Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Review

Camera 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.

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