sonyalpharumors

I would sacrifice a little less small size to maintain the in camera anti-shake. Leaving it out, makes using the older alpha lens less practical unless using a tripod. Hopefully they will come out with another one, slightly larger that has this desirable feature. It would also be nice to have the ability to shoot tethered.

I thank Sony for having the guts to try and do something fairly extreme (small body), which involves compromises, but at the same time not to compromise on optical quality so much (at least for still photography, different matter for video). I.e. to keep the lenses as big as they need to be with current technology to get good pictures. You could argue that they could have made the body bigger and the lenses smaller by swopping the image stabilisation to in-body. However it is good to see a camera that has not been made by a complete compromise in every parameter.

Hopefully there is a more professional camera with the same body size coming. It would be higher priced, but it would be worth it.

>> 1) Indeed, the bodies of the cameras are really small, but the size of the optics is somewhat disproportionate. We did not want to sacrifice image quality to get smaller targets. It is a challenge for our engineers to achieve a reduction in the future the size of the optical and while maintaining its quality.

If they really wanted to make smaller lenses while maintaining optical quality, they could (and should) have kept the IS in the body and made greater use of aspheric surfaces in their lens elements.

>> 2) The zoom of 18-55 mm is lighter than that used by the Micro Four Thirds cameras

Lighter? What, by a few grams? But it is quite noticeably bigger in volume.

>> 3) To make the camera body was small, the smallest of the moment, this time the engineers decided to move the Super SteadyShot system to the objectives. It is the best choice when you want to give priority to reducing the size of the camera.

Sure, but just as the above poster said, it was purely so that they could use that as a promotional point. It makes no sense from an optical engineering or user functionality standpoint. With such a short flange-back / mount register distance, you get telecentricity issues with wide/normal lenses in the corners, and you still need a minimum thickness to be able to grip and handle the camera effectively anyways. The lenses are by far the bulkiest aspect of the camera-lens pairing, and is the primary bottleneck getting in the way of pocketability. Sony needs to stop pandering to their marketing department and let the few brilliant Minolta engineers left actually design great cameras and lenses instead of “sonystyle boutique” PSP and SonyEricsson Xperia inspired gadgets.