digital cameras
The new Sony R1 has raised the bar in the ‘tubby’ stakes with the camera weighing in at a couple of
grams short of a kilo. A kilo in old money is about the same as a Nikon F90/F100 SLR fi lm camera
with batteries and 50mm lens. The Sony R1 is about the same physical size as a DSLR sporting a
70-210 telephoto zoom lens - from back to front it’s deep, very deep! Whilst I had this camera out
on location recently some digital photographers on a photographic workshop (and shooting with
a broad range of DSLRs) spied the R1 and thought I was working with a digital medium format
camera! This mistake came about by the fact that the R1 looks very well endowed up top. Sony
has moved the ingenious ‘pop-up-and-rotate-me-in-any-direction’ LCD screen to sit just behind
the pop-up fl ash which moves forward to give adequate coverage for the wide 24mm coverage
(35mm equivalent) that the Carl Zeiss lens offers. You can defi nitely not describe the porky R1 as
‘compact’. Having said this I had both the Fuji s9500 and Sony R1 sitting comfortably in my kit bag
that is normally reserved for a single DSLR system (one camera and three lenses). If you factor in
the additional lenses that DSLR owners typically carry around in their kit bags then the ‘kit’ could
still be called compact even if the prosumer digicams themselves no longer deserve or warrant this
tag. With physical mass no longer a point of difference between DSLRs and prosumer digicams
what exactly is it that distinguishes these two types of cameras?
Note > When comparing the weight of prosumer cameras against the specifi cations of a
DSLR you must factor in the weight of the lens that you intend to use with the DSLR.
A kangaroo inspecting the impressive Carl Zeiss lens (as fi tted to the Sony DSC-R1)