Gadgetory

hi I'm Laurie glutenin senior editor for CNET and this is the sony alpha SLT a 77 V let's say I enjoyed shooting with the a 77 more than any other camera since the Nikon d7000 it's heavy especially with the sixteen to fifty millimeter kit lens which by the way has become my favorite Sony lens but it's weather sealed and well constructed the grip is comfortable and it feels well-balanced and with only a few exceptions it has the controls in the right places the EVF is a pleasure to use the cameras packed full of solid features although it's still missing a couple of key words and of course the photo quality and performance are right where they need to be for its price class with the bonus of really nice video the shutter button has a soft but not mushy feel and it's really easy to get used to the smooth list of having no reflex mirror because the SLT has a fixed mirror so there's no reflex mirror to bounce while you shoot almost all the back controls are reachable via your right thumb but maybe it's my lack of gaming experience but I find most joystick navigation controls on cameras awkward and imprecise to use that said it's functional and I didn't find it excessively profanity inducing the EVF is delightfully large and magnified compared with its DSLR competitors and this type of electronic level readout is the most effective I've ever used and for the LCD Sony created a fairly complicated mechanism to enable the LCD to tilt as well as swivel it's really useful though I can never quite get into the position I want fast enough because of all the different twists and turns surprisingly the OLED screens are almost too good well the technology makes for great TVs because of their super blacks they make every scene look higher contrast than it is and saturate the colors almost sir realistically that's kind of a negative on a camera plus the colors on the EVF and LCD don't match each other overall the a77 delivers a solid noise profile for its class and generally excellent photo and video if you process raw the camera is good up to ISO 3200 and possibly ISO 6400 depending upon subject matter the dynamic range is fairly broad though I experienced more unrecoverable clipped highlights than I liked does an excellent job with shadow detail well while the a77 has an option for downsized JPEGs there's no support for medium or small raw or raw plus JPEG that's a key feature for a camera in this class for shooting video the a77 does a great job at 1080 progressive rendering very nice tones with no noticeable artifacts like noiray or rolling shutter attribute part of the enjoy ability of shooting video with the camera to the lens the autofocus works smoothly and quietly but you can only use autofocus in what's essentially an automatic mode it's unavailable in shutter or aperture priority or manual modes and I'm not crazy about the automatic gain ISO sensitivity decisions that the camera makes in video mode or the fact that it lacks any audio controls the camera is not the fastest in its class that honor remains with the 7d and then even lags the Nikon d7000 but it does pretty well considering its processing so much more image data the only real performance disappointment is battery life which is rated at 470 shots and that's without the GPS active the new autofocus system seems to work extremely well and I've always liked Sony's interface for selecting among the focus areas and the zone focus which clumps the AF areas in the center left or right is the only mode I like to use more than simply just leaving it on center spot as for features Sony doesn't provide lots of bells and whistles the GPS for geo-tagging is probably the lousiest along with the ability to register up to eight faces for face recognition but it has an excellent subtle set of useful capabilities for instance you can perform exposure bracketing in either a continuous burst or shot by shot with up to a five shot bracket it offers plus or minus five stops of ins exposure compensation as well as Sony's three shot auto HDR now for manual focusing it has peaking it's got some annoying quirks and feature lapses but it's a fast fluid fun to shoot camera that delivers excellent photos and better than competing DSLR video I'm Laurie grinning and this is the sony alpha SLT a 70 70