Recently, a new generation of mirrorless cameras have hit the market. They look and work like S.L.R.'s -- interchangeable lenses, no shutter lag and so on -- but they're smaller and they capture high-definition video. (Since they're not technically S.L.R.'s anymore, Popular Photography magazine proposes the term I.L.C. for them, for "interchangeable-lens compacts." Let's run with it.)

Sony's new Alpha A55 camera, available in October ($850 with 3X zoom lens), is an S.L.R. -- sorry, an I.L.C. -- that changes a bunch of games at once. It accepts any of Sony's existing 33 Alpha lenses, but its radically different guts give it talents no other camera has had before.

Read the full article at The New York Times.