cplunk

Ken Rockwell's site? isn't that more like, an anti Sony site? http://www.mhohner.de/index.php has some good information, especially on flashes and a lot of specs on old Minolta gear.

flash? what flash? Mine came with an external flash that uses it's own AA batteries.  The A99 doesn't have a flash on camera.

There becomes this simple issue that to get more power from the battery, it would have to be larger.  It's not like Sony engineered the battery to be larger than needed and put spacers in there. On...

Naw, Sony's gone beyond that with their technology. It's Canon and Nikon that stuck on putting a couple mirrors between those boxes and dumping it on the market.

That sounds like the automatic portrait framing. I've never used that. But independently of that it can use face detect to focus on them. It still uses the focus areas (wide, zone, spot, etc) and...

A "zoom" lens has a variable focal length. The 300mm f2.8 and 400mm f2.8 are primes, they have one focal length, that's it. Kinda like the 35mm on the RX1. And Sony does have several A mount fast...

On my A99 and A77, I use AF area wide and leave face detect on. And I use DMF for an AF mode, and have focus peaking enabled with the level at high or medium. The camera will autofocus, usually...

I thought the "learning tool" was going home and downloading all the images to find, surprise, you left the white balance on some specific setting on the previous outing, and all the photos you...

US sales taxes are ridiculously easy to dodge, buy from a company in another state and have it mailed.  And should never be charged if you were ordering from the US overseas, I'm sure the EU wants...

Simple reason it never rains, he didn't want to get the camera wet.

Well, then, I gotta wonder why there are so many comparable Canon & Nikons on the second hand market, and no A99?

Ya, but you're carrying around a bunch of glass to get an image circle that you're going to use only the center of.  What your cropping out is actually the "wide" part of the image. And that's some...

Old Minolta glass is ALL full frame (for 35mm film). Wide angle on full frame ends up not so wide on APS-C (A77). And the really good ones, and really wide one (16mm, 28mmf2, etc) are fairly rare...

Just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with using autofocus.  Even most professionals probably wouldn't want to be without it most of the time. It's the Auto mode on the camera that picks the...

You mean, like the Betamax?  Ya, they sure dropped that as soon as VHS came out....

And if that's what you enjoy, do it. Someone's gotta take the pictures in the books. But even for some of us that do enjoy photography, you gotta admit that the amount of time and energy spent to...

While some traditionalists might agree with you, and some professionals starve if this isn't true... My wife clearly understands that my hobby is more about playing with the camera than it is...

I'm assuming this is a first trip? To clear up a bit of confusion that seems common, the city of Vancouver is not on Vancouver Island. Victoria is on Vancouver Island,and the Butchart Gardens. ...

What sort of focal length are you using from those seats and have you considered a prime lens? There will be considerable difference between f1.8 and f2.8, but the depth of field can also become an...

You'd be much better off with any of the 100's of Minolta film era lenses available used, many available on Ebay. The Minolta 35-70 is likely going to work better, and are often sold with $20-30....