I am also very dissapointed about the Sony product management handling the alpha DSLR/SLT product line.

I really dont understand, why Sony sticks on a "fire-and-forget" product policy unless it really hurts their image or business. Also the competition is making mistakes. Accepted, but they do have a clear strategy to handle this and they immediatly communicate to their customers about issues and describe clearly what this issues are.

I have never seen this with the Sony Alpha product line. The speak about it under disclosure to selected dealers about details of improvement or fixes. But the customer who paid a lot of mony for a A77 for example is left in the desert. Why? This is not necessary and does not build up confidence in a product. All the complaints about the Alpha line is related to this behavior.

Many of the issues are plain software issues and I have the strong impression that I need to buzy the next model to get the software updates people asked for with a current product line. This currently hapens with to top models A65/A77. The new A57 has already a lot of improvements in the firmware, which is missing and people asked for now for 6 MONTH since release of the camera!!! The issues are not solved in these models but they fixed it in the next generation like A57 . WHY? Can anybody at Sony send me an explanation?

I am in the software engineering business and I know what I am talking about, when it comes to software maintanance. Many things people asked for are easy thing to realize, even if a big organisation has a more complex process to handle this, it should not last 6 MONTH! This can be done within a  month.

This is really one of the biggest issues with Sony equipment. I really entjoy the Sony Alpha hardware when it runs fixed and updated firmware! I am a Sony Alpha customer now since 2008 and currently use an A850 and A77. Before I had an A200, A700, A33 and a NEX3.

I hope somebody responible for this imaging division from Sony is reading the customer concerns and rething aboutn their strategy.

Thank you.

BTW: The A57 is really a great camera in its class, but it will be even better, when you start opening AF-adjustoments in the firmware menu. This really would make a lot of sense, as the firmware internally can handle up to 20 lenses. So there is really no reason, why this artificial limitation exist.

The A57 will not get AF adjust.  Sony, like Canon and Nikon, differentiate their products by function.  If they didn't then nobody would buy higher cost cameras.

gimp69 schrieb:

 

High ISO noise is only a problem if you don't know how to use RAW.  I guess you don't shoot RAW.

I dont know whom you adress here, but for myself I use RAW on A850 only and use most of the time RAW on A77. More often I use JPG on A77 if the pictures are not "critical". JPG OOC has improved a lot compared to A850. The problem of high ISO are the denoising artefacts introduced by the algorithms!

The current A77 jpeg engine produce a lot of denoising artefacts, which make jpegs hard to use OOC higher than ISO 1600 and enlargments to A4 and bigger. There has been introduced a minor improvemnt between FW 1.04 and FW 1.05 . Any further improvment here is welcome. Although shooting is RAW is always an option but more time consuming in postprocessing.

Are there any plans to improve this further?

Message was edited by: worinke

Not you.

gimp69 schrieb:

 

Nikon and Canon don't put AF adjustment in similarly priced models to the A5x series.  You have to get the D7000 for AF adjustment.

 

Like I said, Nikon and Canon use AF adjustment as a model differentiator, just like your complaint about Sony.

This is true, though Canon started offering microAF with the 50D and you find it now in 60D 7D APS-C class bodies. Nikon is offering this feature on D7000, D300 and D300S APS-C class.

To open up this feature on A57 and A65 would be a another nice differentiation against competition, as it improves the camera value for the user.