and above all, much more reliable focus, and that's what I ended up with. I will not deny that this lens and camera has its appeal, has its virtue. You still have to be happy owning it. I just could not find happiness with mine. Even still, in playing with the images a month after I sold it.

This is not too bad, the first one is raw Bibble output with a sharpening of 60 sensitivity 6, the 2nd is adding a contrast of "30" in exifpro...last running it through Neat Image 40/60. The last step takes the still-visible background noise in the shadow areas (barely-lit areas) and turns it into a light feathery fluff without reducing the image sharpness noticeably. No way you'll see this at 640x480 though :) or you can apply contrast 40 and get rid of it altogether but that also drops the exposure. The key to this shot is to shoot it slow, IS02000 or even ISO1600 would have been a better bet. Again, as a "utility" DSLR, it's just fine. I would still have to run this through DxO to do geometry corrections, you can see the barrel distortion on the shot. This is ISO2500 1-40s handheld 32mm effective.

ok, "live and learn"...in continuing to play with Bibble I found out that I was making a major mistake in not setting the tone curve to "camera" vs "colometric". That is significant enough to lighten the shot, reducing contrast and bringing out the noise especially after sharpening. You want some contrast but not so much that the shot is too dark, eh. So I had to add contrast in afterwards to darken the shot and bring the noise down and the better solution was to just use the camera tone-curve then it doesn't lighten-up with luminance noise after sharpening, at least not below ISO3200. But that still leaves the white-balance. The a700 is definitely "hot". This works fine during the day but at night leads to a lot of green and brown and you really have to cool it down to get rid of that. Plus the added green tint. But...between the nightmare that using DxO 5 is turning into plus the fact that the SAL18-250 is such a good lens I had to give it another try. I have another SAL18-250 and an A700 sitting in a box unopened in my apartment while I continue to play around with my old images to see if I can fix them. Also I want to lighten the load on my D300...in spite of the Nikon 18-200 VRII being a bit weak at full zoom, I love the camera and the lens inside of its limits, the color is very nice, noise grain good, focus excellent and handling nice too...just a sweet camera if a little heavy. I've already put 5,000 shots on it and really I need something to keep the shot count down on it. The a700 being ok during the day...and the SAL18-250 having a 25% zoom range advantage plus the sharpness advantage...I can't see not shooting it. I debated getting an a100 or a200 instead but then I'd have even more noise to deal with at high ISO. I decided not to cut corners there, thinking that the a700 would hold its value better in the event that I needed to sell it. So I bought it for the lens and then got a decent camera. Plus it does seem that the SAL18-250 has more "hits" down in the 0.16s to 0.1s regime than the Nikon18-200. I would pretty-much just throw away anything under 1-10s with the Nikon, certainly 1-8s though I do get occasional hits down to 1-3s. I would never rely on it, though. It's the kind of thing where if I have extra storage I'll try it, but if not, that's what I throw away. ....I will have to have a dedicated test of this. But I know for sure that the Nikon focuses better in low light. I've already gotten some incredible shots from it. But the a700/SAL18-250 is ok. Here's what you do. Accept the fact that the a700 will lose fine-detail to NR with increasing ISO and there's no way around it, even in raw this happens. Accept the fact that the color is a challenge to manage. Accept the fact that it will blow some shots at night due to a bad focus. And then take what it gives you. That is way more than I got from my 400D and the Sigma 18-200 DC OS lens. And it compliments the Nikon hardware, to say the least. Here are some ISO6400 shots that you want to avoid. It just loses too much detail to NR and to noise to use ISO6400 for anything but emergencies or close-up work.

More ISO6400 shots...not so bad at 3x2", hm?

More ISO6400 shots...not so bad at 3x2", hm?

More ISO6400 shots...not so bad at 3x2", hm?

I mean, it's literally not bad as long as you keep the ISO at 3200 or below, manually set the white-balance temp to about 3000 at night (you can't fix the brown look with the WB adjustments in Bibble pro 4.9.9b, even the incandescent white balance temp is around 4400), and keep the higher IS0s for emergency use. Shoot slow and clean.

The following is from my D300 review on PG:......"Contentment". That's one word to describe how I feel about it. It's not perfect. Just "very good". Good enough to make me happy with it. No need to revisit the images, and I look forward to more shots from it. I look forward to the *experience* of shooting it, of seeing and keeping the good ones and enjoying them, of seeing and discarding the bad ones. I know the bad ones are due to my either pushing the camera and lens too hard, or my not getting the shot set up right. They are not due to some fundamental problem with the camera like the WB and tint being hopelessly off or too much NR or even so much of both chrominance and luminance NR in the raw files that there is blotchy chroma noise throughout the whole image. Shooting the d300 is like driving a very nice car, a nice but only moderately-fast car, where you enjoy the drive but you don't want to go out and just *drive* it just for the sake of driving it, that would be wasteful and abusive, and contrary to the purpose of having a car, which is to go somewhere, especially to be ready to go somewhere when you need to go there. I take the d300 out shooting to both get out and enjoy the world and to take photos of where I go and what I see, so that I can enjoy the visions again when I get home or even when I am at work. I don't shoot this camera so that I can nitpick the shots. When I critique the shots from this camera, I am mostly critiquing my own skills, or the absence of enough daylight to take the shot, or even the lack of sharpness of my Nikon 18-200 VRII lens at long focal lengths, at least until I run DxO on the images. And that is all that I can really ask for, from a camera. Be good enough to keep up with me. This camera is that in spades. From 18mm to 180mm at F8 the Nikon 18-200 VRII is just fine. It's that last "erg" of performance and shooting it around F5.6 in daylight that is going to make it crash. DxO can fix most of this but running DxO means another layer of PP (and not an easy one). Most of the time, at most focal lengths, under almost all lighting conditions, the lens and camera are just fine, even without DxO. To show this I would have to put up samples of about 75% of my shots. The other 25%, taken outdoors at night, shot at ISO4000 and up at speeds under 1-15s? I'm just not worried about them. It is too dark to see anything except the lights themselves, and too much noise is introduced into the shot at such ISOs in any case. That's just too much to ask of this camera, that's full-frame/tripod territory. ISO3200 and below, 1-15s and faster, F6.3-F8, 18mm-200mm, this lens and camera simply kills. Virtually fault-free. Allowing me to focus on the shot and the exposure and not worry about what the camera is going to do or what the shot will look like. The a700 with the SAL18-250 may have a longer reach and may allow me to shoot a little longer and slower and still get good shots with less blur and less post-processing required. But the price that you pay for that is in the color tint and white-balance and background noise, and the lack of focus flexibility and range. The two cameras cannot really be equated, the a700-SAL18250 is simply better at some things and worse at others, better in some ways and worse in others. With the SAL18-250, the a700s' strength is in the lens. With the Nikon 18-200, the D300s strength is in the camera.

...it's funny to go back and look at this review from the beginning. At first I was quite impressed with it, then, after the first day :) I began to see what was really going on with it...the main thing is, I got it to take good night shots and that meant that I was staring the WB-tint problems of this camera dead in the face. What kept me from "cutting loose" on it was the stability and effectiveness of the SSS system combined with a focus that was just miles better than my Sigma 18-200 DC OS lens on the 400D. The main thing is, during the day, when the overly-hot WB & excessive tint and unavoidable in-camera NR are not big issues, this is a really good camera. At night, shooting real slow, slow below the limits of most other DSLRs shooting handheld but in enough light to get a good focus, this is a really good camera. It's in-between that it sucks. When you are making excuses for what is coming out of the camera that don't have to do with it just being too dark (because that is one of its strengths), then it just sucks. And that prospect is one of the things that made me sell this camera and lens EVEN THOUGH I LOVED THE LENS. I did not want to have to make excuses for the shots from a $1200 DSLR and $500 lens. Now, I just bought another pair. But you can be sure that if a shot from this camera and the SAL18-250 sucks? I'm not going to worry about it being because *I* didn't know what I was doing. I know that it is because of the camera. And if the shot sucks I'm not spending an hour trying to fix it. It's gone. I'll take the good shots that I get out of this camera and the SAL18-250 lens, and RUN AWAY from the bad ones. And ultimately that's all you can ask for. No camera is perfect. You just want to be happy with the good ones and be able to walk away from the bad ones and forget about them. The sole remaining question is, can I actually do that with this camera and lens like I can with the D300 and Nikon 18-200 VRII. And we shall see. But this is simple. If it pisses me off too much, if it makes me wish that I had taken my D300 instead, too much, it will go on eBay like the first one. Just check back here in 6 months and see.

...I did not want to have to struggle to make excuses for the shots from it. "It was too dark for that shot, handheld" is hardly a difficult excuse to make, but for this camera that is no excuse. If I had to pick a DSLR to take extremely-slow handheld night shots with, it would probably be this camera. It's the comedy-colored output at 1-40s ISO1600 that brings this camera down. The white-balance is just way too warm in all the settings except sunny daylight, giving all the shots a brownish-green tint. Combine that with the in-camera NR that can't be turned off, just "managed", and you can get some real disasters at EVs that many DSLRs can handle easily. Other than that it's a very-nice DSLR. But it's like buying a Ferrari that has been "modified" to pull no more than half a G once it passes 100MPH. You're screwed if you need 0.6G at 120MPH. But it'll happily do 0.25G at 175MPH for you. The D300 and Nikon 18-200 VRII will do 0.75G right up to about 150MPH. It's a question of good versatility vs extreme performance.

...personally I think that what is happening is that you can't turn off the DRO on this camera, either. Not just the NR. It may very well be that SSS on the a700 is more effective than VR on the Nikon 18-200 VRII, in terms of allowing the user to shoot slow. But that doesn't explain the color. I would expect that the shots look the same at the same ISO, shutter speed and F#, attempting to ignore the effects of the unavoidable in-camera NR. This is a really, really simple question. Is the exposure the same, between the D300 and a700, for the same camera settings? If not then Sony is boosting the exposure in the camera, at low EVs. And I guarantee you that I will take a hard look at this.

...for the record, now you can get a 5D for about $1800 new and the Canon EF 28-300 F3.5-F5.6 IS L for about $2200 new. Which is what these two cameras and lenses cost together.

But the 28-300 is a 7" 4lb lens and the 5D even bigger and heavier than the d300. It comes down to how much do you want to tote around just to take shots under a wide range of ISO and zoom settings. I am not completely happy with the Nikon 18-200 VRII or with the a700 body but that doesn't mean that I am ready to carry that lens around on that body just as a "walkaround" camera. And another plus is that the a700 and sal18-250 is lighter as well as better for long-range day shooting than the Nikon d300 and 18-200VRII. As well as 40% cheaper.

but I will put up more notes on comparing the a700 and sal18-250 to the Nikon d300 and Nikon 18-200 VRII, in terms of white balance, across the frame sharpness at F4, F5.6, F6.3 and F8, noise grain and loss of fine-detail at 100% at various ISOs, etc. Light reflection especially.

Here is a shot that shows the, really, solid performance of the SAL18-250 mounted on the a700. Notice how everything looks slightly soft but at least realistic. the key point is that everything is in place. The masts look like masts and you see a hint of ropes near them. This is a very complicated shot that looks pretty simple, there is a LOT of linear fine-detail. But the SAL18-250 handled it well without a lot of blurring. http://www.flickr.com/photos/12219276@N08/2273205416/sizes/o/

So, notes with the new a700 and SAL18250.
Between this lens and the camera I rate the lens an 8.5 and the camera an 8. I get good results during the day, it gets to be a little noisy at twilight and at night and the noise has a large grain, so shooting raw is limited to about ISO1600 and the camera jpegs look a lot better at night, especially once you get the white balance correct. That absolutely must be done or the shots will look brownish-green. The D300 is miles better at getting the colors right using AutoWB. Once that is done, I still see some purple flaring at night but it's not too bad. Definitely a lot more than the Nikon 18-200VRII. But the lens is much sharper than the 18-200, even at 150mm the sal18-250 is solid where the Nikon 18-200 is not really sharp enough even at F8 with DxO unless most of the scene is within the center half of the frame. It is not a high-resolution high-precision lens. You do not have to worry about this not nearly as much with the SAL18-250 and I would say that if I were going out to shoot landscapes during the day, the a700 and the SAL18-250 is what I would grab. The D300 with the Nikon 18-200 is better for close-in work, shots that absolutely fill the frame but don't have loads of fine-detail, or landscape work that is similar. Not too much fine-detail so you can't really see the blur. If there is a lot of fine-detail throughout the frame, you can see the blur easily, as well as the low contrast of the lens. Plus the SAL18-250 is 25% longer. However I would have to say that the SSS is not as stable as the VR on the 18-200 especially at long range. Even during the day, even at twilight, it still needs about 1-60 to 1-120 or so for stability, once the lens is out past 150mm or so. Both the SSS and the focus will occasionally "hit" at low speeds in low light and surprise you with a great image, but it it isn't anything that I would depend on. It looks like it can shoot stable at 1-8s, consistently, if you just look at the camera LCD, but those shots will not be stable on a 21" monitor. The low limit for it is really 1-15s, more if you can get it, and just forget about shooting raw at night past ISO1600 and take the jpegs and run. It can shoot decent jpegs up to about ISO4000 or so. Also today I couldn't get the camera to function properly until I had removed and reinstalled the battery. And without a doubt it just doesn't focus reliably in low light or shooting at night. So given those things and some heads-up shooting with them, WB, color realism, noise grain, low-light focus, long-range shooting stability, it is behind the D300 but the lens puts it out in front, like a Ferrari 308GTi is in front of a Corvette even if the Corvette is faster and has better brakes. The Corvette simply cannot match the panache of the 308GTi. You have to get used to driving it to enjoy that styling, that's all there is to it. You can't shoot the D300 or any other non-Alpha camera and enjoy that SAL18-250 lens. And the lens is *that* good. And given the size of the Nikon 80-400VR and the fact that the Tokina 80-400 doesn't have VR, you are left with, really, putting either the very-sharp 70-300 VR or a borderline-skanky Tamron 28-300VC on the D300 and hoping to solve the lens issues that it has with the 18-200 VRII mounted on it. There's really nothing that you can do to improve the a700 with the SAL18-250 on it except to practice shooting it so that you know what not to try to do with it. What this camera is begging for is a Tokina 80-400, but there isn't one in Alpha-mount. But unless you need to save a stop that badly, there's no reason to put anything but the SAL18-250 on this camera. I rate it a full point if not two points better than the 400D with the Sigma 18-200 DC OS and probably overall it has to be rated better than the D300 and the 18-200 VRII if only because a camera should at least be able take good, solid, photos during the day in good daylight at F8 throughout the zoom range. The 18-200 VRII is just a significant handicap for the D300. It gives you great range, yes, but at the cost of a serious loss of lens sharpness and contrast in the outer third of the frame, in the latter third of that zoom range. The SAL18-250 does not ask you to make that compromise. It merely asks you to accept the a700, and all of the a700s' foibles, as the cost of shooting it. I think that if Nikon had not ever come out with the d300, not a single budget DSLR owner would have a problem with that deal. There's nothing really "wrong" with the a700, it just could be a better DSLR, better at everything that it does. But it is certainly "shootable" as it is, and it will give decent results throughout the ISO range with a little practice, patience and understanding. Just don't expect too much of it and be happy with the shots that it gives you that *are* good. That is the difference between it and the D300. With the D300 and the Nikon 18-200VRII, you can expect to get good results aside from the lens sharpness. With a700 and the SAL18-250, you can expect to get quite a few misses and some outright crashes along with the good ones, and the color will always seem a bit off, but lens blur won't ever really be a problem if you stick to F5.6 or better and if you're lucky you will get the WB just about right, the camera will focus well, you'll have taken the shots at a high-enough shutter-speed and the shots will look fine, if slightly "warm and fuzzy" with a Panasonic-like unrealness to the colors. Are you happy when your 8-year old kid makes it around the block on their bicycle? That's what shooting the a700 is like. It gives you that great feeling that you get when you see your kid coming home from the playground, on their bike, safe and sound. And that's a hard feeling to turn down. But it's not the kind of feeling that is going to make your day, day in and day out. Sometimes you just need a camera that can play a duet with you, not just follow your finger along the page. The D300 will flat-out make your jaw drop with the shots that it can take, shots that the a700, with its many weaknesses, would have no chance of shooting. But to be fair, just about any "average" DSLR would have the same problems, really. The D300 just makes the hard shots easy, allowing you to think about your shot as a photographic artist, and not worry so much about the shot as a technical photographer. It's like comparing Dali or Eischer to Rockwell, like comparing an F-15 or F-22 to a T-39. The D300 will snicker at the shots that the a700 misses, but without a lens to match its technical excellence, the d300 cannot take shots that look as good as shots that the a700 and SAL18-250, or just about any other midbody with a decent zoom lens and even some of the newer P&Ss with 10x zooms, can take easily in broad daylight. It's like a Ferrari 308 with a broken 5th gear, and the a700 is like that Corvette. Ostentatious, just plain "Detroit-tacky" without any real sense of style, not inspirational in any way, nothing that anyone with any real taste would want to be seen in, but able to put a solid 170mph, a 12-sec quarter-mile and 0.8G down on the Ferrari.

Just an example...if you shoot raw with this camera you pretty-much have to do this manually...first step is to run it through Bibble with the WB set to "camera", and the lens-correction active...then manually adjust color, cyan +10, blue +10, contrast +5...then sharpen to taste. I haven't sharpened these. Basically if you are going to shoot raw you should also shoot jpeg fine because quite often the camera jpegs will look better than what you can get with the raw files. Either with less noise (and of course less fine-detail) or better color balance or both. This is what you would see if you lower the WB temp enough to get rid of the "brown" cast. I shot this in "cloudy", it's still too warm. But you could spend hours fiddling with the WB temp trying to get it precisely-right, try doing that for every shot. What a PITA. By the way this is an ISO320 shot, F6.7, 112mm effective.

As far as night-shooting with this bad-boy goes, there's no way around it. The A700 has too much in-camera NR to compete with normal DSLRS (not to mention CMOS DSLRS) above about ISO1600 for anything except low-resolution scenes. It's not just the "cooked raw". The camera absolutely mungs any fine-detail at high ISO. The higher the ISO, the worse it gets. Not saying that you can't get decent shots out of it at high ISO. At the least you can boost contrast to hide the noise, and at low resolution, 640x480-ish, or small image sizes, 4x6" or less, the shots will look ok, if the camera gets a good focus and you have a steady hold, neither of which are a given. This is much like any other camera. The difference is that even shooting raw the fine-detail will be cruddy and the camera jpegs even worse. There is just no way around this short of using a tripod or an ultra-fast lens and shooting at low ISO. With a normal DSLR you can shoot raw and leave all that luminance noise in there and boost contrast to hide most of it and use a NR program to get rid of the residual noise that remains. Do that if you want with the a700 images. In no way shape or form will there be any fine-detail in the shot. And most likely it will blow the focus. The difference between this camera at low ISO and at high ISO is literally, "night and day".

...take the a700 and sal18-250 when you know there is little to no chance that you will shoot it at night, except maybe for shots of well-lit nearby subjects, and the shots that you will take will be mostly monochromatic, and you absolutely cannot afford to carry a 2nd lens. If you think that the focus or color range or both will be a challenge, at all, the D300 is the way to go.

Here's an example of what this camera is incredibly "wrong" for. And, admittedly, it's a rare example. Unless of course you find yourself shooting city landscapes a lot. It's a little extreme at ISO5000 but let's call it "effects overemphasized for dramatization". Three shots, the first is the raw output from Bibble, using florescent WB, the 2nd a 640x480 crop at 100% and third the raw shot with a +20 contrast adjustment (to mask the noise in the shadow areas). Note that there is still a lot of reddish-blue chroma noise even after this step, but never do you really see any luminance noise. That's because Sony has nuked the luminance noise with NR in the camera and left the *chroma* noise in!!!! This makes no sense to me at all. Then they did this in the RAW FILES. Dumb and dumberer. You are left holding a broken bat, so to speak. There's nothing that you can really do with this except flail. All the fine-detail is gone. The shot is only good for small sizes. They are, apparently, assuming that no one would ever want to shoot a DSLR like this. But why else put ISO6400 in the camera?!? Nikon does it almost completely the opposite way in the D300 and guess which way works better. The thing is this. You never want to have to use strong NR on your images. Sony takes that choice almost completely out of your hands, with this camera. The only thing that you can do to dial down the NR is to dial down the ISO...just like a P&S. So this camera is basically a bridge camera that has an APS-C sensor and a switchable lens. It doesn't even have a real "raw" mode.

This was shot raw and converted in Bibble 4.9.9b using florescent WB and the camera tone curve, then it has been straightened and the contrast boosted and then I removed a crane from the shot, in Paint Shop Pro...there are two ways to look at it. One is as "pop-art". Shots like these actually come out ok with hard colors. The other is to reduce the viewing angle...this is ISO1600. One of the few that actually came out in focus, after the sun went down. Most of the shots that I took after this one are blurry and out of focus when viewed on my 21" LCD. They looked fine on the camera LCD. None of them really look good. Certainly not as good as the D300 shots that I took there. But, at 1MP, at 640x480, most of them would be ok. If you didn't look at them too closely. And if you got lucky and got a good focus not to mention if you shot them faster, you might even be impressed. As long as you didn't know what you were missing.

....here are the "embedded" jpegs from the corresponding raw files, unretouched. One at 1-8s and the other at 1-10s. Actually these are ISO2500, my mistake. When in doubt about your raw-conversion settings, always refer to the embedded jpegs. They will depend on what WB tone curve, tint etc that the camera used for the shot, but still, at least you know that you're in the ballpark. You can see here that there is absolutely no difference in NR between the jpegs and the raw files. It looks like all the NR is being done in the image-processor prior to storing the data, regardless of what format you choose. To the a700, "raw" is just a proprietary 12-bit data-storage format. If it wasn't for the additional tint added to the jpegs (or if you can fix the heavy green tint that it applies to mask the background noise at night instead of boosting contrast), you might as well just shoot jpeg.

...and you can see how it would be fine, great, even, for shots that you have no intention of making large prints of, or if you do because you're stubborn, you have no intention of looking at them closely. Viewing-angle saves the day. Keep it small, and all is good.

"the finished product", ISO1000. I repeat, the SAL18-250 is a sweet lens. The a700 has already thrown away significant fine detail even at ISO1000. Here's the Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12219276@N08/2278482174/sizes/o/

...ok let's just assumine that the "cooked raw" doesn't do anything worse than what Nikon is doing with the D300, at high ISO, at least as far as you can see on a 21" monitor when viewing the full image. Let's just assume that for the moment. You still need to get a good focus to take the shot and have it come out looking good. That is where the D300 excels and the a700 has no more maybe but certainly no less trouble than any other DSLR. The problem with the a700 is that since it has ISO6400 it incites you to take shots with it at night of scenes of which it cannot focus very well. The other problems just pile on top of that. The "cooked raw", the internal reflections, the lack of a good horizontal reference in the viewfinder...the absymal auto-WB...all of that stuff. Still, optically, the a700 and SAL18-250 is definitely significantly sharper and cleaner than the Nikon D300 and 18-200 VRII. At low ISO, given a good focus. And that is not something to just sneeze at.
In adequate light, given precautions to get the proper WB, you will enjoy this camera and lens and it will give you decent results. And certainly, for it, "adequate light" is much less light than any midbody or p&s can handle. But you cannot get *great* results with this camera and lens because of the various problems that I've already pointed out a dozen times. And if you ever get lucky and do get great results from it, it'll frustrate you to death trying to get them again. But you'll search high and low and never find a sharper lens than this one, with anywhere near the zoom range. It is truly a damm shame that the a700 is not up to the level of this lens. Having a d300 and Nikon 18-200vr and this lens and the a700, I want to just put the SAL18-250 on the D300, and sell both the a700 and the 18-200vr. And since Tamron makes this lens (the Sony SAL18-250 is just a rebadged and repackaged Tamron), I could just buy it from Tamron, for DX-mount. But that means that I have to give up the VR, or carry the Nikon 18-200vr just for low-light shooting. But that would make a LOT more sense than carrying two cameras and two lenses or a 5D and a 28-300 EF L. But if Tamron comes out with a VR version of the 18-250...or if Nikon comes out with a sharper version of the 18-200VRII...or if Sony comes out with a real DSLR...well, one can only hope that all three happen.

so, here you go. I made one mistake in processing this file which I will get to, later. The image is now named "DSC0088240570621ARWraw_BB4LC1Sa150s006NR0C50Q96IAc25_NI4060s00.jpg"

which means that it is an srgb shot, converted to jpeg from a raw file with Bibble 4, with the lens-correction active, Sharpening with a=150 and s=6, the NR (noise-ninja) off, and contrast set to 50 in bibble. The mistake was in sharpening this shot but this was batch-processed. Now I would not do this even in a batch, I'd sharpen it later (in a batch just for sharpening). I always save my jpeg files with a Q value of 96, even the intermediates, and yes you can quickly fill up a 300GB drive this way, but if you don't use a high Q value then every edit results in a loss of IQ due to accumulated compression error. I then ran another contrast adjustment on it and then ran Neat Image with the luminance NR strength set to 40 and chroma NR set to 60 (the defaults, after all that playing around with NI...I end-up using the default settings). Then I downsampled it and posted it for you to see what this camera can and cannot do. It still needs to be rotated and straightened. It's an ISO3200 handheld shot.

tourist,

Nikon really may have given you that D300.

After reading all, and I do mean all of your comments I just can't pass up the chance, I mean I am compelled to ask you to re-read your first few statements, those prior to your new gift.

Boy was that a700 the neatest thing! At the highest ISOs! Better than any but the best Canons and only a couple Nikons.....

Me? I'm still debating- a700 or D300??


and how come you didn't go back, re-shoot the same scenes with your free new toy, and then post them side by side?