There are lots of features that can be replicated from the comfort of your computer - another is the "Dynamic Range Optimizer" which basically tweaks your tone curve in the same way you'd do in your RAW processor before it outputs to JPEG.
Personally, I rather like the teleconverter button idea - I'm terrible at framing something with a view to cropping it afterwards and always want the in-camera shot as compositionally close to the final image as I can get it. Like I said in my 'First Impressions' piece, though, it's frustrating that the button only seems to work when shooting JPEG, not RAW. And, because I managed to borrow an M42 adapter off a Sony-wielding friend of mine, I also noticed that it didn't work with legacy lenses. That seems an obvious omission, particularly as it would have doubled up as a really useful magnification button that'd be great for checking manual focusing...
It's a digital crop, not digital zoom - a big difference. Where it says " This is not a digital zoom as found in many compacts." in the copy is a bit of a giveaway.
A digital zoom crops the image and then blows it up to full size, which is why it gets pixellated. Let's say you have a 10mp camera and use the digital zoom. The resultant crop might constitute just 4mp of that 10mp image, but then the camera's processor interpolates that 4mp crop to make it appear to be 10mp. Pixellation and poor image quality is the result.
By contrast a digital crop of the same image (a 4mp crop from a 10mp sensor) is going to return a 4mp image, with no interpolation and no pixellation.
And I tend to agree that cropping in camera and in post-production are intellectually very different animals. But yes, the fact it only works in JPEG is an annoyance, but I suspect the legacy lens issue is more understandable - there's a lot of data moving between camera and lens these days and if there's no lens info provided, the camera may not be able to accurately crop the image.
Ahh OK, I stand corrected and have to confess to not reading past the first few lines.
I can understand Nikon having this kind of option so people can use the 'Made for digital' lenses on there full frame D3 and D700. But (and this is a personal view, I'm not saying anyone who likes it is wrong ) it seems just as useful as a digital zoom on the Sony.
I know when I've experimented getting the same crop factor out of my 5D to match that of a 30D/40D and then compared the IQ to that of the 30D there was a big loss in quality and the 30D won hands down. And I didn't interlop the image up to the same rez but left it as it was from the crop using CS3.
So, and this is a guess, I can imagine the loss of image quality could be the same. I'd be made up for someone to show me how it's not.
It's slightly different from the made for digital crop, too. The Nikon cameras detect when a DX lens is used on the FX sensor and crop down to DX format to prevent vignetting. What this does is similar to the earlier Nikon D2X/D2Xs crop, where it only uses the centre portion of the sensor.
And the result is very different from your 5D to 30D crop test. There you are using two different sensors with different pixel pitches, and will get a change in image quality. By contrast, with the Sony and Nikon D2X system there is no change in image quality, just a change in image size. Although the compositional ethos is different (composing in camera as opposed to cropping in post) the end result - from an image quality aspect - is identical to taking a picture, cropping in Photoshop and then saving the resultant crop with no other changes (no resizing, no uprezzing, not even a change in sharpening).
Alan's right. This is probably more for the p&s upgrader, not wishing to spend hours with image editors to get a photo printed. However, with 14mp to work with, the end result should still be a workable printed image, even using less of the captured pixels.
DRO does help shooting jpgs with the A200. Compared to jpgs out of my KM5D, the A200 results blow them out of the water. Even with high contrast levels, the processor manages to keep detail at both tonal ends of the spectrum. With RAW, well, it doesn't do anything. And that's what raw is all about.
) it seems just as useful as a digital zoom on the Sony. 
