Man Is The Media.
A flawed jewel, but it’s mine: Sony F828
January 6th, 2008 by Martin
You, sir, are you unsure of what digital camera to buy? Me too. It’s a jungle out there, and as a former editor of a digital camera magazine, I should know.
Being a child of the digital age, I’m a compact kind of guy (ed.: preferring cameras with a fixed lens, as opposed to single lens reflex cameras with changeable lenses) . The fact that the camera chassis and the lens does not have to be aligned, makes for some interesting cameras and shooting positions, although not many manufacturers have used that advantage to its fullest. Over a year ago, I sold my trusty Sony F717 because the image quality just wasn’t up to snuff. After rapid advances in sensor development, including low noise and high ISO, the 717 just wasn’t performing well enough.
But what a camera! The shooting position is unique: You hold the lens barrel resting in your left hand, and are able to turn the chassis up and down with the right hand, enabling you to see the monitor no matter if you’re shooting over crowds or under tables (not that I ever do that, honestly). My favorite shooting position was from the hip, so to say: You hold the camera at stomach-height, looking down at the monitor turned upwards to your face. The point is that people don’t consider this a shooting position, which makes them much more at ease and behaving much more natural in the pictures.
So, I trawled the market for qualified replacement candidates. I was strongly considering Fujifilm’s S9500, probably the most impressive super zoom compact, I’ve held. It just feels so much like a tool, a perfect fit for my hands at least. But, despite market leading low light performance, the 10,7x optical zoom really craved for image stability, which I decided to wait for (but never came). Another candidate was Canon’s S2 IS, which was a superb all round camera, that I would recommend in a heartbeat (it’s now out in a gunshot gray S3 IS and a pitch black S5 IS). But to be honest, I never cared much for the softness in Canon’s images processing.
Meanwhile Sony had discontinued the F-series and went into the super zoom game with the clumsy H-series. They also tried to raise the bar, as they had once done with the F series, with the extremely interesting R1; an attempt at the ultimate DSLR replacement, but it was somewhat a monster with an extremely odd monitor position (in fact, it has two monitors) and of course it was monstrously overpriced. While Sony was leading the game with the super-compacts (not least with paper-thin T7), they seemed completely in the woods regarding the advanced compacts.
Alas, after many candidates for a new camera choice, I knew that none of them would provide for the fun I had had with the F717. So, I did the only obvious thing to do: I bought the flagship of the series: F828.
Just look at it! It’s a message from the future, telling you what a digital camera should be. When it came out (August 2003), the F828 was quickly labeled ‘a flawed jewel’. A ‘jewel’ because it was a quantum leap for Sony’s engineers (and every other camera engineer, I would say) using four colors to blend from and not three like all contemporary systems. Like the other cams in the F series, it also sported swivel lens, Zeiss optics, and night shot (infrared beams, ooh).
It is by far the meanest, darkest, superzooming bad-ass of an advanced compact camera ever made! Take this baby from your pocket (alright, bag then) and ladies will be convinced you drive a shabby Jeep, smoke cigarillos, and drink whiskey like no other man alive.
And it is ‘flawed’ simply because of less-than-perfect image quality. At the time (and for years to follow) Sony was struggling with visible noise, even at low ISO levels, and chromatic aberrations; unfortunately the F828 was no exception. And although it does shoot RAW it’s painfully slow and locks the camera while storing (no buffer).
(feed readers, click though to see my little Issuu book here).
But don’t make the mistake (as many reviewers, including DPReview, did when it was unleashed) of comparing it to a DSLR, because a compact never will be the same and nor should it be. As long as you use flash indoor and in low light situations, you will be fine, have fun, and be the coolest guy on the block (or, possibly, the most geeky one).
If you are out there and know how to mod this thing with the latest image processor, image stabilization, and a much larger buffer, you could finish what Sony, for reasons to me completely unintelligible, never finished: The flawless jewel of the advanced compact camera.
And the best thing yet? Despite the fact that this camera probably was the Sony camera that stayed longest on retailer’s shelves, it is now very hard to find in stores. I bought an unscratched second hand version for merely 340 USD, including an HVL-F32X Sony Digital Flash and lots of accessories. The lens alone is worth almost that.
Eventually I will have to buy another camera for the picture quality alone, but this one’s a keeper.
