This week I complemented my camera gear with Sony’s newest camera – the SLT-A77V – since the camera is not yet available in the U.S. I had to order it from Hong Kong. The SLT-A77V uses the translucent mirror technology and is the direct successor of one of my other cameras, the Sony A700. I have been waiting for this camera for years. The camera uses a newly developed 24.3 megapixel Emor APS HD CMOS sensor and the latest version of Sony’s BIONZ image processing tech.

Thanks to the translucent mirror, Sony claims the SLT-A77V to have the world’s fastest continuous AF among DSLRs. It can pull down 12 FPX at full-resolution while keeping up phase-detection AF – very impressive.

The SLT-A77V has a new OLED Tru-Finder viewfinder, which uses a 2359 dot display to give 100 percent coverage of the frame through the eyepiece. That allows to zoom in on the image to check focus and even preview exposure changes in real time.

The camera also features a built-in GPS for geo-tagging, full HD movie and an ISO settings range from 50 to 16,000.

As you can imagine, I am very eager to try it out now that I’m holding it in my hands and have studied the manual. Unfortunately, we have had fog here in San Diego for almost the whole week. Therefore, we decided to leave San Diego tomorrow and visit Matthew in Las Cruces for his 6th birthday next week – he doesn’t know that we are coming – I’m sure it will be a big surprise.

This will also give me the opportunity to play around with my new camera – probably we will also spend another day at the White Sands National Monument – stay tuned for some new pictures in the coming days.