The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Early Data Release
  We present the Early Data Release of the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral
field spectrograph (SAMI) Galaxy Survey. The SAMI Galaxy Survey is an ongoing
integral field spectroscopic survey of ~3400 low-redshift (z<0.12) galaxies,
covering galaxies in the field and in groups within the Galaxy And Mass
Assembly (GAMA) survey regions, and a sample of galaxies in clusters.
  In the Early Data Release, we publicly release the fully calibrated datacubes
for a representative selection of 107 galaxies drawn from the GAMA regions,
along with information about these galaxies from the GAMA catalogues. All
datacubes for the Early Data Release galaxies can be downloaded individually or
as a set from the SAMI Galaxy Survey website.
  In this paper we also assess the quality of the pipeline used to reduce the
SAMI data, giving metrics that quantify its performance at all stages in
processing the raw data into calibrated datacubes. The pipeline gives excellent
results throughout, with typical sky subtraction residuals in the continuum of
0.9-1.2 per cent, a relative flux calibration uncertainty of 4.1 per cent
(systematic) plus 4.3 per cent (statistical), and atmospheric dispersion
removed with an accuracy of 0."09, less than a fifth of a spaxel.
