Sony- The DSLR Punk that will change everything.

Posted by StayClassy on January 20, 2013 05:35 pm 29

Background:

Sony.

Say that in photography circles and you're sure to start a rabble. I fondly remember my CD Mavica, which worked about 1% of the time and had horrendous performance. Or that camcorder that stopped working after 2 sessions due to a hard drive parking issue. I swore for years to never buy a Sony when I was older.

I'm 21 now, and after a day out at Best Buy, I spotted an A65 sitting in the open box container with a sticker asking for $600. My Canon DSLR recently crapped out on me after a girl at the club decided to soak test it with a pitcher full of Hennesy. So I plucked it out the container, toyed with it for a few moments while the representative there gave me a brief overview of the specs. I knew that I could return it if I didn't like it, so I took her home.

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Naturally, she's still in my possession. Without a doubt, this is the finest camera I've owned, and beats the pants off of almost every camera that I've tried against it, full-frame and medium format notwithstanding.

Being a college student meant that I had budgets to maintain, so I've only recently acquired my first lens, the SAL35F18 (35mm f/1.8 prime) and the HVL-F43 flash.

The Future

Sony is taking on the Canikon circles by indirectly competing with them. Sony offers superior image quality, but the biggest offering on their part is the lowly, and controversial EVF.

Having grown up with rangefinders and OVF's, I was skeptical at first. I immediately complained about the noisy EVF that had a lot of grain in low light. However, everything for me changed when I sat down, set the camera up to my personal tastes (RAW), moved the dial to "M" and realized my shutter speed was too fast. As I dialed back the speed, my EVF got brighter. Ok, that's a cool trick. I took the shot, and to my surprise, the image looked exactly the same on the screen as it did in the EVF. So I tried adjusting my white balance. What I saw in the viewfinder was what I got.

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What makes my images consistently better than my fellow camera enthusiasts at my school is not the fact that I have a really high resolution sensor, or a newer camera; it's consistency. Having an EVF allows me to make every shot come out RIGHT. My white balances are always spot on, and when I shoot, I always leave the histogram on. I get to see immediately whether I should bump the exposure down or up, even if what I'm seeing looks good, because I know that in post, I'll have the most amount of data to work with.

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Sony is shaping the future of DSLR's with the strong adoption of the EVF. If Sony can increase the resolutions, ensure color accuracy is maintained AND push features like focus peaking harder and more accurate, Canon and Nikon could very well find themselves facing stiff competition. I spent a day with the A99 while my partner was borrowing the 1DX, and the irony of the whole shoot was that time and time again, the A99 shots came out more consistent.

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