You'd have to persuade me that this was the main reason for people not buying Sony, before I'd buy the idea that Sony + AP will make any meaningful difference to Sony sales.
There
will be people who think about this, but I'll bet it's not a significant number of potential buyers. Most will buy whatever YouTube or the guy in the shop tells them to (if they're new to photography); otherwise the support question (which is valid, no dispute about that) will just be one part of a bigger puzzle.
And - I completely believe - hardly anyone is influenced by what camera brand a news agency uses anyway:
in fact it's impossible to tell, because they always strip the Exif out of their images.
Here's something else: AP's own blog page about "
why Sony?"
Sony Electronics Inc., a global leader in imaging, and The Associated Press, the trusted global news organization, announced a new collaboration that will make Sony the exclusive imaging products and support provider for AP news photographers and video journalists around the world. AP has a disting
apimagesblog.com
Completely objectively, many of those images (from the "young flamenco dancers" onwards) are properly bloody
horrible.
The dancers' colours are disgusting, for example - Sony's broken colour science to the rescue again - and some of them (the fisherman and the climbers, for example) are really noisy for only 1250 and 3200 ISO.
Indeed, the long jumper is hellish noisy at 400 ISO!
The 5000 ISO hurdlers image (among others) looks
hammered by NR.
And where's the much-vaunted low ISO DR advantage? Blocked shadows
everywhere...
(Maybe being able to lift shadows by 5 stops to make up for a bad exposure isn't so important after all, eh?
)
If I was looking to buy a body, one look at that lot and I wouldn't
go anywhere near a Sony. They're
deeply unimpressive images.
But then - PJ isn't really about ultimate image quality, is it? Based on this collection, Sony seems to fit right in.