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Picture Quality / Size Options (8.5)
The Sony alpha A100 offers three resolution settings: its native 10 megapixels, 5.6 megapixels and 2.5 megapixels. In JPEG mode, it offers Standard and Fine quality. Fine quality files are about 50 percent bigger than Standard files, and they look much better. The A100 also shoots RAW files, which do not undergo JPEG compression. JPEG discards some of the image data. RAW files are bigger, but they can be edited much more easily, and their increased quality is often apparent in final prints.
Picture Effects Mode (9.0)
Sony refers to the A100's effects as Color/DEC modes. The choices are Standard, Vivid, Portrait, Landscape, Sunset, Night View, Black and White, and Adobe RGB. They pretty much do the expected: Vivid boosts saturation and contrast. Portrait decreases contrast and favors skin tones. Landscape boosts saturation of greens and blues, and boosts contrast. Sunset bumps up reds and oranges. Night View boosts saturation, and keeps blacks from going gray. Black and White makes monochrome images.
Adobe RGB saves in that color space, which has a wider gamut than the A100's standard sRGB. Users who post-process and print their own images often prefer it. The Sony alpha A100 also has individual controls for saturation, contrast and sharpness.
Sony added a “D-Range Optimizer” to the A100 that is very unique; it's halfway tempting to call it a metering mode. It uses data from the metering system, apparently, to make local adjustments to brightness values. D-Range is available only with evaluative metering, not spot or average. It does not work in manual exposure mode, or with RAW files, and it overrides manual contrast adjustments. Because of the limitations on metering and exposure mode, we can't measure its effect with our standard dynamic range test. We shot a few regular scenes, though, and can share this impression: the system is active when a big area of the image is blown out (appears pure white), but is not overexposed by more than 1 or 2 EV. In the right cases, the D-R Advanced recovers detail in those areas, without darkening the rest of the image. It's similar to an automatic curves adjustment the way Adobe Photoshop does on a RAW file. It's very slick. It doesn't work with highlights that are more severely overexposed, but neither does Photoshop.
Sony doesn't offer much guidance about how to use the setting. Why not just leave it on all the time when shooting JPEGs? It would take a while using the camera to be sure there isn't a downside to that.
We're posting some of our test images. For easy reference, the shots with no small pumpkins in them are the ones with D-R turned off. Plain D-R is on in the shots with one pumpkin in them, and D-R Advanced shots have two pumpkins in them.
Our final take on the D-R system is this: it's a very good convenience feature, because it allows users to reap one advantage of shooting RAW, without having to shoot RAW. It's not equivalent to the extended dynamic range available from cameras like the Fujifilm FinePix S3 or S5, however. Those cameras deliver more realistic dynamic range in their expanded modes, and the Sony alpha A100 does not.
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