I went to the Sony South Africa Promotion at V&A Waterfront on Saturday. I have been keen to see what the hype is about High Definition (HD) technology and I like Sony’s products. Unfortunately it seems that either I was expecting to much or the hype of HD and Blu-Ray is, just that hype. There were a number of large LCD HD TV’s on display. Some were even displaying teasers driven by Blu-Ray. Standing 1m from any of these TV’s you could easily spot grainy-ness in background objects like cliffs. Even when applying a more realistic 4-5m viewing distance you could still see blocks and grain in a lot of the scenes. Yes this is still way better than what we were watching 5 years ago but this is not really what I was expecting at all. I was sold on the concept of clear, crisp immaculate imagery.
I got a chance to pick up their new DSLR-A100. I couldn’t really play with it so I can’t really comment on it, except on the weight and feel. The display model with a flash attachment on it seems to weigh about the same as my boss’s Nikon D70 which in my opinion is rather heavy. It does however have a nice solid feel to it. The Canon 350D is still my choice in SLR, and the new 400D is looking very hot! What I did think was very cool is the new HDD Hanycams with built in hard drives. Finally! I don’t know who would bother with the Mini-DVD cameras when they can only hold 30min of footage on a single sided disk? For the console junkies they also had PlayStation 3’s on display but you could not actually play any games on them (what may I ask was the point then?). Sadly none of the phones were on display so I could not get my hands on a P990. Which is top of my list of upgrade options in the new year.