We’re going to continue our announcement party today with the SLT-A77, but first we need to have story time. So, fluff those pillows, grab a juice box, and gather ’round.

The year was 2007, and I’d just begun my tenure as Roberts’ resident web guru. It was an exciting year for the digital world. Canon had announced their EOS-1D Mark III, Nikon had announced the D40, their first true consumer DSLR, Olympus announced the E-410 and E-510 twins and with them the return of live view and the introduction of the interactive rear menu, and Sony finally released its first DSLRs after having acquired the failing Minolta brand: the quirky entry-level A100 and the prosumer A700.

Since then, Sony has announced 20 Alpha models. They have added full-frame cameras, and invented the pellicle-mirrored SLT series. But it took them until today, 4 years, for one of those Alphas to finally replace that A700.

So, was it worth that kind of wait? A lot has changed since the A700 hit the market. Live view is no longer seen as a rare gimmick, but now a de facto gimmick. Full-frame has become a prevalent consumer product. Nikon wowed the world with its 51-point AF 3D matrix that acted more like magic than what we knew of AF at the time. Olympus and Panasonic shook things up by announcing a new breed of camera that had the DSLR sensor–but not its mirror–in a point-and-shoot sized body. The megapixel race died off in favor of the high ISO race. HD video in DSLRs became a thing, and then became the norm.

So, after all that, what’s the A77 bringing to the table?

Well, right off the bat it’s using Sony’s new-fangled fixed mirror technology, which allows for traditional fast phase-detection AF, but since the mirror isn’t flapping around it can keep focusing while shooting and can shoot notably faster. It also means there’s no optical viewfinder, and instead there’s an electronic one piping out the sensor’s full-time live view.

In this case, that electronic viewfinder is a 0.5″ OLED one (not LCD) with 2 million friggin’ dots of resolution. And that continuous shooting rate is a very commendable 14 frames per second (which was unheard of when the EOS-1D Mark III claimed to reach it back in 2007, and hasn’t been seen since). It’s got 24 megapixels, 19 AF points, a 3″ 921,000 dot tilt/swivel LCD, ISO 50-25,600 expanded (100-16,000 native), 1080 video with a built-in mic over the pop-up flash, a shutter life of 150,000 actuations, and a maximum shutter speed of 1/8000 second. There’s a weather-sealed magnesium body wrapped around it all, with a top-deck LCD and available grip for a second battery. It also includes Sony’s now-typical sweep panorama and 3D shooting modes, as well as all the face-detection bells-and-whistles you could want. And, there’s GPS built in to geotag your photos, no accessory or dongle required.

Interested parties should look into stashing away $1400 for the body only, or $2000 if they’d like to buy it with the newly announced 16-50mm f2.8 DT standard zoom (DT means it’s crop sensor only, and with Sony’s 1.5x crop that’s give it the same field-of-view as a 24-75mm). But, since you’ve had four years to save up, that shouldn’t be so hard, right?

More images and a press release after the jump.

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