New Camera

Yesterday I mentioned that we had purchased a new camera. Actually, it was a combination of Christmas gifts from la mamma e papà, mamie monette, & the mama, that allowed us to purchase it. Thanks y'all!

As with the saw, I figured I'd share with y'all what I learned in our buying process. Unlike the saw, though, I did find a site with a 5 part, all inclusive, buying guide, so I'll refer you to it and will not try to distill all that information into this post (happy Margaret ... no bla bla bla). What I will share is how we ended up deciding on the Sony α100 digital SLR.

Background: I have been shooting with SLRs for now 15 something years. I started with an all manual Yashica FX-3 Super 2, which I loved and still have (I keep black and white film in it). Then several years ago, to make it easier to take action shots and to make it easier for Cindy to take pictures, we bought a Minolta Maxxum XT. We have no beef with the Minolta and plan to keep on using it, but with the house renovations and the blog, it was going to be more convenient to have a digital camera.

The decision process: So, we saw our options as follows: small cheap digital, medium grade digital, digital SLR.
If digital was not up to par then the SLR was out of the question. It was probably going to be a the small cheaper camera or it was going to be the medium digital. What's the difference? The main one, for us, was that the small cheap digitals do not have good zooms and Cindy is addicted to zooms. We would use the Minolta for all important shots, and the digital for all the keeping track of progress on the house and blog shots.
So the main question was: was digital technology up to par for Cindy? (Ok, I'm picky too ... but she is the pickiest ... I think it is all those years of working as a database publisher) We were hoping that stores would have sample pictures taken with various cameras, but they did not. We thus decided to go to Wolf Camera and try two cameras out against our Maxxum. Cindy took two shots of me (one against a light background and one against a dark background) with a medium digital, the Sony SLR (the only camera which will accept the α mount lenses we had with our Minolta Maxxum SLR), and our Maxxum.

The Verdict: we looked at the results and had friends look at the result. The medium grade did not compare with the DSLR or the Maxxum, and was thus eliminated. As for the others, our friends correclty identified one digital picture shot with the DSLR, but missed the other. Bottom line ... they could not tell the difference. Thus we went with the Sony α100 digital SLR.
Why Sony vs. the other brands: it's the only one which could use our α mount Sigma lenses.