Ah finally, the details for the new higher level Alpha are out. It looks like quite a formidable creature.

What a lot of announcements lately with the Canon and Nikon offerings, Sony comes up soon after.

• 12.2 Megapixel CMOS
• New AF Sensor
• Faster Focusing
• High Speed Shutter
• Anti-blur
• Pentaprism Viewfinder
• Weather sealed
• 3″ LCD
• HD 1080 Output
• Wireless Remote Included
• New Kit Lens DT 16-105mm F3.5-5.6 with Internal Focus

Like the A100, the new camera still wears its Konica Minolta heritage very much on its sleeve, and when you start to look a little more closely at the specification it’s obvious that there’s still an awful lot of Konica Minolta DNA in the A700. This is hardly surprising given that the circumstances behind its development.

And, just as the A100 was obviously based on – and designed to be a successor to – the KM 5D, the A700 follows on from the 7D, and – despite lots of Sony touches and an attractive new design – 7D users are likely to find using the new model reassuringly familiar.

Albert has a good post about it here too:

The New Sony Alpha 700!

Well as I’ve mentioned this one a few times here it is! The first review, I’m really tempted by this camera as I’m a great lover of the Canon Powershot A series for their full manual controls.

I almost bought the A700 for my mom but the 6x optical zoom without any kind of stabiliser isn’t all that useful, finally a A710 with image stabiliser and a very resonable 7.1 megapixels.

The A700 was already an excellent camera, I’m really happy to see a Powershot A series with a stabiliser!

I’ve been looking for a good compact camera to use for food shots and as a backup for my SLR just in case the battery goes flat or it’s too bulky to use (sometimes shopping malls stop you from taking pictures if you are using a SLR but not if you are using a compact).

It also uses AA batteries which is good for travelling and it means my old rechargeable AA from my Powershot A70 won’t be wasted!

ISO performance is clean up to ISO200, at 400 above it’ll only be good for a mid-size print, I thought with the new Digic II processor this might not be a problem, but I guess it’s just basic physics, you can only do so much with a tiny sensor.

The PowerShot A710 IS takes an already excellent camera — the A700 — and adds some one really useful feature (image stabilization) and one not-so-useful feature (more pixels). Despite going up from 6 to 7 Megapixels, the A710’s photo quality remained very good, with noise levels that are perhaps lowered than on its predecessor. When you look at the whole package — from the photo quality to the image stabilizer to the manual controls — you’ll see that the A710 offers a lot of camera for your $400.

Full review here.

I’ll be waiting for some reviews from other sites and I shall go and try it out when it hits KL.