October 2nd, 2008 by 
kwc
The Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 gives a new identity to the fledgling Alpha line with an industry-leading, auto-focusing, tiltable Live View display. Other user-friendly features include built-in image stabilization and dynamic range optimization (DRO), making the $800, 14.2-megapixel Sony Alpha A350 a powerful addition to the consumer digital SLR market.
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| Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Studio Test Images | ||
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Introduction
When Sony launched the Alpha series with the budget A100 in 2006, it struggled to find an identity in a digital SLR market dominated by Nikon and Canon. Sony’s better-established competitors had budget SLRs that lured professional hopefuls into upgrading, while Sony was just dipping its toes in the water. Originally the love child of Sony and Minolta, the Alpha series began life as a confused child with a good pedigree, although Sony eventually got sole custody. The original Alpha A100’s sub-$1000 price tag, built-in image stabilization and novel features like Eye-Start Auto Focus gave it some definition, but who, exactly, was it for?
Two years later, Sony has answered that question with the 14.2-megapixel A350 and the 10.2-megapixel A300. At first, the two don’t seem like major improvements over their predecessors, the A100 and A200. You might even wonder, “Where’s the beef?” The answer is sitting right on the back of the camera: The tilting 2.7-inch Live View LCD and innovative Live view auto focus at long last gives the Sony Alpha series a defining identity.
Unlike other Live View displays that don’t auto focus, focus slowly or black out their displays, the A350’s innovative mirror system lets the LCD use the same high performance, phase-detection auto focus as the viewfinder. The display also tilts up and down, making it easier to shoot at previously awkward angles.
How does this one feature transform a digital SLR? How is it different from the Live View features on other cameras? I took it to the streets of San Francisco to find out.
Features
The Sony Alpha A350 is a 14.2-megapixel beast backed by Sony’s Bionz image processor. The sensor has a 3:2 aspect ratio, 1.5x crop factor and the camera offers RAW, JPEG, and RAW+JPEG format options. It also includes a D-Range (DRO) Optimizer feature, which helps preserve shadow and highlight detail. Sony covered all the basic exposure options: program auto, aperture priority, shutter priority and manual, with a bulb option available in the manual setting. The A350 also has most of the standard scene modes: portrait, landscape, macro, sports, night and sunset.
The A350 has most of the features we’ve come to expect from digital SLRs: sensor anti-dust system, two stops of exposure compensation in 1/3 EV increments, ISO 100 to 3200 sensitivity, and Live View. (I’ll discuss later how Sony’s take on Live View is different.) No budget SLR is going to have top of the line specs, and some of the A350’s feature compromises are the tiny 0.74x magnification viewfinder, no secondary LCD on top of the camera for displaying control information — it all displays on the main LCD or in the viewfinder — no depth-of-field preview button, and slow 2.5 FPS (frames-per-second) maximum capture rate. Both the A350 and A300 have a slower, 2 FPS shooting rate when Live View is active; the A300 bests the A350 with a 3 FPS max-shooting rate using the optical viewfinder, thanks to its lower resolution.
As I mentioned, the highlight of the A350’s features is the 2.7-inch, 230,000-pixel, tilting LCD with Live View. Hands-down, this is the best Live View implementation available. Although many other cameras feature Live View, there’s always a compromise. The Canon EOS 40D has it, but you have to focus manually. The Nikon D300’s Live View has two auto focus modes, but it either blacks out the display while the mirror is up for traditional phase-detection auto focus, or forces you to use slower contrast-detection auto focus. The Sony Alpha A350 has no compromises: An innovative mirror arrangement simultaneously directs light at both the standard auto focus sensor and the Live View sensor. You get the same auto focus performance whether you’re shooting in viewfinder mode or Live View mode. The frosting on the cake is the ability to tilt the display for low-angle and high-angle shooting. You won’t be able to call it a “grab shot” any more, now that you can see what you’re shooting.
Sony backs up the point-and-shoot flavor of the A350 with a host of other user-friendly features: Super SteadyShot image stabilization, Smart 1.4-2x Tele-converter and Eye-Start Auto Focus. Super SteadyShot is a great feature for consumers looking to save money. Although it some argue that in-camera image stabilization is inferior to lens-based solutions, it’s hard to complain about 2.5 to 3.5 stops of stabilization in an $800 digital SLR. The Smart Teleconverter feature is really nothing more than a 1.4x or 2x crop. The 14.2-megapixel A350 has plenty of pixels to spare, but the 2x setting does take you down to a 4-megapixel image. The Smart Teleconverter even has a dedicated button on the back, though you can only use it in Live View mode. The Eye-Start Auto Focus is a bit of an odd feature: The camera focuses when you put your eye to the viewfinder. Sony says this will save you time by having the camera already primed, but I found the biggest benefit is that it saves battery life by shutting off the LCD.
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| Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 thumbnail (left) and RGB histogram display (right) | ||
The playback menu has some nice features and takes advantage of the fact that the LCD display is slightly taller than the 3:2 aspect ratio of the photos. You can look at one photo full size while thumbnails of the other images are displayed across the top. You can also bring up separate histograms for the red, green and blue channels. This particular display mode will also show you burnt highlights, but only on a very small thumbnail. None of the other display modes show you the burnt highlights, which is a shame.
The ability to create folders with the settings menu is a real timesaver. Instead of having to browse through all the photos on your memory card, you can quickly jump between the folders you’ve set up. I also liked the interface for zooming in on a photo: It immediately jumps to full zoom so you can check sharpness, while also showing a thumbnail of the full image to help you navigate. Unfortunately, it’s very slow, taking 2 to 3 seconds to load. The A350 is also slow to show a review of the shot you just took, taking about 3 seconds.
Camera Menus
 Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 playback mode | |  Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 information display |
 Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Fn menu | |  Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 main menu |
 Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 in Live View mode display | |
Design
My first impression of the A350 was that it looked cheap. But much of the blame falls on the 18-70mm plastic-mount kit lens, which is pretty cheap looking even for a kit lens. Thankfully, the image quality of the lens is better than its appearance. The rest of the A350 holds up pretty well for a budget camera. The body is small and light and has a nice texture that feels good in your hands. The rubber on the grip is a bit thin and hard, but gets the job done. The only part of the design that made me truly wince was the plastic flash hot-shoe. I hope it’s easily serviced because I don’t have a good history with plastic parts on flashes.
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| Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 two-way tilting LCD | ||
The A350’s novel, two-way tilting LCD is hinged on the top and bottom so that you can tilt it up if you’re shooting with the camera below you or down if you’re shooting with the camera above you. The clever hinge design means that the tilting feature adds very little size to the actual body. As much as I would enjoy even more tilting directions, I think Sony made a good choice with the design.
The LCD display shows your current camera settings. This is important, as there is no secondary LCD display on the top of the camera. In Live View mode the settings overlay the live display like a point-and-shoot camera. When using the camera in optical viewfinder mode, the LCD display can be set to show a summary or detail view of your current settings, or it can be turned off altogether.
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| Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 control layout | ||
The control layout has changed a lot since the A100, but it feels like Sony is still figuring out how to pack them into the compact body. My thumb rests on top of several controls and there is a tight squeeze between the LCD and the buttons to the left. I did a quick hand survey and it seems the grip and layout are targeted at medium-sized hands.
The A350 hides many of its features behind a dual-purpose “Fn” button. During shooting, the Fn button accesses flash, metering, auto focus, white balance and D-Range Optimizer settings. During playback it lets you rotate images.
amera Experience
“Why doesn’t my camera do that?”
I had only been using the A350 a couple of minutes and I had already muttered that to myself at least twice. Most of my attention was drawn to the tilting Live View display as I tried to figure out all the different angles I could swivel it to and the various new shots that it would allow. As I expected, the Live View LCD became a major part of using the camera. While shooting at a museum I composed images with the camera resting on the floor; at a concert I raised the camera above my head to get a good crowd shot. I also tried to use the LCD to peer around corners, but since the screen does not tilt sideways, that doesn’t work so well.
The tilting LCD is not a panacea: It’s very difficult to follow a moving subject with it, sunlight reflecting off of it can be a problem, the shooting rate drops to 2 FPS, and the display refresh rate sometimes stutters in low light situations. I tried to shoot a cycling race with Live View, but I had to give up on using the LCD due to the slow frame rate and difficulty panning accurately.
The Live View display adjusts the LCD color to match white balance settings, which made it easier for me to use non-auto white balance settings. White balance presets, like sunshine and shade, can also be adjusted in a -3 to +3 range. There was some disparity between what was shown in Live View and what I ended up seeing on the computer, but it’s still impressive. Custom white balance was also very easy to use - just point, click and you see the result. I often forget to change my custom white balance when the lighting changes so it was nice to have the Live View display as a reminder.
Another feature that I enjoyed was the built-in Super SteadyShot image stabilization, which has a prominent on/off switch on the back of the camera. Sony’s claim of 2.5 to 3.5 stops of image stabilization stood up in my testing. It helps that there is a camera shake meter o n the display that tells you how good of a tripod you’re pretending to be. When the meter shows you’re as steady as possible, you can take your picture with greater confidence. My greatest surprise was being able to take photos in the 0.4 to 0.5-second shutter speed range (about 3+ stops slower than normal). Not all the images taken that slowly came out, and there are some hints of camera shake in them, but I could definitely use many on the Web or for smaller prints. The Super SteadyShot image stabilization was especially useful when I went to the de Young Museum to shoot a Chihuly glass exhibit. Like most museums, the lighting was dark and no flash was allowed. I also wanted to keep the ISO settings low to minimize noise - another benefit of image stabilization. Even when I held the camera away from my body — using Live View — I was able to get usable shots.
The A350’s fine-grained battery meter, which tells you from 0 to 100 percent how much battery life is remaining is an amazingly simple and extremely useful feature. You know exactly how much battery life is remaining so your camera doesn’t surprise you suddenly running out. I often have to replace batteries early on my other cameras to prevent this from happening. There is a dark side to this improved meter: It makes you aware of how quickly you’re draining the battery. As is to be expected, the Live View LCD consumes more battery power than using the traditional viewfinder. Sony claims you can take 730 shots on one battery, but that figure is a bit misleading since it only applies to shooting with the optical viewfinder. I managed to get 600 shots out of the A350’s battery in one day, but that figure is artificially high. The battery meter made me paranoid that I wasn’t going to have enough juice to take all the shots I had planned for the day, so I was careful to turn the camera off and on in between shots and switch to optical viewfinder mode towards the end of the day. In the end that saved me because I was able to reserve 4 percent for the final shot sequence I had been planning — a huge swarm of people exiting a concert I attended.
I do have plenty of reservations about the A350. Near the top of the list is the tiny 0.74x viewfinder. As fun as Live View is, a good viewfinder is essential for sports photography because LCDs are too jerky to follow fast action. Another annoyance is the box-shaped, 9-point auto focus layout of the A350. Four of the AF points are on the corners of the box, four are clustered around the center circle, and the last is the center. The A350 does have a very handy Local Auto Focus mode where you can immediately select your auto focus point using the 9-way controller, but the four main directions (North, East, South and West) and center button all give you auto focus points close the center. It would be nice if the easiest directions to press provided more variety .
My biggest peeve was the A350’s Fn button. It’s one of the controls that’s changed a lot since the A100 and I still don’t think Sony has it right. For whatever reason, Sony thought it was a good idea to also make the Fn serve as a “rotate” button when in playback mode. The problem is the A350 thinks you’re in playback mode for the brief second it shows a review of the shot you just took. Numerous times I took a picture and hit the Fn button to change a setting, only to encounter a menu for rotating an image. You need to be fast enough to hit the Fn button before the review photo appears or keep tapping the shutter button to suppress the photo review.
Sony claims the A350 improves upon the auto focus performance of previous DSLRs, but it’s hard to verify that with the kit lens. Like all kit lenses, it’s noisy, slow and soft around the edges. The camera often had difficulty focusing, even when I was using the center focus point, which is most accurate. But it was hard to tell if this was due to the camera, the lens or both.
Image Quality If you look at the image above and our high-res studio sample images, you’ll see that A350 JPEG images starts to lose fine details even at lower ISO settings like ISO 400. At higher ISO settings images take on a painted look as the fine details get smoothed out. This is usually a sign of aggressive noise reduction. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to fix with sharpening. I found that instead of bringing out the edges in the photo, sharpening creates little blobs of color that just make the image messier. The A350 does have the option to turn off high-ISO noise reduction and long- exposure noise reduction. You can also shoot in RAW mode if you have room for 17-megabyte files. We encourage serious photographers to shoot RAW. But it does require more storage and a little more post-processing effort. The switch to RAW format is night and day and definitely the route to go if you don’t like the overt smoothness of the JPEG processing. I found the RAW images - even those shot at ISO 400 - to have lots of luminance noise but not too much color noise. Adobe’s Camera Raw did a great job of removing the color noise and preserving detail, but the luminance noise is trickier to deal with as it makes sharpening difficult. Overall, the Alpha A350’s noise reduction is a mixed blessing. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time processing your photos, it can be a good thing. You may not want to waste time or money with noise reduction software and, when viewing the images at lower resolutions, it does improve their appearance. If you care about your image quality, though, you may be in for extra processing time and bigger hard drives to store the RAW images. For all this talk of post-processing, I found that I often did very little to the photos I took with the A350. The A350 seems tuned to minimize post-processing and I didn’t really add much contrast or saturation to the photos I took. One of the features that helps minimize the processing is D-Range Optimization, which adjusts images in-camera to ensure good shadow and highlight appearance. There are both a standard D-R mode and a D-R+ advanced setting - only the standard setting works in RAW mode. Don’t let the “+” confuse you; it isn’t more dynamic range boosting. Instead, it breaks the image down into smaller parts to analyze how to adjust the lighting. If you showed me a D-R image and a D-R+ image, I probably couldn’t tell the difference, although I tended to prefer the D-R+ results. In any case, the effect of either is small; so don’t be expecting HDR-like images. I did find one subject that fooled the A350’s best attempts to get a good exposure. In photos where I framed one flower against a darker background the A350 frequently overexposed the flower. The flower was often completely blown out with no hope of recovery in post-processing. It’s unfortunate that the A350 doesn’t give you more options for noticing blown highlights. None of the full-screen playback modes show you blown highlights - only the four-histogram mode shows you this and the photo is a small thumbnail. Conclusion Luckily, the Sony Alpha A350 is a different kind of digital SLR. It lets you act like a professional or kick back and use it like a point-and-shoot. If you’ve used nothing but point-and-shoot cameras, the A350 will be a comfortable upgrade. The Live View mode will let you take photos in a familiar way and features like Smart Tele-converter and D-Range Optimizer mean that you won’t be a slave to Photoshop just because you own a digital SLR. Sure, it’s still an SLR and you should probably only buy it if you’re willing to also purchase a couple of lenses over time. But with built-in features like Super SteadyShot image stabilization, you don’t have to buy more expensive image-stabilized lenses like you would with a Nikon or Canon. The reduced detail in higher ISO images may be a deal breaker for some, but I think most will enjoy the picture quality. If you’re stepping up from a point-and-shoot digital camera, the image quality is still going to be a noticeable improvement. As a professional photographer, I thought I might turn my nose up at a digital SLR that acts like a point-and-shoot. But the Sony A350 is a fun camera. It has all the manual controls I’m used to, but lets me experiment with different angles and gives me features like image stabilization without having to carry around $2,500 worth of heavy gear. It’s not a camera I can recommend to aspiring professionals, though. For more serious performance, better look to the Sony Alpha DSLR-A700. Or better yet, the just announced Sony Alpha DSLR-A900 - a 25-megapixel, 5 FPS camera that substantially raises the performance ceiling of the Alpha lineup. Interestingly enough, it is missing the killer Live View functionality of the A350, but it’s clear that Sony is now paving an upgrade path from entry-level camera to the more rugged, feature-rich and high-performance body that you’d need as a pro shooter. Who Should Buy It The Sony Alpha A350 is not the best choice for: The Sony Alpha A300 might be a better choice if: - end - October 2nd, 2008 by kwc
The photo of Dale Chihuly’s glass boat sculpture below was taken hand-held in a dimly lit museum at ISO 1600 with the shutter speed set to 1/10th of a second. I wanted to take the A350 to its limits and this photo is riding just inside that edge, both in terms of the A350’s Super SteadyShot performance and ISO performance. The A350 did well in both categories, though there are some caveats. With a little bit of cleanup, most people probably wouldn’t be able to tell that it was taken at a high ISO speed. The blacks are smooth and the color in the glass isn’t showing much noise. If this all sounds too good, it’s because there is a catch.
Friends are always asking me for digital camera recommendations, expecting me to suggest a digital SLR. I almost always end up recommending point-and-shoots. People like the idea of a digital SLR with its implied quality and control. But most of the time, the complexity of a DSLR and the post-processing required are the opposite of what they need and a less expensive compact digital camera is the better choice.
The Sony Alpha A350 is an excellent choice for:
Contents of the Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Box
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