A700 in depth FAQ, read first! - Updated Nov. 11th

Try this

Christine E wrote: I called SonyStyle to buy the extended warranty and the woman on the phone said they were not offering it if not bought at SonyStyle. I have doubt about that. i bought my 700 at B&H Anybody else?

Hi Christine,

I would call back, tell them you would simply like to purchase the Extended Warranty for your newly purchased A700. IMHO, get the accidental coverage, and not just the "basic" extended warranty.

The sales staff at Sony Style still needs a bit more trainig at this time... :)

This is directly from their website (SONYSTYLE):
None
2 Year Service Plan with Accidental Damage from Handling[$99.99]
3 Year Service Plan with Accidental Damage from Handling[$139.99]
4 Year Service Plan with Accidental Damage from Handling[$179.99]
2 Year Service Plan[$52.99]
3 Year Service Plan[$99.99]
4 Year Service Plan[$119.99]
Find out more about Service Plans


Good Luck!



PS. I purchased the 4 year accidental and NO I did NOT purchase the camera from Sony Style... You have 30 days to purchase the warranty from date of purchase.

Edited by lonewolf69 - 22 February 2008 at 00:12

Hi Christine,

I don't think this will be a problem, just tell them that you tried calling yesterday but the line was closed.

Good Luck!



-Alex

Hello, great tips - thanks, l just got my a700 last week, so l have been trying to tweak the settings, well fiddling would be a better word, have we got anymore tips from the honourable member "Shaocaholica" (man thats a mouth full to pronounce) or equally wise guru's/guret's before the A900 is released and the poor novices are left behind, yes l know read the manual but it's great when someone explains things in lay terms, by the examples on PG 1.
cheers
stevo

Girello wrote: Very interesting, thank you very much!! Just one question: Shaocaholica wrote: Workaround A: Set your jpeg level to x.fine and set sharpness to +3. This will produce sharp jpegs but at a cost of sizes very close to cRAW (~12mb). What should be the average dimensions of the JPGs without this workaround? Thanks! Ciao!!

Hello,

Where, within the menu options, is the select/adjust for this sharpness, etc... setting?

Thanks - Ponz

To put things as simple as i can we need to set the camera settings to be as "dull looking" as possible;
- aRGB color space
- low contrast
- low brightness
- neutral CS
- a tad lower saturation

That's part of the setting we can set however; what does influence (a lot!) camera histogram as well is the WB setting. For that we need to understand that WB has nothing to do with raw data; WB is only a manipulation of raw data in post processing just as contrast, brightness, sharpness and ever color space is. So, what we want in this respect is to cancel WB completely. To do that we use a so called "uni-wb" setting, which is kind of "native WB" every sensor has. I think this topic is covered elsewhere on this forum (may be for a900 but the principle is the same).   

I've just upgraded from a KM 5D to Alpha 700 and was surprised when I spotted over-aggressive NR on a RAW file http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlsmith/3308966541/ at 1:1. Thanks to this thread I was able to work out that it was ACR 4.2 that caused it. In the Sony RAW converter I saw noise not smudging, so I downloaded ACR 5.2 and this shows as same. Shame that there is noise at ISO 800 though

I have a couple of questions, to maximise quality:

a) should I turn DRO off?
b) which Creative Style should I use?

Thanks in advance