Why Sony / Minolta at all?

[Travis]

Firstly the Minolta A1 costs £1,000 and there are several DSLRs with higher specs and interchangable lenses for a few hundred pounds more (Canon 10D)

Secondly the image you make can't be great if the quality of lens you use is not top spec. Given that minolta pro zooms cost around £700 you can't tell me that the optics on the A1 are anywhere near that quality.

If Minolta doesn't bring out a DSLR which can use the minolta fit in the next year, they will be out of the pro market. If they go for a different lens mount we will all be changing to different formats. IF you don't believe this, go into a camera shop and see what happens whey you ask about Minolta SLRs.

 

[hung]

>I have the Dimage 7i. The lens is top class. You forgot that you will ha= ve to pay separately to buy lenses if you get a dslr.

 

[adesmith]

>You forgot that you will have to pay separately to buy lenses if you get a dslr.<

Not if Minolta follow the lead of Canon and Nikon and use the same mount as that of their 35mm SLRs. Which I think is the point we're all trying to make. We HAVE the lenses....flashguns...etc Now give us the option of a dSLR to use 'em on alongside our favourite SLR. Don't wait a year to get a spec-sheet out to the world. It will be to late, everyone else will have moved on. Get a "work in progress" to wet our appetite at least within the next 3 to 6 months (product in shops in 9) or it's as good as all over for Minolta. Not everyone will wait..... just look at the amount of good quality Minolta equipment being sold on eBay EVERYDAY !

 

[Travis]

>I have the Dimage 7i. The lens is top class. >>You forgot that you will ha= ve to pay >>separately to buy lenses if you get a dslr.

No I didn't. Most of us already have lenses. I have 4. I dare say the lens is good, but it is NOT anywhere near as good as top of the range lenses. Nor can you get a fisheye for it. Nor a super telephoto pro-spec. Nor a proper macro etc.

The A1 is a good quality hobby camera. Try selling your images to quality magazines and you'll soon work that out.

I will give Minolta another year or so then I will be trading to Nikon.

Believe me, if Minolta does not bring out a pro DSLR they will become a hobby camera producer and will not be spoken of in the same breath as Nikon, Canon, and now Fuji, Kodak, Pentax, Olypus, and - for goodness sake - Sigma!

 

[sungnee]

>>Finally, I am incensed at Minolta for their failure to produce a DSLR<<

Would you like to consider using a scanner in the interim? According to consensus, "hybrid processing" produces the best images in the present state of technology.

I rather think that Minolta is rather clever by not introducing a DSLR at the moment.

 

[Travis]

>>I rather think that Minolta is rather clever >>by not introducing a DSLR at the moment

There's nothing clever about creating all this negative feeling. Retailers in shops telling people not to buy SLRs because there is no Minolta Digital SLR to upgrade to. Magazines saying the same.

I have a quality film scanner, and hybrid does not produce the best images unless you buy an Imacon which costs over $4,000.

The consensus is that the top of the range DSLR is as good if not better than 35mm.

 

[hung]

>I hate this type of illogical logic: "Retailers in shops telling people not to buy SLRs because there is no >Minolta Digital SLR to upgrade to". If I just want to take pictures of my family with a film camera, is it relevant? After all, film lenses are not optimised for digital sensors. I would rather pay for a complete dslr and new lens system than hobbled my new dslr with old design film lenses.

 

[Travis]

Of course it is not relevant if you want to take snaps of your family. But people who just want to do that don't need medium to top of the range SLRs. A point and shoot will do it for them.

For those of us who have invested upwards of $1500 in a pro SLR we want to know if we can carry on working professionally. All the pro camera manufacturers have given a road map to thier users, except Minolta.

And what do you mean optimised. The only problem is the change in focal length, which isn't a problem on several cameras and just means buying a wider angle lens for those that are not 35mm chips.

This is not a relevant problem for hobbyists, but serious photographers want to know that Minolta is not becoming a hobby brand.

 

[zeevk]

Optimized, as I understand is designed to cover less area, smaller angle of coverage, and requires higher nominal resolution (in lines/mm) to be on pare with 35mm results. If you take a portrait with a 100mm lens on 35mm film, the lens provides certain details. Same portrait on a CCD covers smaller area, thus benefits from less "on-film/semsor" resolution. Some of the resolving power of the magnificent lens is lost outside the area of CCD. This is eqvivalent to shooting on film covering only partial center area and then enlarging to full size - details will be lost. Speciality CCD lenses have a smaller cover angle, suitable exactly to cover a CCD chip.

 

[iberger]

>Digital sensors differ from film in that their sensing spots are recessed in tiny wells. A lens optimized for digital will fire straight into the wells rather than at an angle, which means more light hits the sensors, especially the sensors at the edges. I don't know this would make much of a difference with long focal lengths, but I can see how it would with wide-angles. Or, as Olympus says in their E-1 description on the Web, "Specially designed for digital applications, it >allows light to strike the image sensor at a near-perpendicular angle," The Olympus E-1 lenses also tell the cmaera about their characteristics, enabling the camera to compensate for, say, barrel distortion or vignetting. Though only Olympus does this stuff so far, there's no reason why others --e.g. Minolta--could not do something similar. > The Oly

> >minimizing degradation and lig