Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Review

Image Quality
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.

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.