stereo microphone

Sony's A3000 is a big mirrorless camera

I'm trying my very hardest to get my head around this one. Sony's new A3000 is a mirrorless camera that's bigger than your common-or-garden EVIL camera, a bit smaller than a traditional dSLR, and roughly the same size as the Canon 100D. And it has been deliberately designed to be on the larger side. Sony A3000 with 18-55mm kit lens

This means that Sony has taken a class of camera that was developed with the specific intention of including almost all of the traditional SLR's best features barring the pentaprism and optical viewfinder, which were removed in order to make it smaller, and then made it larger but omitted the key bits of a camera's mechanism that draws people back to the SLR time and time and time again: the pentaprism and optical viewfinder. No. My logic here is failing me. Anyone?

The A3000 is an E-mount camera with a 20 megapixel APS-C sensor that has an ISO range of 100 to 16,000. There are 25 auto-focus points and it can manage 2.5 frames per second continuous shooting. That can be upped to 3.5 frames per second on switching to speed priority shooting mode.

Mode dial, hot shoe, general SLR-likeness, but no mirror

Full HD video can be shot with either 50i or 25p modes and it can be hooked up to stereo microphone. There's also the hotshoe for flashes and a range of filters and effects.

It has a few more megapixels of resolution than Sony's NEX-3N, but they're otherwise very similar cameras. Except that the A3000 is larger and it doesn't have a tiltable screen.

Price-wise it'll be in the region of £370 ($399) and available from September 2013.