Fresh off the DSC-R1, with its Carl Zeiss lens, and APS-C sized sensor; Sony continues to march into the big leagues with its first digital SLR, the DSLR-A100. While this is Sony's first digital SLR, this is in many ways not a first-generation system. Sony has been making imaging sensors for many other brands (including Nikon), and the body and lens collection come from the recent acquisition of Konica-Minolta's camera business.
The DSC-A100 has the body and price of a(n expensive) budget SLR, at $900, but offers the quality of the mid-market Canon EOS 20D and Nikon D200 plus some additional benefits. Unlike Canon and Nikon, but like Olympus, it has an anti-dust filter (every digital SLR should have this) and in-body sensor-based image stabilization (good for about two stops, not quite as good as Olympus'). The sensor in the DSC-A100 has hardware-based dynamic range optimization to reduce blown highlights and capture images in JPEGs, but this appears limited to managing its JPEG conversion, and judicious raw conversion would perform the same effect. Disappointingly, the DSLR-A100 is a little slow to turn on, making the user wait a second from power-off or sleep.