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Sony has announced the latest DSLR in their Alpha camera line, the Alpha A700. This new camera seems closer to the Maxxum 7D than the more recent — and more similarly named — Alpha A100. Imaging Resource has a good preview of it, but the key features are:

• 12.2 megapixel CMOS sensor, which sounds remarkably similar to the sensor in the Nikon D300.
• Analog to digital conversion on the sensor chip itself, which should eliminate one source of image noise by not requiring the analog signal to travel from the sensor to the A/D converter. This is only 12-bit A/D, however, not 14-bit like so many of the newly announced DSLRs. We’ll have to wait for the reviews to see if 14-bit processing will really be a big improvement.
• 3 inch high resolution LCD display (640×480, same as the Nikon D3 and D300′s much-hyped display.)
• Anti-dust system that uses the anti-shake system implementation to try to shake dust off of the camera. This hasn’t been that effective in other models, but we’ll have to wait for the full reviews to come out before we prejudge the A700 too much. Just a little prejudging for now…

Despite all the similarities to the D300, there’s one big advantage the A700 will have, which is in-camera anti-shake. This is supposed to be an improvement over Sony’s past anti-shake technology, and they claim that it’ll give an impressive 2.5 to 4 stops of exposure extension. That’s a whole lot more low light headroom than I have without any anti-shake, and I’d love to play with that and see what possibilities it opens up.

What about pricing? It will retail for $1,400 for the body only, $1,500 if bundled with an 18-70mm lens, and $1,900 with their new 16-105mm lens.

Luminous Landscape has posted a hands-on preview of the Canon 40D. The Luminous Landscape has always been more about real-world usability and quality than about pixel peeping and test charts, so bear in mind that the preview is from that point of view and doesn’t have any full-size image previews to peep at.

But I tend to fall in that camp as well, and from my point of view it’s a very good preview. He continues a trend of being glad that Canon finally has an auto ISO feature, but being disappointed that it’s not as flexible as Nikon’s auto ISO. This is, personally, one of my biggest gripes. It’s just a little bit of software coding, why can’t they program in some auto ISO flexibility? It makes shooting in varying lighting conditions so much easier.

He times the burst modes, coming up with nice and speedy times:

I timed 22 raw frames in 4 seconds before the buffer started to unload and slow down a bit. In Large Fine JPG I was able to shoot 100 consecutive frames in 17 seconds before hitting the buffer and the camera starting to slow down. The card used was a 4GB Sandisk Extreme IV.

This is exceptional performance, and sports and wildlife photographers will likely flock to this camera because of its high speed capabilities.

One of the longest sections of the preview is the discussion of Canon’s Live View implementation. On the plus side, he reports that the live RGB histogram is very accurate, and was able to rely on it to get high quality RAW files by exposing bright but just short of blowing out the highlights, according to the live histogram. One downside is that the live histogram isn’t accurate in low light.

But, of course, it’s not perfect:

What I don’t care for in Canon’s current Live View implementation is that autofocus is not available. The camera can be set so that the the top-rear AF-On button lowers the mirror and activates AF for an instant, but otherwise one has to manual focus. This may not be an issue when doing landscape style shooting, but for action photography it is an issue. Manual focusing is made easier though by the ability to greatly magnify the image on screen.

Since Nikon’s D300 is said to have contrast detection autofocus available during Live View this may also turn out to be a competitive disadvantage for Canon.

The final issue I have with Live View is that the rear LCD isn’t articulated. (Neither do most cameras with Live View – yet). The lack of a flexible LCD makes using this feature less than ideal. As Live View technology matures I’m sure that we will see future DSLRs with articulated screens, and indeed some will start to come to market in the second half of this year.

After the first Live View reviews (possibly for the Olympus E-510 or E-410) I was under the impression that the frame rate was low for this early generation, much like the early digicams had a low frame rate LCD view. But after seeing a view preview of the Canon 1D Mark III’s live view, it looks like Canon’s Live View is very smooth and usable. So that’s a big plus. Another generation or two and DSLR Live View is probably going to be something much more usable.

The preview closes with the angry e-mail inducing claim that the image quality of the 40D may slightly surpass the image quality of the 5D — anyone else remember Luminous Landscape’s similarly controversial claim about the Canon D30 blowing away 35mm slide film’s image quality?)

Oh, and he also mentions that it’s an excellent camera:

The bottom line is that the Canon 40D is the most DSLR for the money that Canon has ever offered. Certainly in its price range there doesn’t seem to be anything that can touch it. Move up a notch in price though and the forthcoming Nikon D300 may well put the squeeze on Canon’s hegemony in the DSLR marketplace. Time will tell, and no matter what happens we’ll all benefit from the renewed competition.

Definitely looking forward to some full reviews for this one.