I've had this camera for just over a year now. It has comfortably performed excellently and dependably all the time, as long as I haven't expected miracles!
It has of course been superseded by the Sony Alpha A-200, which is good news if you can find one of the big box retail stores getting rid of their old stock - places like Circuit City and Best Buy have been dumping their 'old' A-100 18-70mm kits for prices as low as $370. There's probably few of them left in the country, but considering that lots of these were sold, you might also consider picking up a used one.
I have used SLRs for many, many years. I used Minolta, and like other reviewers have a supply of lenses that went with my Minolta 700si collection. This was the main reason I chose the A-100, but I was also aided in my decision by the size of the camera - it is bigger, and more comfortable for me to hold than the other camera I looked at - the Canon Rebel, which seems to be made for people with very small hands!
Things to appreciate about this camera:
- Works with Minolta autofocus lenses - they are usually significantly cheaper than Canon or Nikon lenses, but often of comparable quality.
- The anti-shake technology is, like Intel, *inside*, which gives you some degree of compensation for when you take low speed shots, without having to buy individual lenses with anti-shake technology like some other camera brands.
- It's pretty much ready to be used out of the box - you can stick it in automatic mode and be very happy. However, if you want full control of ISO, shutter speed, aperture, white balance etc - you can do that as well.
- Compact Flash is now dirt cheap, so you can keep a couple of 2gb, reasonably fast cards on hands and be able to store hundreds of photos (don't do that too often though - hundreds of files can take quite a while to download if they're all 10mb and you don't have a superfast computer!)
- The pop up flash is adequate for family needs, although you'll probably want to invest in an extra flash at some point.
Battery life is really pretty good, using lithium batteries. I decided against getting another Sony battery, and bought a generic one from Amazon for about $10, which I use as a back up and which works pretty well for a no-name battery!
And what is there that is less good?
- The ISO settings - at 800 and 1600, you begin to really notice the noise - as far as I can tell you'll never get a non-grainy photo. I believe that this is something that the A-200 deals with more effectively. The only solution is to use a flash unit, or else accept the grainy look (which works well for say a pub band performance, less well for portraits!).
- The proprietary flash that they use means that if you want true TTL functionality, you have to buy one of the new Sony Alpha units, or else one of the later Minolta models all of which are quite expensive. My solution has been to use the Sunpak PZ4000 that I used to use with my Minolta SLRs and either point the flash at the ceiling or else use a diffuser, because the unit always fires off at full power.
Overall though, with a year of extensive use (mainly taking pictures of my son who is now 15 months old), I have been very, very pleased with the results. The 18-70mm lens seems completely adequate and is now the one that I usually use, thus deflating the argument for having bunches of Minolta lenses around (although I'm sure I'll use those ones when I finally get back into landscape photography).
The camera is super easy to use (as proven by other people that I have had take photos with it), the quality is great, and it feels substantial and well made in your hands. Especially if you are able to get this at a good price, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend buying it instantly.
