This camera is So capable even with it's 2/3" CCD!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Best handling, impressive speed, high pictures quality, accurate color.

Cons: Need Smaller aperture, faster shutter speed. potential CA/PF. Small CCD.

The Bottom Line: 
It's a bargain if you can get it lower than $700. Sony is throwing in 512 MB MSpro to buyers for free between now and Dec.

Author's Review
Who should buy: Sophisticated users to amateur enthusiasts. Best-fit buyers are looking for an ONE-PIECE DIGITAL camera with the most natural control designs, great amount of features, top performance of speeds (non-raw), high quality pictures and high zooming power.

Value (street price is around $750-$999): Comparing to it's closest competitors, A2, Nikon 8700, Canon Pro1, Oly C8080, after more than a year of it's announcement, the depreciation of it's market value is VERY slow, indeed. After all these months, the camera should still worth about $750 given the technology, features and picture quality. . My advice is if you can find a f828 cost you lower than $750, it's worth to buy it. I was lucky enough to get a brand new one for under $600 this month.

Benefits you should care:

Mechanical ring 28-200mm Carl Zeiss lens with second ring for manual focus. You can't bit this with any other competitors. Basically, there is no digital competitors offer the same kind of manual rings control system in this level. If you use SLR before, you know how important it means to you. Unlike the lever system, the continuous ring controls let you easily, quickly and accurately adjust your composition and focus. Combined with the porperly weight balanced body, well designed body shape, naturally placed control buttons, you will find that holding the camera in hand is a total joy.

Although the Sony can still stretch a little on the camera's optical zooming power (350mm) would be much better), a 28mm wide angle to 200mm zoom lens is quite enough in most of the case. It would say more than 90% of your pictures can be handled well by this wide range. If you are like me who do not want to carry interchangeable lenses but need wide range, this is an excellent choice.

4 color CCD: it after testing and comparing, it's found that the CCD really improves the reality and the accuracy of the picture's color. You can still choose the standard color (3 color CCD setting) which will give you some more saturated (vivid) results.

Best speed 8 MP digital camera: shutter lag is 0.3 sec, cycle lag is about 1 sec, power on to shoot is about 1.5 sec. It is a very very speedy machine. I don't see any other same class competitor is comparable to the numbers.

Very long battery life. This camera battery is the longest last one among the same class digital competitors. Reports can be found on the internet.

Picture quality: resolution is the highest in all same calss cameras. It's noise level is quite low in ISO 64 to 100. Anything over 200 is not as clean. I would say ISO 400
is still usable in many cases (with some post reduction) but ISO 800 is too noisy to be practical. Thanks for the carl zeiss lens and the excellent 4 color CCD, images taken in ISO64 and 100 are crystal clear and sharp.

Very good quality EVF and LCD. EVF requires good light condition in order to be optimal.

Standard 58mm filter thread is on the lens. This is a very very very important features that some of the major competitor models lack of. If you are serious enough to use these high end cameras to take pictures, you definitely use filters to optimize the results in many situations. It's a shame like some other 8MP digital cams that they totally overlooked this need.

So what's the concerns:
1. EVF image color can be unrealistic in lower light situation which force you to switch back to the LCD when you verify the exposure. ALso a larger LCD is better help for composition. 2 inches is good.
2. min aperture should be smaller. now it's min aperture is f/8. If you take a lot of landscape, you should know that f/16 and f/22 is absolutely demanded in order to obtain the best depth-of -field.
3. don't penalize if I fire too fast. The camera makes you wait longer before you can shoot again if you shoot too fast.
4. Longer lens is needed. 350mm is a better choice.
5. Larger CCD needed. 2/3" CCD is unchanged from f 717. This is a shame since they have to decrease the pixel size in order to squeeze in 8 million of the on this small sensor. I think use a bigger sensor is a must in this level so the dynamic range will improve.

6. CA/PF problem. Although I have bought a model made in a little later of 2004 (the lens told me that it's not the first version from 2003 nor those from very early of 2004),
I still can see some minor little CA/PF problems sometimes. The problem is not very serious as people reported earlier this year.

7.Auto focus point is limited to 5... this is a shame. My SLR has a 7 points system. I know most of higher end machine has a 7 or 9 point system at least. Pansonic/Leica has a 9 pts system in it's Z3 camera which cost less than $350.

8. No ultra wide angle nor power zoom lens to add. Basically, they don't encourage you to do it thru the third party add on lenses since the f828 mechanical ring could be damaged.