Sony has announced its new α700 digital SLR, aimed at serious photo enthusiasts and semi-professionals.

It features a 12.24 megapixel (effective) Exmor CMOS sensor, which, according to the press release, “utilises cultivated CCD imaging and original Column A/D conversion technologies to deliver high-speed and high-picture quality”. Right…

Apparently this means that analogue-to-digital conversion uses dedicated converters located close to each element array on the sensor itself, reducing noise, and further complemented by on-chip noise reduction after digitisation.

Sony’s BIONZ processing engine then performs further RAW noise reduction, before compression and encoding.