Unholy alliance between German precision and Japanese innovation How Sony went from making Walkmans to destroying the DSLR market
- Vladimir
- Nov 17, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 22
Sweet Jesus, what a time it was to be alive in the camera world of 2003! While the film purists were still clutching their precious silver halides like some kind of chemical security blanket, Sony went and did something absolutely mad – they released the F828, a digital beast that made the photography establishment collectively soil their darkroom aprons.
The new 8-megapixel digital still camera boasts a fast f2.0 Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* 7x zoom lens with focal length equivalent to 28-200mm on a 35mm camera. It is expected to sell for $2599 and will be bundled with a 256 MB Memory Stick Pro card (valued at $215).
Before this, digital cameras were seen as mere toys or tools for capturing family vacations—certainly not something for serious creative or professional work. But then came the F828, and it completely transformed the scene! It was the first sign that digital photography was turning into something truly significant. And wow, back then, the F828 could even record decent quality video with audio!
The DSC-F828 was announced on August 15, 2003, and hot damn, it was something else. This wasn't just another plastic fantastic point-and-shoot – this was the world's first consumer digital camera to feature a Four Color Super HAD CCD and Carl Zeiss T* lens. The partnership between Sony and Zeiss, now that's a story worth telling with a bottle of whiskey in hand.
You see, the unholy alliance between Sony and Zeiss began in the mid-1990s, when Sony, those consumer electronics devils, were looking for some German engineering credibility. They started putting Zeiss glass into their Handycams and Cyber-Shot cameras in 1996, and the rest, as they say, is history written in light and silicon.
The F828 was like nothing else at the time – sporting a 7.1-51mm Carl Zeiss lens equivalent to a 28-200mm on a 35mm camera. That f/2.0 aperture was faster than a cocaine heartbeat, and the build quality made other cameras look like Happy Meal toys.
Sony Alpha Revolution
But the real story – the one that leads us to the Sony Alpha revolution – that's where things get properly weird. See, Sony wasn't content with just making fancy point-and-shoots. In a move that shocked the photography world, Sony bought Konica Minolta's camera division and launched their first Alpha DSLR, the α100, in 2006. This wasn't just a camera – it was a declaration of war on the established photo industry.
The transition to Alpha was like watching a corporate acid trip unfold in slow motion. Sony took Minolta's A-mount system and injected it with enough technology to make NASA blush. They went from being the weird cousin of the camera world to becoming the force that would eventually help kill off DSLRs entirely in favor of mirrorless cameras.
Today, looking back at that F828 is like finding an evolutionary missing link – the moment when digital photography stopped being a joke and started becoming the future. That $2,599 price tag in 2003? Highway robbery by today's standards, but for those of us who were there, who saw the future in that twisted black body and Carl Zeiss glass, it was the price of admission to a revolution.
And that, my friends, is how Sony went from making Walkmans to destroying the DSLR market and becoming the camera company that makes Canon and Nikon executives wake up in cold sweats. It's the American Dream, except it's Japanese, and instead of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, you buy a camera company and terrorize an entire industry with relentless innovation.
A short video i made incidentally when i got lucky to run into Sony representative at DODD Camera Store
Unholy alliance between German precision and Japanese innovation. And How Sony went from making Walkmans to destroying the DSLR market Nov 17, 2023
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