For the past two days I have had the joy of owning, and using a Sony 135mm F1.8 ZA.
It is sublime! ... and ... it puts my Sony Alpha 100 to shame, which just adds to my eagerness to get the new Sony Alpha-700.
I will not be posting test photos up just yet (gotta wait until the weekend) - but - I assure you this is worth every penny spent on it.
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So, the Alpha 700 is out at last (dpreviewA lot of reviewers have had their hands on pre-production bodies, and the general consensus is that the camera handles smoothly, the ergonomics are spot on (esp the vertical grip), and the camera performs excellently in even very dim lighting ( Read more... )

For photography at Beltane; the best lenses of the night were all primes. We knew that there was advantage in using primes over zooms, however, we never knew how pronounced it would be.
( About primes... )

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First Ultrafast Digital Sensor has been announced by Sony
The latest CX News article on the ultra-fast CMOS technology
CX News article on the announced sensor
Datasheet on the new sensor (PDF)
The original CX News article about the ultra-fast CMOS technology, from one year ago
Sony have announced their first ultrafast CMOS sensor; a consumer- ( Read more... )

After selling both of my flashes, I have now taken the plunge and bought both a bigger and better flash and also a brighter wide-standard zoom...

( piccies )

Woo! Finally, Sigma are releasing the above lens for the Sony Alpha mount. It will be out in May 2007, according to Sigma. This lens is a down-sized version of a traditional lens, the 70-200mm F2.8, translating the traditional lens for APS-C-sensor digital SLRs.
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References:
Sony's article on it's 60fps CMOS sensor
Digital Photo Pro's article about general progression towards CMOS instead of CCD sensors
Sixty Frames Per Second
Amusingly; this matches what thingomy said here.
It would probably use a combined mechanical-and-electronic shutter. The photographer would shoot a shot; picking a shutter speed of say 1/ ( Read more... )

This design is for a system of adding binary-encoding to segments of a longer-shutter duration, giving time stamping to parts of the image that change through the duration. In post-processing, specialised software can then decode that, and motionblur can be compensated for.
This is not yet commercially available, yet when it finally is, it will be ( Read more... )

Kodak and Sony (plus Sony Ericsson) enter technology cross-licence agreement

This press release states that apart from agreeing not to sue each other over patent infringements, Sony and Kodak will be exchanging patented technology information.

Surprisingly; Sony is paying the royalties to Kodak. I guess that Kodak has quite a lot of patents ( Read more... )