Is that Sony Alpha real or fake?
If you roam around the various Sony-Minolta camera forums on the web, you probably have seen this image — apparently a shot of the Alpha Advanced Amateur dSLR in use. Is it really the future Alpha? Or is an interesting fake? It is definitely not an A100.
The way I see it it could be:
- Someone playing around with one of the prototype Alphas shown at the PMA show
- Someone with access to an actual pre-announced test Alpha
- A Photoshop hoax designed to play on the emotions of photographers waiting for any crumb of information about the new Sony cameras.
The word is that the future Alpha mockups shown at PMA were just that — non-functional wooden mockups. Perhaps someone got their hands one of these and staged a teaser photo session.
Then again, if one of the new A-mount SLRs is due to be released any time soon, Sony would need to develop a working model to test with. So our friend with the vertical grip Alpha might just have been showing off with a prototype Alpha and the image would up on the web. Perhaps…
The third option — a Photoshop fake — is entirely possible. I checked the EXIF data for the image on the web — but there was none — a possible indication the image was reworked in Photoshop. It would take some work, but it would be fairly easy to take one Sony’s own promo images and carefully edit in to the image of the man holding the camera. As long as he was holding any SLR with a vertical grip, anyone with Photoshop skills could place the Sony promotional image in place.
I also think there is something fishy about the Sony logo on the pentaprism. The logo is sharp enough to shave with, but the lens face is so out of focus you can’t read any of the text printed on the bezel of the lens.
Hmm — the lens doesn’t appear to be a long zoom, rather a short zoom or a prime lens of some kind. That would mean a distance of less then four or five inches between the face of the lens and the pentaprism. That is really shallow depth of field. How many lenses can you think of that could photograph the whole scene, render the Sony nameplate perfectly, yet have the front of lens out of focus? It would take a long, very-fast telephoto, opened all-the-way to provide depth of field that shallow. It’s possible…but not very probable.
Still, if it is a fake, it is a very good fake. You know the natives are getting restless when we are reduced to grasping at straws like this. Comon Sony — announce the new models already!
I think what damns this to the pile of fakes is the aperture of the lens. It’s surely a Zeiss lens because of the OOF orange “T*” on the lens. But the aperture in the lens looks like it’s stopped all the way down, like the lenses in the mockups at PMA. No way that the DOF would be so shallow with a lens that close and that stopped down. This all leads me to believe that this is a non-functional mockup without a real lens mount and someone else took the picture.
I’m preety shure it is no a fake. I don’t know any promo image of this camera in this angle and in this kind of lightning. It also looks too good to be fake (but not too good to be true).
I believe the scond option is the right one.