DPReview TV: Requiem For Sony A-Mount

Maybe Sony could make a deal with JIP to sell their A-mount business. That is what Olympus did. JIP created OM Digital Solutions to continue the line of gear. We shall see what comes of it.

Dpreview, please repair the "Cameras" menu. Konica-Minolta is missing from the menu while Minolta has only one digital and one film camera (strange). I wrote about this in the Site Feedback forum a while ago but I guess none of the staff is reading that forum.

My first "real" camera was a Minolta SRT-102, 1975. Consumer Reports recommended the SRT-101, but the 102 had a little window to show aperture, that I thought was pretty cool. Also got it in modern Black. The Lens was a 50mm f/1.7. Didn't opt for the 40 dollar upgrade to 1.4. (Bayonet mount was preferred to the screw in because I shot sports for school. Needed fast change). Bought an XE-7 as well. Both cameras still work. Didn't know the pedigree of the Sony cameras until after I invested in my Nikon gear, may have gone with Sony, had I known. ;-) Liked the video. Thanks

Sony made clear that they were seriously on professional market when they released their first full-frame 24Mp DSLR, the A900. That was before Nikon's flagship D3X, which had the same specs (and similar Sony sensor) and cost 3 times more. The SLT's must be considered just a soft transition to the provenly more convenient mirrorless concept. The shift required a new mount design and Sony not only gave support to their previous lenses as they opened the way for third party brands. A-mount was doomed by the natural selection of technological evolution. However it is not dead, as any of the older glasses can be used for many more years with better AF+tracking performance on the newest E-mount bodies. Cruel as it is, this evolution comes with improvements in all fronts, so the new lenses are unbeatable, which turns a bad option to invest on the old ones, both by users and manufacturers. ROAD END.

If Sony had been HONEST, they would have announced the death of A mount years ago when it was obvious to everyone that they were going to ignore it and let it die on the vine - stringing along A mount users to keep them using and buying. Very dishonest in the name of profits and expediency.

They couldn't even turn the system into a vlogging and selfie system like they are doing with others? Its too good for that.

I've read several times that if they put the A1 sensor into the A9ii body, they end up with a better camera. A9ii is a heck of a camera.

Sony is leading the way once again.

For whatever reason, Sony spent the past 10 years crippling A mount, so it was clear it was going to die. SLTs could have been the best for video, but Sony did a few things to make sure that would not happen.
At the same time A mount has many advantages over E mount. Ergonomics were always better and until recently menus were better. The can use 2 types of PDAF as well as CDAF to focus too. So there was always great potential.

As for 'dead'. Sony A mount and Samsung NX mount are dead. Neither works on other brands systems. I'd say Minolta MD lenses are going to be more popular than A mount, because they work (MF Only) with so many more current cameras.

Newer F mount and EF mount also, may never 'die'. They work well on multiple mirrorless brands. Canon could stop making DSLRs, and it won't stop Canon, Sony and owners of other brands from buying and using EF lenses.
Someone once told me EF lenses are the universal mirrorless lens.

it is good that Sony ended the A mount.
Sony without Minolta is just a consumer electronics company. Minolta was their only camera DNA. Now we will witness implanting of playstation genes in Sony cameras. Which is probably was inevitable as Playstation is only one remaining profitable business for Sony.

Interesting, but you missed a lot about Minolta. In its film days it produced great mechanical cameras such as the SRT family, the CLC metering remains one of the best across the board.
Leica used the XE1 as the basis for its R3 and R4 models showing how good the mechanics of these models were. Minolta had many other collaborations with Leica. Minolta needed an electronics company to get involved to move ahead and Sony needed a lens company so what we see today follows. Many electronics companies have got allied with camera/lens manufacturers. Leica works with Panasonic another example. Minolta have given photography a lot to be remembered. You mentioned the A100 yes cheap feeling but what about the A700 IBIS DSLR well made and a great model at the time before SLT. Today use my Minolta MD/MC lens mounts adapted to my digital cameras as some Rokkor and also Vivitar series one lenses still offer great image quality on new digital bodies, such as my Fuji`s, and Panasonic`s.

My 1st DSLR was a Sony A33. The guy in the camera shop tried to convince me to by the NEX-5, but the poor autofocusing reviews put me off. That was the thing about the SLT line, in that it combined good auto-focus performance with advantage of mirrorless(i.e WYSIWYG). Without the SLT, I doubt Sony would of made the same strides in mirrorless, and we would still be using flappy mirrors.

However the writing was on the wall sometime ago and as a A line user I felt unloved for many years, eventually jumping to Fuji, not helped by Sony basically lying about where their long term plans.

So RIP A-mount, you maybe dead, but your legacy lives on

I believe two new episodes are on the way...

Those Zeiss A mount lenses were Sony designed + built, and Zeiss approved. And now, it 2021 SonyZeiss FE mount lenses no longer say “Zeiss” on them–even for lens models that used to say “Zeiss”--it’s just the T* symbol. Example the FE 50mm f/1.4.

[Konica]Minolta gave the camera division away to Sony, so not “sold”.

You forgot that, along with Olympus, Sony also had DSLRs with live view that also used the DSLR’s phase detect AF. It was slow, and involved the mirror flipping down to get focus. But it was different.

I started my passion for photographic equipment with Canon, but soon moved to Sony as they launched the a700. There is no camera that I know that can match it for comfort and ease of use, while still being affordable and very robust. The lenses were also fabulous and many had very good prices when compared to similar offers from other manufacturers. While I have always seen DSLRs as a stopgap technology and have being rooting for mirrorless to replace it since the early NEXs, no camera since the a700 have delivered the joy I had when using those old tanks. BTW, I have two a700 still going strong at my office, with 200k+ clicks on the counter. Never had a single problem with them. My employees use them every single day and they are neither the most careful nor the most skillful people. And my clients see those cameras as proper professional equipment together with the macro setup and strobes.

The A mount croaked many years ago. Used A mount lenses from independent lens makers are a lot cheaper than the same lenses in EOS and Nikon F mount. Consumer demand for these lenses are very low, and it is not surprising that Sony will be discontinuing them.

It is actually a good thing because Sony lenses will now be designed exclusively for the E mount. Since the E mount has a shorter sensor to lens flange distance, the rear element can be closer to the sensor. Leica has taken advantage of this in their M mount lenses, by designing wide angle lenses without adhering to the reverse telephoto design that SLR camera lenses have to resort to. It now means that we will likely see sharper wide angle lenses from Sony and Zeiss for the Sony mirrorless cameras, shaper than is possible for wide angles designed for DSLR cameras

A requiem seems a bit of a stretch for a lens mount. Perhaps I should wear a black arm band for a month?

One sony mount less. Carefree.

That was fun. More video on the history of current technologies would be good. Nostalgic retrospectives, maybe not so much. (I owned a Konica SLR back before Chris & Jordan were born.)

I suppose next edition will be m43 and Nayekon?

In the late 70's, the Minolta XE-7 was a superb machine. Maybe some historical sidebars for Chris and Jordan.

PS: in discussing the triumph of mirrorless cameras, you might note the complexities of retro focus design required by that SLR mirror. A good geeky topic there...

Great retrospective! My first SLR was the Olympus OM1 bought new in 1979. My second, purchased almost 30 years later, was the KM 5D from a pro photographer friend who was upgrading. My kit consisted entirely of used Minolta AF lenses purchased from eBay, Kijiji, and garage sales. It included the legendary "beer can", the 17-35mm f/2.8, 300 f/4, the stunning 100mm f/2.8 macro, and others. I still have and use many of those lenses on a Sony A77ii. Bottom line: For me and probably legions of other "under-funded" amateur photographers, the ability to use cheap legacy lenses on a digital SLR body with AF and IBIS was a way to get leading edge digital camera technology at a fraction of the price of equivalently-capable Canon or Nikon kits. RIP Konica/Minolta/Sony AF!

You can still feel something Minoltaish in Sony cams if you have used Minoltas in the past. It's not something you can touch or see, but seems it's there. And this is good, even if Sony's staff, I guess, they don't feel it.
As for older formats, they will stop existing, from the moment that APSC cams will stop contributing to every manufacturer's revenue as milking cows.
I think it's the way they 'll "do" it that counts to their users, marketing departments seem they don't have such kind of sensitivity.
Only Fujfilm and Pentax will remain in the APSC -in ILS and DSLR respectively- the first has still to catch up with Pana's M43 maturity. Those three (FuPaPe) form the more agile and versatile alternative to FF.
It seems highly unlike that CaNiSOs will invest in mirrorless implementations.

If you want to make this a useful video then test and show off a bunch of A mount lenses still available new or used. There are probably some bargains to be had for e-mount with the adapter.

Years ago I would check out the Sony cameras at Best Buy on my lunch break. I had an A65 and I noticed the sales people never suggested Sony cameras to anyone. I asked one why and he said he liked Sony best and it was what he had as did his sale buddies. But his manager told him never suggest Sony. Because people came in ready to buy either Canon or Nikon. When the clerks suggested Sony and showed them LiveView AF, and Canon and Nikon didn’t have it, they would leave without buying anything. They went from a sure sale to no sale. As I was leaving I noticed the manager go over to the sales clerk and ask him why he was talking to me in the Sony section.

Back in 2004, I was considering moving to a DSLR. I had an Olympus C-2100UZ f/2.8 (38-380mm equivalent focal length), but I was looking for an upgrade.

I ruled out both Canon and Nikon, because I did not like their out-of-camera JPGs, and the consumer bodies/lenses did not wow me.

So I looked at Olympus and Konica-Minolta. My take away after reading the appropriate forums on dpreview was that Olympus users loved their gear and there was little talk about having to ship stuff back because it wasn't correct. However, with KM, it was often playing roulette of whether the body you got would work. There were many users who went through 2-4 cameras before finding the magic one that worked.

In addition, the Olympus gear was splash proof, and many users had stories of shooting in the rain, etc. For me, the big selling feature of KM was its inbody stabilization. I gave this up for the ruggedness of the E-1.

You guys are TOO YOUNG. Many somewhat popular lens mounts have disappeared -- Minolta SR, Canon FL, FourThirds, Nikon 1, etc.

Minolta rose to #3 in the USA (behind Canon and Nikon) by technical innovation, especially the 1985 introduction of Minolta AF (aka Sony A) mount. However, Honeywell argued AF infringed on their patents... the crippling US patent fight ended in 1991, directly costing Minolta $127.6M and killing momentum. Minolta's transition to digital included the 1995 RD-175, an impressive AF DSLR that didn't sell well; they didn't make another AF DSLR until after the 2003 Konica merger: the 7D and 5D in 2005. Unlike the similar Pentax/Samsung collaboration that left Pentax alone, Sony absorbed Minolta's camera business in 2006 and invested in growing it. Sony continued/evolved various Minolta A lenses, including the famous 500mm AF reflex and 135mm STF, and leveraged Zeiss. AF lenses adapt to E/FE with comparable performance and Sony bodies still "feel" Minolta-ish. :-)

You need to do a video for Nikon 1 and Samsung NX as well, both born not too many years ago. And it looks like you will soon need to do a video both for Nikon F and Canon EF the way they discontinue lenses at the moment.

I was a contractor at Sony when they bought Minolta.
I was ordering my Rebel XTi and a coworker was buying the a100 at the company's employee store.

We debated endlessly about the in-body SR. While he argued that it was the best thing to happen to photography, I argued that not only was the lens-based IS better but also I needed neither. I was happy shooting my F/4 L lens with no IS. It served me well for 6+ years and I traded it when I bought my D7100.

Age changes some things. Now I need IS for most things. Majority of my lenses are VR zooms. I also felt that IS lenses were not very durable. Time tells me that some of them are more durable than me ;-)

The Rebel XTi still works well today, with 24mm and 40mm STM pancake lenses. This reminds me to ask my uncle how his Maxxum is. He probably hasn't used it in 15 years, if he still has it.

I'm still lamenting the disappearance of the m42 "universal" thread mount!

That 135/1.8ZA-simply Wow. Five years from now I can see that LA-EA5 adapter really dropping down in price and me collecting old Minolta A-mount lenses just for fun shooting. Beer can. What else would people recommend. Top six?

next week, M mount.

A general comment. I am generally not a fan of videos. I would rather read an article. I really like listening and watching these two. Camera’s endless specs and numbers can be hard to articulate while staying interesting. These guys are great.

An interesting take from some young guys. Minolta had been a sort of second tier product, not in quality, but in price, along with Olympus, Pentax, Konica Autoreflex and some forgotten names like Mamiya/Sekor and Topcon. Like Nikkormat, they were cheaper alternatives to Nikon, and thus popular with hobbyists or anyone in a high tax country.

The Maxxum/Dynaxx was huge. To use a favorite DPR cliche, it really WAS a game changer, because it did something your old camera could not do. An even bigger accomplishment was that Minolta kept it so quiet. No, rumors, no teasers, no BS.

I was working at Leitz. The company vice president took a Maxxum home for the weekend. Came in on Monday with a smile on his face and said "I loved it." It didn't take a genius to see that SLRs without AF were done.

Long story short, Sony bought Minolta because it was for sale, cheap. Honeywell won its long-running AF patent lawsuit which brought Minolta to its knees.

At the beginning, 0:11-0:13, not "In MemoriUm," but 'In MemoriAm."

My first AF camera was a Minolta Maxxum 7000i, I think it was. It had one center AF point, I believe, but I was shocked and dismayed to realize there was no way to lock focus. Recompose = refocus. I hated it so much I immediately traded it in on my first Nikon (8008). Even Pop Photog printed my long rant as their review of the Minolta didn't bother to mention this design oversight.
I always enjoyed my Nikons over the years. Now, I hate my Sony.

If Chris didn't see many Minolta buyers other than Minolta old-timers buying the then-popular Minolta Maxxum SLRs in the camera store he worked at, it's probably because they weren't buying them at camera stores. They were buying them at big box electronics and discount stores.

After all, let's remember that camera stores were dying then, too.

Assuming that the demise of a lens mount "before it's time" means when people were still shooting with it and would have preferred to continue buying equipment in that mount, then that's a long list of mounts, and saying it consists only of the Maxxum/A mount is at best a weird, sophomoric joke best appreciated by viewers with no sense of history.

When I was looking to get my very first 'proper camera, it was between an Olympus E-520 and a Sony Alpha A350. I was, similar to Jordan, advised against Sony on similar grounds; i.e. they won't stay long in the business. How the tables have turned...

Quite near to the beginning, Chris tells us that Minolta were the first to have a SLR system with autofocus back in 1985.

Not really wanting to sound pedantic, but there was prior art. in form of the hugely successless Pentax ME F, introduced in 1981. It already had the focusing motor inside the lens, but a huge battery compartment chunkily added to the lens. Due to that, the body remained as compact as the ME Super it was based on, one of the smallest 135 SLR bodies ever made. The body needed just four LR44 button cells to operate, the Lens itself took four AAA cells.

Admittedly, this was a one-off occasion, as there was only one lens ever produced for that camera (the 35-70/2.8), so there wasn't really a "system" to speak of. But the camera body was abled to use other Pentax lenses, and the autofocusing gadgetry inside the camera indicated if a manually-focused image was in focus.

(I had one of these bodies back in the early eighties, paired with a manual 50/1.7 lens).

Pavane of ageing Sony A-Mount. This is not a sign of death of other dSLR mounts. Sony just gave up! Long Live dSLRs !

I'd quip that it's time to look for a cheap 135/1.8, but I think used lens prices often creep up during a system's death knell as supply dries up and a lot of people have the same thought (be it those adapting lenses or those still clinging to older bodies).

Requiem aeternam dona ets, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat ets.

"The mind of Minolta"!

Minolta brought many Photography Innovations to the table. I mean, look guys, the Minolta A3 was into 2003 (!) the worlds #1 Bridgecam with 28-200 (FF-equal) Lens, and al-mg body (battery grip avialable) and IBIS build-in.

Minolta had many quite innovations during their runtime, i still have my 6 MP Dynax 7D APS-C with IBIS. Konica (with merged with Minolta into 2003) had the 1st AF camera into 1977, a Rangefinder, not being a prototype, but from their C35 AF, based on the C35 Series. http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Konica_C35_AF

Minolta brought 1985 AF to the masses with their Dynax 7000 AF, albeit other brands like legendary Contax had AF Prototypes based onto a Contax 137 MD Design into 1974 Photokina being shown. Nikons famous F4 came 1988 with AF,
albeit their F-501 with AF as #1 Nikon came into 1986. I remember quite the Day, saying, thinking...AF - W T F ?! Into 1985. ;) Back on, Sonys A850 & A900 are Minolta FF DSLR Designs, not finished into 2006 when Sony bought Minolta.