Alphatracks

Last week, reader Tony Bombardo contacted me regarding Sony’s high-end electronic flash unit, the HVL-F56AM. Or should I say former high-end flash unit…as of this writing the HVL-F56AM is missing in action at the Sony Style website. Under flashes and lights, you find the HVL-F36AM and the new HVL-F42AM units, but the F56AM is no where to be found.

So what’s happening with the HVL-F56AM? I know it was listed on Sony Style a couple of days before, because I was ordering some accessories and it was there as big as life. Now it’s gone.

Well, almost gone.. I found that if your order a dSLR, the HVL-F56AM still shows up as an available accessory. I’m not sure if you can actually order the unit, but as of yesterday, if you were buying a camera it was still listed. I also found that if you click on the specs for the F42AM, you can find a sidebar link to the F56AM. That link indicates it is in stock for shipment. The HVL-56AM does not appear in the list under the flashes and lights category.

Sony hasn’t said the HVL-F56AM has been discontinued. So what happened to it? The brand new HVL-F42AM offers most of the features of the HVL-F56AM, and is priced at $299. The HVL-F56AM’s most recent list price was $449.

I don’t have any hard information from Sony, but if I had to guess there are two things going on here. First, the HVL-F42AM offers almost the same features at $150 less. Admittedly, the HVL-F56AM has a guide number of 56, while the HVL-F42AM has a lower guide number of 46. The HVL-F42AM is more or less equal to the HVL-F56AM in most other respects. I suppose that 14 guide units might be worth $150 is some cases, but for most people the HVL-F42AM will appear to a be a better value.

Is the just released HVL-42AM Sony’s current high-end electronic flash?.

The second aspect is that Sony has indicated that there will be a flagship flash unit to accompany the new flagship dSLR. I don’t have specs on the yet to be announced Alpha flagship flash, but I have to believe a electronic flash unit billed s the flagship will have to be superior to all current Sony and Minolta electronic flash units.

At the same time, how much higher could Sony price the flagship flash? It would have to be considerably higher than the HVL-F56AM at $449, otherwise who would buy the HVL-F56AM at the expense of the flagship? On the other hand, if they reduced the ticket on the HVL-F56AM, it would cut into sales of the HVL-F42AM and the HVL-F36AM.

So Sony (apparently) chose to axe the HVL-F56AM. Maybe sales of the more expensive unit were flat. Or maybe Sony needed the production facilities to start building the flagship flash.

Does this mean the flagship will be coming sooner than this fall? Or will the new flash unit be released before flagship dSLR? Since the the upcoming dSLR will be full frame, its possible the new flash will cover a wider angle, since one of the reasons for shooting with a full frame dSLR is the opportunity to shoot with a full complement of wide angle lenses,

Of course, this could be a simple mix-up. Someone at Sony redesigned the web page and happened to leave the F56AM off the main flashes and lights order page. Maybe Sony just had a temporary shortage of HVL-F56AM units and the F56AM will appear on Sony Style in the future.

On the other hand, if I really wanted a HVL-F56AM, I mean I really wanted one, I would start looking around to find a merchant that still has a new HVL-F56AM in stock.

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Sony has just announced a 24.8MP full frame 35mm sensor targeted at digital SLRS. The new CMOS sensor is said to use advanced circuitry to overcome the limitations inherent in creating a full frame sensor.

The answer to a hard drive maker’s prayers: the Sony 24.81mp sensor.

The following is from the Sony press release:

This sounds pretty incredible. We’ve all heard the “too good to be true” rumors, now we have Sony’s announcement that they will offer a full frame, nearly 25mp sensor.

Two things are evident. This has to be the sensor Sony will use in the flagship/A900 dSLR. It has to be. Sony will undoubtedly offer to sell this sensor to other manufactures including Nikon and Pentax. But they can’t call their top-of-the-line camera the flagship unless it utilizes the best technology Sony has to offer. So unless Sony is developing something even more incredible, this has to be the heart of the flagship.

The other point is the press release says the sensor will be mass produced within this year. That tells me the flagship won’t be on sale any time soon. This year, maybe, but those hoping for a PMA announcement with the camera shipping soon afterwards are going to be disappointed. It is possible Sony could announce the flagship at the PMA show, but from the tone of the press release the top of the line Alpha won’t be on dealer shelves for some time.

Don’t worry too much about the A900. It seems that Sony has a whole box of new toys they are ready to announce at PMA. We are sure to see some new Sony dSLR hardware before the week is up.

If you still have your heart set on the flagship, look at it this way…you’ll have several months to stock up on terabyte hard drives to store all those images from that huge sensor

Watch this space for more Sony dSLR news in the coming days.

Technorati Tags:
Alphatracks, Camera, Photography, Sony Alpha, Tom Bonner, full frame sensor

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A few weeks ago, wrote about my rapidly failing film and negatives from Cord Industries. At the end of that post I alluded to the fact that neither hard drives or CD disks are considered safe bets for long term image storage.

Now ZNet blogger Robin Harris is posting about something called “silent corruption” on hard disks. If, like me, you store thousands of images on disk, it’s’s enough to keep you awake at night.

Harris links to a study by CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab. The study suggests that data stored on hard disks isn’t as safe as we might like. While CERN is concerned with raw data, it would appear that our disk-stored photos are equally at risk.

Your backup is only as good as your storage media

The term data corruption doesn’t sound all that terrible. You might think that minor corruption would only affect a few pixels here and there. If that were the case, someone with good Photoshop skills could restore the corrupted image. Such is not the case.

A couple of years ago I had a nearly full Compact Flash card go corrupt on me. It worked fine while I was shooting, but when I inserted the CF card into my reader, I was greeted with a “Card Unreadable” error message.

Fortunately, I was able to recover most of the images using data recovery software. However, several images were truly and totally corrupt.

The recovery program was able to copy the bad images off the card. but there wasn’t much hope for the data they contained. The images were super-imposed over one another, in much the same way as if you made a double exposure on a piece of film. In addition, there were weird bands of color passing all through the corrupt images. I consider myself something of a Photoshop expert and I can tell you there was no hope of restoring those images. They were well past salvage.

Now imagine the same scenario on a huge hard drive with several terrabytes of stored images. if the drive becomes corrupt, how many images could you stand to lose? Sure you can back your images up, and you should. If both the primary and backup sources fail at the same rate, however, where does that leave you?

Recently I started a project that involved digitizing some Kodak 126 negatives from the early sixties. The negatives were over forty years old, but still perfectly useable. I have some my parents’ film negatives that are more than seven decades old. You still could get decent prints off them. Will we be able to say that about digital?

Can digital survive as long as film?

I’m not advocating a return to film and I’m not going to be Chicken Little and start waiting for the sky to fall. On the other hand, I don’t want to be complacent and sit idly by while my collection of digital originals becomes so much silicon dust. Even with a rigorous backup plan, however, there is a chance that silent corruption could trash valuable, irreplaceable images.

On the other hand, i have been involved with computers and hard drives since the early ’80s. I have only had one one hard disk fail so badly that I couldn’t recover the data off it. That drive suffered a power failure during the start up procedure, and the heads actually slammed against the platter, making 1.6GB of information unreadable. Sad, but not a disaster. What if it had been 1.6TB of information? And what if the back-up had quietly become riddled by errors while in storage?

There is a chance that I still may be around in another forty years. If I am, I beleive that most of my film negatives will still be usable. You have to wonder, however. How many of the digital images I shoot today will I be able to access in 2047?

Are you concerned about the life of your images stored on hard drives and CDs? What steps are you taking to ensure that your digital images survive? Let us know what you think.

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