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Product highlights: See all 2 reviews. See all reasons. Thanks for submitting your review Most reviews are processed and published within 5 business days. You will receive a confirmation email once your review has been published. Your review. Upload your photos. Use the Email associated with order. For example, "Charlottesville, VA". Review title Please complete this input.
For example, "Great picture, Pounding bass! First name Please enter your first name. Pros Max. Please complete this field. Cons Max. Like several of our tests, these images are actually photos of a high-resolution poster, shot under studio lighting. The shots for this camera were captured with our third-generation House poster, which was assembled from 45 separate megapixel images, shot with a very high-quality lens, and then stitched together into a single image.
The resulting image amounts to about very high-quality megapixels. This should have sufficient detail to comfortably challenge cameras up to at least megapixels. And even with higher-resolution cameras, we believe that the camera lenses themselves would be more likely to limit resolution than would the detail in the poster. Why did we choose to shoot a picture of a picture? The idea was to show a typical subject a house and surrounding foliage in a way that would be absolutely consistent from camera to camera.
Any outdoor subject is going to vary considerably from day to day, as the lighting changes with the weather, atmospheric conditions, and season. Shooting a poster lets us compare images from cameras shot weeks, months, or even years apart, with the sure knowledge that nothing has changed from one shot to another. Things to look for here are fine detail, as seen in the foliage and tree limbs against the sky, sharpness in the corners, and the preservation of subtle detail in the shaded brick patterns.
While the House poster in the shot above provides absolute repeatability from test to test, it doesn't offer the range of brightness dynamic range that the original scene had, nor does it contain the nearly infinite range of fine detail found in nature. For these reasons, we still shoot the original house, even though the vagaries of nature mean that no two shots will ever be directly comparable. In fact, over the eight or so years since we first shot this subject, the trees in front of the house have now grown so large that they obscure much of the subject.
Things to look for here are how well the camera handles the range of light levels from very bright to quite dark, and how well it renders the very fine detail visible in various parts of the image. Note though, that because this is shot outdoors, the character of the light is unavoidably going to change quite a bit, depending on the atmospheric humidity and the time of year.
Simply reading "3x zoom range" doesn't do a lot to help you visualize what that means. It also says nothing regarding just how wide the wide-angle end of that range is. To give you an idea of exactly what each camera's zoom lens does, we shoot this series of images, showing results at maximum wide angle, maximum telephoto, and telephoto with "digital zoom" enabled. Note of course though, that so-called "digital zoom" just crops out and enlarges the central pixels of the image, achieving increased size at the cost of reduced resolution.
Because most of its various elements are now contained or represented in the combination of the Still Life and Multi Target shots, we no longer routinely shoot the Davebox by itself, as would normally appear in this space. We do however, still use it for our low light test below. Many are interested in close-up or "macro" photography. This test shows the best results we could obtain using each camera's macro mode. What to look for:. Low light photography is an area where there are really enormous differences between digital camera models.
This test starts at a light level about equivalent to typical city street lighting at night one foot-candle , and then progresses down from there, each successive test being at half the light level of the preceding one. You may also see the effect of poor low-light autofocus in some of these shots, although we use a different test setup to check autofocus performance more directly. The results of which are reported on in the main Test Results section. Things to look for here include:.
Digital camera makers have gotten better with their flash-range ratings. In the early days, many cameras had rather "optimistic" flash range specs, to put it politely.
These days, the manufacturers seem to be toeing the line. No doubt at least in part because of tests like this. Consistent with our philosophy of testing worst-case conditions, this test also involves some use of each camera's zoom lens. Flash range is greater at wide angle focal lengths than at telephoto ones. If you're shooting at the wide angle end of the lens' range, you might get better flash range than what's shown here.
The white and black chips let us check white and black points in addition to the mid-grey of the target itself. The bold black framing marks indicate the corners of either a or aspect ratio, for those shots in which we're checking flash uniformity.
See below. Lately, many manufacturers specify flash range with the camera set to Auto mode, in which the camera is free to boost its ISO setting to help increase the flash range.
This does increase the range, but it's easy to have too much of a good thing: Too high an ISO can leave you with too much image noise. The variable ISO setting also means that there isn't an easy way to compare the range with the fixed-ISO shots in our standard flash range series. So now, we also test the flash under the manufacturer-specified conditions whatever they may be, but frequently with the camera set to Auto mode , and the look at both how brightly the scene is lit, and how much image noise is present in the resulting images.
Flash range for SLRs will vary with the lens used depending on the maximum aperture , so their flash range is commonly expressed as a Guide Number, or GN for short. The guide number is a distance, in either feet or meters, at a given ISO.
To find the maximum flash range at a given aperture, just divide the guide number by the aperture. The flash units on many digital cameras don't illuminate the scene very evenly, especially at wide angle focal lengths, so the photos here shows how uniform the flash coverage is. As noted earlier, this test uses the same target as our flash range test, but for the uniformity tests, we take care to frame the target the same from camera to camera.
Approximate, they roughly split the difference between the and aspect ratios. Viewfinder accuracy is an important parameter, especially for shots where framing is critical.
It's likely that this is a deliberate design choice by the camera engineers, to help avoid users accidentally cutting off the heads of their subjects. Unlike the optical viewfinders, the LCD viewfinders on most digital cameras tend to be quite accurate.
Still Life This is our new "Still Life" test target. This is just the sort of detail that noise suppression processing tends to flatten out. If you look at the detail in these swatches as the ISO increases, you'll see just where different cameras start to lose subtle detail. The label of the vinegar bottle second from the right is another great place to look for lost detail from noise suppression, as the image of the person at the top of the label is actually a depiction of a mosaic.
The dark colors in the background and in the figure's clothes contain detail that's very quickly lost when a camera's noise suppression system kicks in. Cameras with really high-quality, low-noise sensors that require little noise suppression will be able to hold onto the detail in these areas, many others will show only a uniform swath of smudged color. Another place where you'll quickly see the effects of over-aggressive noise suppression is in the white salt grains of the salt grinder in lower left.
Cameras are often more conservative about suppressing noise in highlight areas because our eyes tend to see less of it there , but many cameras seem to have a hard time holding onto the subtle shadings that distinguish the salt grains from each other, particularly at higher ISO levels.
Fine Detail : You'll find a lot of fine detail in the label of the beer bottle on the right, in its fine cursive text, but the other bottle labels hold a lot of fine detail as well. Fine text is often a good visual indicator of resolution, because our brains have an excellent idea of what the text should look like, so are very quick to notice even minor loss of detail. Some of the fine lines there are extremely fine indeed.
Looking at results from many different cameras with this target, we found that camera noise-suppression systems often confuse the fine lines with image noise, and so flatten them out. There's also a nice range of fine text sizes in this chart as well, once again great visual cues for resolution and detail. Highlight Detail : Three elements in this scene show off or show up a camera's ability to hold onto highlight detail. As mentioned above, the salt grains and reflections of the studio lights in the salt mill are examples of fairly subtle highlight detail that cameras' anti-noise processing sometimes obliterate.
The folded white cloth under the mug on the right side of the frame likewise shows a lot of white-on-white detail that is easy to lose, particularly if a camera's tone curve is too contrasty. As it turns out though, the most sensitive test of a camera's highlight abilities seems to be the hank of white embroidery thread in the upper right corner. These fibers are unusually bright and reflective, so its easy for a camera to blow out detail in them. Shadow Detail : Several elements of this subject are useful for evaluating shadow detail, particularly the black mug and the pieces of folded black velvet, both under and inside the mug.
The bottoms of the beer bottles also provide some gradations of deep shadow, and the clump of peppers in the bottom of the pepper oil bottle had a fair bit of detail that's far down at the shadow end of the tone curve. We were actually surprised when we constructed this scene just how dark the velvet and sides of the beer bottles ended up being.
Even with the bright studio lights shining directly on it, the velvet in particular stays way, way down at the shadow end of the tone curve. The right-hand grip has been completely redesigned - for the worse, unfortunately. It is so uncomfortable it makes you wonder if the camera would do better without it grip-less SLRs were the order of the day for decades, and nobody complained about that.
And the grip is but one example where the new design lags behind the old one. The smaller body apparently forced the engineers to re-think the control layout and philosophy of the camera, and this has resulted in a number of questionable design decisions.
For starters, the number of external controls has been reduced, making the A less intuitive to use. That alone would not be objectionable at all - we have seen similar solutions that worked quite well - but unfortunately Sony's implementation has caused the four-way pad to cease functioning as a quick AF point selector.
Now you need to enter the Function menu via the Fn button, navigate to 'AF area', enter, select 'Local', then repeatedly press the left or right arrow button until the desired AF point is highlighted, and finally exit the Function menu. That's about half a dozen button presses sometimes more required for something as simple as changing the active AF point! This effectively means that most people will only use the central AF sensor for focusing, and recompose if needed.
This age-old focus-recompose technique is much faster than selecting an off-centre focus point on the Sony A, and works every time except when dealing with extremely shallow depth of field. Alternatively, you can use the AF button in the centre of the four-way navigation pad to focus on whatever is in the centre of the frame, and hold it down not only while recomposing but also while releasing the shutter too so that pressing the shutter button does not cause the camera to refocus.
Of probably less importance is the omission of the SteadyShot switch - the A retains the sensor-shift image stabilisation feature of its predecessor, but now you need to enter the main shooting menu to activate or deactivate it. Given that about the only time you will want to deactivate it is when you mount the camera on a tripod, the omission of an external switch for this particular function seems a logical decision. The controls that do remain are rather haphazardly placed, with almost nothing falling readily under your thumb or fingers.
The new power switch is in a place where you would expect the control wheel to be - in the dark, or with the camera up to my eye, I sometimes switched the camera off accidentally, when my actual intention was to change the aperture setting.
The control wheel itself is located further down, and the best thing you can do is try to train yourself to use your middle finger to spin it.
The optical viewfinder OVF of the Sony A appears to be identical to that of its predecessor, delivering 0. The nine autofocus points are permanently marked on the focusing screen, and are therefore always visible in the viewfinder. The active AF point lights up in red when in use, and if focus is acquired, a green focus confirmation dot appears on the left side of the in-finder LCD; similar to other manufacturers' models. The LCD screen is a fixed 2. The brightness of the screen can be set manually, but it can also adapt to ambient light levels automatically.
Outdoors visibility is average - we've seen much worse more reflective LCDs on some competitors, but would still like to see some improvement to the antiglare coating. This is a small step back from the one built into the A, which had a guide number of Of more importance is its mode of operation. There is no mechanical button to raise the flash, and neither are you advised to raise it by hand. Instead, if you would like to use it, you need to enter the Flash menu by pressing the right arrow key on the four-way pad, choose the required flash mode Fill, Slow or Rear and exit the Flash menu.
The flash will only pop up when you half- press the shutter release. If you don't want to use it any more, it is not enough to push it back - you need to re-enter the Flash menu and select the Flash Off option.
Otherwise it will pop up again the next time you hit the shutter button. As with the AF point selection procedure described above, I found this solution to be unnecessarily complicated and in conflict with the A's billing as an easy-to-use SLR. To be fair though, some shooting modes allow the user to choose an Auto Flash option, which will probably please novice users - but it's no substitute for a well thought-out user interface. The pop-up flash can also act as a TTL controller for wirelessly slaved external flash units.
External flashguns can also be mounted to the camera itself via the hot shoe. Be reminded that it is not of the standard variety - non-dedicated flashguns and other hotshoe-mounted accessories such as PocketWizards cannot be mounted without a separately sold hot shoe adapter. The A has a few niceties inherited from its forebears. These include the sensor-shift image stabilisation system we already touched upon and which Sony now calls SteadyShot Inside , an orientation sensor that rotates the status display so it remains readable even if the camera is in portrait orientation, a pair of eye proximity sensors beneath the viewfinder that automatically shut down the LCD when raising the camera to your eye, and Minolta's legacy Eye-start AF technology.
In the field, I found the eye-start autofocus system to be somewhat useful, though not necessarily faster than the more traditional solutions. As far as the anti shake system goes, it works very well for providing camera stabilisation at relatively slow shutter speeds - see a demonstration in the Image Quality section of this review - but it's less effective at the other function Sony has tasked it with; namely, shaking off any dust particles that may have settled on the sensor during a lens change.
Apparently the anti shake system was simply not designed to move the sensor fast enough to shake off the dust - this will be evident if you look at some of our samples that clearly exhibit a few dust spots.
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