Sony Alpha A350 Review

I bought an a350 earlier this year and took it back to the shop as I was extremely dissapointed with it. The very helpful (indipendant) camera shop assistant spent an hour attaching different lenses, even putting £700 worth of Ziess lense on which made a slight but not acceptable difference. I compared it at work with a colleagues Cannon powershot (£120) and his came out better on saturation, detail (especially at full zoom & macro)and sharpness. I eventually took home a Fujifilm s100fs. I think there is a clear case of paying for the name here which is a shame as I have a Sony DSC W1 compact which is excellent. Caveat Emptor.

Cliff, can I ask if your assessment of ISO/noise performance (and other aspects of image quality) are based purely on standard Jpeg output, or also on RAW? I ask because the Pentax K20D (with a similar pixel count) benefits from minimal noise reduction, so it retains quite a lot of detail. The A350 seems to go the other way, smearing detail away... but would this still happen if you shot in RAW? Can noise reduction be turned off? I understand the target market is far more likely to shoot in Jpeg with default settings - I'm just curious.

I've been using the camera for a year now, most recently with a sigma 18-200, and have been really pleased with the results, especially the sharpness and detail in large prints, well desrving of Cliff's 9/10. I think sometimes comments on noise are a bit academic - viewing the images on-screen and highly zoomed in is a really artificial measure. In practice, on good quality prints, it just isn't an issue (I've been printing up to A3). I've had much better results than a friend with Canon 500d