After damaging the pellicle mirror in his Sony A55 with cleaning fluid, a guy named Dario decided to look for a makeshift replacement while waiting for a real replacement mirror to arrive. He then discovered that food wrap (AKA Saran wrap) works nearly as well as a real pellicle mirror. The only downsides are occasionally degraded autofocus and a soft-focus effect when facing bright lights.
Here’s an interesting look at the guts of the pellicle mirror Sony A55 and how the camera works. The camera being examined in the video is already disassembled and neatly organized by layer. If you haven’t seen or read much about the A33/A55 before, this video will bring you up to speed on the advantages of having a translucent mirror instead of a traditional one.
TIME magazine has named the Sony Alpha A55 as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010. They write,
A.K.A. the camera that never blinks. Traditional digital SLR cameras take the nicest photographs around, but they’re hobbled by a decades-old technical limitation: when you snap a picture, the mirror that’s been redirecting the image to your eye and to a focusing sensor pops up momentarily as the image is captured. Until it goes back down, the camera can’t focus. Sony’s Alpha A55 ($849.99 with lens) fixes that with an ingenious translucent mirror that stays put. That means you can shoot up to 10 perfectly focused photos a second and record HD video that never goes blurry. Bonus advantage: with no need to allocate interior space for a moving mirror, the Alpha is noticeably smaller and lighter than its Sony SLR brethren.
10 perfectly focused photos per second? That’s a pretty interesting claim.
Two advantages of the translucent mirror found in the Sony A33 and A55 are high fps continuous shooting (since the mirror doesn’t slow things down) and the lack of viewfinder blackouts when shots are being captured.
If you’re not sure what this means, the above video demonstrates what it feels like to shoot at 10fps using an A55. It kinda looks and sounds like you’re playing some sort of computer game.
The rumors that have been circulating in recent weeks were spot on: Sony has just announced four new DSLR cameras: the A33, A55, A560, and A580. As expected, the A33 and A55 are the world’s first pellicle mirror DSLRs, and have the features and specs we posted just yesterday: phase-detect autofocus while recording HD video or shooting 7fps or 10fps respectively. Read more…
Alleged photographs of the upcoming Sony Alpha A33 and A55 DSLR cameras have popped up in an overseas forum. The images look legitimate, though the A55 and A33 front views are identical images that had the model number Photoshopped. Not sure why that is.
These two cameras are rumored to be pellicle mirror cameras. Read this post that we wrote last week to learn more about what pellicle mirrors are. Read more…
