Sony DSLR-A350 Review

Overview

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Design

Sony A350 Design

The Sony A350's all-black, compact body measures approximately 5.25 x 4.0 x 3.0 inches (131 x 99 x 75 millimeters) without the 18-70mm lens attached; and weighs 24 ounces (682 grams) with the lens, battery, and memory card. While the A350 isn't small enough to fit into a pocket or purse, it is light enough to carry on vacation thanks to the plastic body panels. You'll want a camera bag for better protection and portability, but the positions of the eyelets for the included neck strap at least let the camera hang level with the standard lens.

Roll-over the various controls and features with your mouse for a brief description.

Sony A350 Front View

The Sony A350's front panel has the bayonet lens mount, lens release button, Self-Timer lamp, and the front of the pop-up flash compartment. Like the Sony A200, there is no Depth of Field Preview button to be found. Also visible from the front of the camera are the Shutter button and Front Control dial, located at the top of the hand grip. An indentation near the top of the hand grip comfortably cradles your middle finger as it curls around the grip.

Sony A350 Left Side

The left side of the camera has a connector compartment covered by a rubbery flap. Inside the compartment are the wired Remote and DC-IN jacks. The Auto / Manual focus switch is also visible just below the lens release button housing. At the top is the other neck strap attachment eyelet. Also from this view, the pop-up flash button is visible on the side of the pop-up flash unit.

Sony A350 Right Side

The right side of the Sony A350 has the CompactFlash memory card slot, covered by a hinged plastic door. The Sony A350 accommodates Type I or II CF memory cards, including Microdrives. Nestled inside the compartment door is the shared-use A/V Out / USB 2.0 jack for direct connection to a computer or television set. At the very top of the right panel is one of the two neck strap attachment eyelets.

Sony A350 Top View

The top panel accommodates the pop-up flash compartment and external flash hot shoe. The hot shoe employs a proprietary electrode setup and mounting bracket for Konica Minolta and Sony accessory flash units, which isn't compatible with generic hot-shoe flashes, nor with Sony's older hot shoe flash units for the F828 and R1, like the HVL-F32X.

Sony A350 Back View

The remaining controls are on the camera's rear panel, along with the optical viewfinder and 2.7-inch LCD monitor which is vertically tiltable. The A350's optical viewfinder is surrounded by a flexible, removable arch, and features two sensors below it that detect when your eye is brought up to the viewfinder. Controls are well-placed and easy to learn, though it's unfortunate that the Card Write LED indicator is usually covered by the thumb when you hold the Sony A350.

Sony A350 Bottom View

The camera's bottom panel is fairly flat, with a the metal tripod mount centered beneath the lens. Also on the bottom panel is the camera's battery compartment, which features a locking, hinged door.

Operation

Sony A350 Operation

Like the Sony A200, the A350's user interface is among the simplest on the market, which makes it easy to recommend to most beginners. Anyone familiar with the A200 will feel right at home, as the interface is identical except for the addition of Live View mode, and Smart Telephoto digital zoom.

The Sony A350's external dials and buttons access most of the main camera settings, reserving the LCD menu system for less commonly-used functions. The Control dial accesses shutter speed and aperture settings, in addition to a wide range of functions when used with other control buttons. In Manual mode, pressing and holding the EV compensation button on the camera's back shifts the Control dial to adjusting the Aperture value. Most of the camera adjustments are made by pressing a button, and turning the Control dial. Menus are navigated with the eight-way Controller on the back of the A350, and all nine AF points can be selected when in Local AF selection mode. The major functions not accessed by an external control are clustered under the Function menu, which you activate by pressing the Function button.

Sony A350 Record Mode Displays

The Sony A350's rear-panel, 2.7-inch, TFT color LCD monitor is for image review, image preview, status display, and menu display. Unlike the lower-end Sony A200 and higher-end A700, and A350 and A300 DSLRs offer a Live View mode, so the LCD can be used to frame shots. The A350's LCD (as well as the A300's) tilts down almost 45° for high-angle shots, and tilts up over 90° for low-angle shots. It unfortunately doesn't swivel left, right, or forward.

Since the A350 does not have a top status LCD panel, the color LCD is put to good use to display various camera settings. While the Sony A350's battery life is quite good, using the LCD as a Status LCD can drain the battery more quickly than expected. But it does lower the cost, and the display offers a good array of information. Pressing the DISP button adds even more information to the display.

Sony A350 LCD Display Screen Info
1 - Shutter Speed 2 - Exposure Mode 3 - Exposure Compensation 4 - Flash Mode 5 - Flash Exposure Compensation 6 - Drive Mode 7 - Focus Mode 8 - Creative Style 9 - Battery Status 10 - Image Quality	11 - Aperture Value 12 - Exposure 13 - AE Lock 14 - ISO (Sensitivity) 15 - EV Scale 16 - Metering Mode 17 - AF Area 18 - D-Range Optimizer 19 - White Balance 20 - Remaining Shots 21 - Image Size

Display Rotation
Here's a nice ergonomic touch, carried over from previous Sony SLR models: The Sony A350 has an orientation sensor inside, and uses it to keep the display oriented in the right direction so the information will appear right-side up when viewed by the photographer, whether shooting horizontally, or in either vertical orientation. (For those who might be wondering though: No, it won't turn completely upside-down.)

Large- and Small-Type Options
Sometimes you don't need to see every last detail about the camera's operation, but rather prefer to concentrate on just the most important settings. The Sony A350 has two different display options that apply to both the horizontal and vertical formatted data screens. The large-type/low-density option drops the details on metering mode, AF mode, Creative Style, White Balance, and the EV scale.

Sony A350 Live View

As mentioned above, the Sony A350 has a Live View mode, where a real-time preview of your subject can be seen live, on the LCD. Live View mode is enabled by sliding the LiveView/OVF switch on the top of the camera forward. The LCD display looks similar to the viewfinder in this mode, but with added information available. You can cycle through the A350's three Live View mode displays using the DISP button. Live View Screens available are:Indicators On (info overlay shown below), Histogram On (no info overlay, but a small, live luminance histogram is shown in the bottom left), and Indicators Off (no info overlay, but there is still basic shooting info shown at the bottom, similar to the optical viewfinder display).

Sony A350 LCD Live View Screen Info
1 - Battery Status 2 - Wide AF Area Bracket 3 - Local AF Area (1 of 9) 4 - Spot Metering Area 5 - Spot AF Area 6 - Drive Mode 7 - Flash Mode / Flash Exposure Compensation 8 - Exposure Mode 9 - Focus Indicator 10 - Shutter Speed 11 - Aperture Value	12 - Image Quality 13 - Image Size / Aspect Ratio 14 - Remaining Shots 15 - White Balance 16 - D-Range Optimizer Mode 17 - Creative Style 18 - Focus Mode 19 - AF Area Mode 20 - Metering Mode 21 - ISO Sensitivity 22 - Super SteadyShot Scale 23 - Camera Shake Warning 24 - AE Lock 25 - EV Scale

Sony A350 Playback Mode Displays

In Playback mode, the LCD monitor's default mode shows the most recently captured image, with a limited information overlay reporting the resolution and quality, date and time, folder, file number, frame number, the total number of images, and a small selection of other exposure settings including shutter speed, aperture and ISO value. Pressing the Display enables a histogram display, which also shows expanded exposure information for the image. Just above the information is a thumbnail of the image that alternately flashes any under and overexposed areas in the frame. (This function can sometimes be more helpful than the histogram, in that you can directly see what parts of the image are too dark or light.) Four histograms line the right side of the frame, one each for the red, green, and blue channels, and one representing the luminance of the image as a whole. Pressing the Display button again pulls up a type of index display, with a series of thumbnails of the other images on the card lining the top of the display. You can use the left and right arrows to change the main image display while keeping the thumbnails at the top of the frame. A fourth press of the Display button brings the image full-screen, with no information.

Pressing the Function/Rotate button lets you rotate the image. You can zoom in on captured images in Playback mode, by pressing the AE Lock button with the magnifying-glass icon. When zoomed in, the Front Control dial cycles through the other images on the card at the same enlargement, and pressing the center button of the multi-controller toggles between the magnified view and a full-frame view with the current magnified area outlined in yellow. The Exposure Compensation button zooms back out to the normal display. Once in normal display mode, another press of the Exposure Compensation button pulls up the index display mode.

Optics

Sony A350 Optics

Alpha lens mount. The Sony A350's Alpha lens mount is compatible with the full array of Alpha lenses, both screw-drive and electronic autofocus models.

The Sony A350 features a bayonet lens mount, which accommodates a range of Sony and Konica Minolta lenses. The Sony A350 is sold body-only, but there are two kits, one that comes with a Sony 18-70mm f/3.5 kit lens, and another that comes with both the 18-70 and a 55-200mm f/4-5.6 telephoto zoom lens. A small button on the front of the camera releases the lens from its mount, so it can be turned and removed.

The Sony A350's CCD is smaller than a 35mm frame, so the angle of view at any given focal length will not be the same as on a 35mm camera. To find the approximate 35mm equivalent focal length, multiply the focal length of the lens by 1.5. (Thus, a 50mm lens will provide about the same view as a 75mm lens on a 35mm camera.)

The Sony A350 provides both manual and automatic focus control modes, set by the Focus Mode switch on the left side of the camera. You can select between Auto and Manual focus modes. The Function button provides access to additional AF Area and focus mode options. The Autofocus Mode option under the Function menu offers Single-shot AF, Automatic AF and Continuous AF settings. Single-shot sets focus with each half-press of the Shutter button, while Continuous mode is constantly adjusts the focus whether the Shutter button is pressed or not. The Automatic setting will lock focus on a still subject or continually adjust focus on a moving subject, for as long as the Shutter button is halfway pressed.

Autofocus Area also has three options available through the Function menu: Wide, Spot, and Local (manual setting). The default option is a nine-point Wide Focus area, indicated by an array of dashes inset within four widely-spaced brackets in the viewfinder image. You can override the chosen AF mode by pressing the Spot AF / OK button in the center of the Multi-controller, which defaults to the more accurate center AF point (the latter indicated by a target box in the center of the viewfinder). Wide AF bases its focus on the most prominent subject detail in the portion of the image that falls within the AF brackets. Spot mode bases its focus on the very center of the frame, where the square target resides. The Local setting is Sony's terminology for a manual AF area selection, and lets you manually set the main AF point by using the Multi-controller to highlight one of the nine AF points. The active AF area is briefly illuminated in the viewfinder.

Sony A350 AF Assist

The Sony A350 uses its built-in flash head as a very bright AF-assist light for better focusing in dim lighting. This has the advantage that the light from the flash is very bright, but the downside is that you can only get AF assist when the flash head is raised. This is a real limitation for available-light photography, as the camera can expose at light levels below those it can focus at. (Although its low-light focusing ability is much better than average.) If the camera is fixed on a tripod, you can work around this limitation, but it's somewhat awkward: With the flash head up, half-press the shutter button to make the camera focus. Then switch the focus mode to manual focus, being careful not to touch the focus ring on the lens. Stow the flash head, and then take your picture. (But don't forget to switch back to AF mode for the rest of your shooting!)

Sony A350 Anti-Shake

The Sony A350 also employs Sony's Super SteadyShot anti-shake technology, which uses a highly sensitive angular rotation sensor and Smooth Impact Drive Mechanism (SIDM) to move the CCD assembly itself to counteract camera movement, rather than the more common approach of moving an optical element inside the lens. This body-based anti-shake approach is based on technology Sony acquired from Konica Minolta, but Sony claims that a more powerful processor in the A350 increases the system's effectiveness beyond that of similar systems in previous Konica Minolta SLR models. (Theoretically, a faster CPU could let the system respond to and compensate for higher-frequency vibrations.)

Sony claims that the Super SteadyShot anti-shake system in the A350 provides a 2.5 to 3.5-stop reduction in the blurring produced by camera shake. Translating that into real-world shutter speeds, a two-stop improvement means that a shutter speed of 1/30 second would give you the same resistance to blur from camera shake that a speed of 1/120 would without anti-shake. A 3.5-stop improvement would mean you could shoot as slow as 1/11 second and get the same results (blur-wise) as when shooting at 1/120 second unaided. Even the lower end of the specified range of effectiveness means a pretty significant improvement in one's ability to hand-hold long exposures.

When Super SteadyShot is activated, the SteadyShot scale on the right side of the viewfinder display indicates the degree of stabilization. A downside to Sony's body-based SteadyShot approach is that while you can see the results of stabilization on competing lens-based designs, you have only this scale to tell you how the A350's SteadyShot mechanism is doing. SteadyShot minimizes the effect of blurring caused by slight camera movement, which is more noticeable at long focal lengths. And since the Live View image is generated on a separate sensor, that mode also lacks an image stabilization preview.

Sony A350 Anti-Dust Technology

To help combat dust particles on the CCD from changing lenses, Sony included both an anti-static coating on the CCD filter and an anti-dust vibration to automatically shake the CCD each time the camera is shut off.

Sony A350 Optical Test Results

Below are the results of our optical tests on the Sony A350. We used the 18-70mm kit lens as the benchmark, since most people will buy and use the camera in this configuration.

Kit Lens

Zoom
Good performance with the 18-70mm kit lens, though with soft corners at telephoto.

The Sony Alpha 350 comes with an 18-70mm kit lens, which is a fairly average optical zoom range of ~3.9x, but a little longer than most kit lenses. Details are reasonably sharp in the center of the frame at full wide-angle, with low levels of coma distortion and slight blurring and chromatic aberration in the corners, but considering the 14.2-megapixel resolution, it's quite low. Results at full telephoto are also quite good, but there's more noticeable blurring in the corners of the frame.

Macro
A fairly large macro area with the kit lens, with slightly soft details. Flash throttles down pretty well.

The Sony A350's kit lens captured a slightly large macro area with the standard 18-70mm kit lens, measuring 3.14 x 2.09 inches (80 x 53 millimeters). Details were soft throughout the frame. There was also some additional softening in the corners from the lens. (Most kit lenses have some softening in the corners at macro distances.) You'll get much better results with a dedicated macro lens. The Sony A350's flash throttled down for the macro area pretty well, despite minor overexposure which can probably be corrected with a touch of negative flash exposure compensation.

Distortion
Moderate barrel distortion with the 18-70mm kit lens, though low pincushion.

Barrel distortion at 18mm is 0.8 percent

Pincushion at 70mm is about 0.1 percent

The Sony A350's 18-70mm kit lens produced about 0.8 percent barrel distortion at wide-angle. Though this is about average among the cameras we've tested, we still find it a little high to our eyes. At the telephoto end, the approximately 0.1 percent pincushion distortion is quite low. This is the tendency for the lens to bend straight lines outward (like a barrel -- usually at wide-angle) or inward (like a pincushion -- usually at telephoto).

Chromatic aberration
High and bright at wide-angle, but low at telephoto with the 18-70mm kit lens.

Chromatic aberration is fairly high and noticeable at the full wide-angle setting of the Sony A350's 18-70mm kit lens, showing 8-10 pixels of bright coloration on either side of the target lines. At full telephoto, this distortion is much fainter and not very evident in images. Again, though, the 14-megapixel sensor makes this chromatic aberration seem much more pronounced. (This distortion is visible as a slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.)

Corner Sharpness
Moderate blurring in the corners of the frame at both zoom settings with the kit lens.

The Sony A350's 18-70mm kit lens produced moderately soft corners of the frame at full wide-angle and telephoto, noticeable in a few shots. The lens is also a little softer overall at telephoto than at wide angle. Keep in mind that sharpness usually improves once the lens is stopped down a few stops. (These shots are taken with the lens "wide open" at maximum aperture.)

The images above were taken from our standardized test shots. For a collection of more pictorial photos, see our Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Photo Gallery .

Exposure

Sony A350 Exposure

The Sony A350 offers very good exposure control, with fairly fine-grained adjustment of image attributes like sharpness, contrast, and color saturation, as well as extensive White Balance offerings. The Exposure Mode dial on the top panel selects the main shooting mode, offering Manual, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, Program AE (Program Shift), Full Auto, Flash Off, and six Scene settings.

Sony A350 Exposure Modes

In straight Auto mode, the camera controls everything about the exposure, except for flash, zoom, and focus; but rather uniquely you can actually adjust every setting in the Function menu, including Flash, Autofocus, White balance, Metering, AF area, and Dynamic Range Optimization modes.

The Flash Off mode operates just like Auto, but disables the flash regardless of the lighting conditions.

Program AE mode keeps the camera in charge of the exposure, while you have control over all other exposure options. While in Program AE mode, you can rotate the control dial with or without holding the Exposure Compensation button to scroll through a range of equivalent exposure settings. Thus, you can bias your exposure toward a faster shutter speed or greater depth of field as circumstances dictate.

Aperture Priority mode lets you select the lens aperture setting, while the camera selects the most appropriate corresponding shutter speed.

In Shutter Priority mode, the user selects the shutter speed, from 1/4,000 to 30 seconds, while the camera chooses the best corresponding aperture setting.

Switching to Manual mode gives you control over both shutter speed and aperture, with a Bulb setting available for longer exposures. Exposure time in Bulb mode is determined by how long you hold down the Shutter button. There doesn't appear to be any limit to the duration of Bulb exposures, but it appears that the dark-frame subtraction will only compensate for exposures up to 30 seconds long. (I strongly recommend use of the optional wired remote in Bulb mode, as the pressure of your finger on the Shutter button is bound to jiggle the camera somewhat, blurring the image.)

Sony A350 Scene Modes

The six Scene modes include Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Sports Action, Sunset, and Night Portrait/Night View. Each optimizes the camera's exposure, white balance, and image processing systems for the particular program. Portrait biases toward wider apertures to defocus the background while capturing warm, soft skin tones. Sports Action maximizes shutter speeds with Continuous Autofocus and Continuous Advance Drive modes. Landscape produces sharp, colorful shots of outdoor scenery. Sunset handles the rich warm palettes of sunsets. The Macro setting boosts color in smaller subjects, and Night Portrait balances ambient light with the flash; turning off the flash enters Night View mode, which maintains a dark background when presented with night scenery.

Sony A350 Metering Modes

The Sony A350 offers three metering modes: Multi-segment, Center-Weighted, and Spot. The default metering mode takes readings throughout the image to determine exposure. Center-Weighted gives precedence to the center of the image while reading the whole frame. Spot metering options are also available via the Metering Mode dial on the rear panel. Spot metering, useful for high-contrast subjects, bases the exposure reading on the very center of the image, letting you set the exposure based on a small portion of your subject. You can also lock an exposure reading by pressing the AE Lock button on the back panel. Halfway pressing the Shutter button also locks exposure and focus, but only in autofocus mode.

Sony A350 ISO Range, Noise Reduction, and Exposure Compensation

The Sony A350's light sensitivity can be set to ISO equivalents of 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,600 or 3,200, or it can be left in Auto mode for the camera to adjust as it sees fit.

A Noise Reduction option is available both for longer exposures and higher ISO settings, and greatly reduces the amount of image noise that would otherwise result.

Exposure compensation is adjustable from -2 to +2 exposure equivalents (EV) in one-third-step increments by turning the Control dial while pressing the Exposure Compensation button, which displays the scale and setting on the LCD monitor. Two Auto Exposure Bracketing options are available. Bracket: Continuous snaps three shots in rapid succession if you hold down the shutter, varying the exposure between each in steps of 0.3 or 0.7 EV units. If you only shoot one shot in this mode, it keeps shooting just the unmodified shot, which is great when you only want to bracket occasionally. Bracket: Single takes one shot per shutter squeeze at each setting, separated by either 0.3 or 0.7 EV.

Sony A350 White Balance Options

The Sony A350 offers convenient control over white balance, color rendition, and tonal range. You adjust white balance through the Function menu, which offers Auto, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Flash, Color Temperature or Custom settings. Auto lets the camera choose the white balance itself. Within the preset modes, you can also fine tune the white balance by pressing the right and left arrow keys. Custom allows you to calibrate the camera to a specific lighting situation by pointing to a white or neutral object. Color Temperature lets you select a specific color temperature in degrees Kelvin. You can apply color filters to really tune your white balance between green and magenta bias. There's also a White Balance Bracketing mode, with options of High and Low adjustment. With each frame captured, three shots are saved with three different white balance settings.

Sony A350 Creative Style Menu

The Creative Style menu option under the Record menu offers a selection of presets for varying subjects, including Standard (faithful color reproduction), Vivid (increased contrast and sharpness), Portrait (optimized skin tones), Landscape (optimized daytime outdoor scenery), Night View (optimized for nighttime scenery without flash), Sunset (optimized landscapes at dusk or dawn), Black & White, and Adobe RGB. Within each preset, you can manually adjust the image contrast, saturation, and sharpness in five steps from -2 to +2 arbitrary units.

Sony A350 Drive Modes

The Sony A350's Drive Mode button on the top panel accesses a range of shooting modes, including Single Frame Advance, Continuous Advance, 10-second, and Two-second Self-timer modes, Continuous Advance Bracketing, Single Frame Bracketing, and White Balance Bracketing. The first two bracketing modes access the camera's Auto Exposure Bracketing system. In Continuous Advance mode, the Sony A350 captures a rapid series of images, with a maximum frame rate of 2.44 frames per second (in our tests). White Balance Bracketing saves a series of images for each shot taken with bracketed white balance values.

The shorter, two-second self-timer mode delay is very handy when you need to prop the camera on something to take a photo in dim lighting, and don't want the pressure of your finger on the shutter button to jiggle the camera. The 10-second delay is long enough that you can run around to get into the photo yourself. An LED lamp on the front of the A350 blinks and the camera beeps as the 10-second Self-Timer is counting down, the blink and beeps becoming faster in the last few seconds.

The images above were taken from our standardized test shots. For a collection of more pictorial photos, see our Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 Photo Gallery .

Not sure which camera to buy? Let your eyes be the ultimate judge! Visit our Comparometer(tm) to compare images from the Sony Alpha DSLR-A350 with those from other cameras you may be considering. The proof is in the pictures, so let your own eyes decide which you like best!

Performance

Sony A350 Performance

Imaging

Sony A350 Imaging

Color

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Accurate color and saturation, with only minor shifts in hue and intensity.

In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. More saturated colors are located toward the periphery of the graph. Hue changes as you travel around the center. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center.

Saturation. The Sony A350 pushes strong reds and blues just a little, but actually undersaturates bright yellows, some greens, and cyan tones slightly. Thus, color saturation is a little truer to life than many consumer cameras. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. Here, with the color balanced properly for the light source, the Alpha A350's skin tones looked natural, but perhaps a bit on the cool side. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. The Alpha 350 showed only a few small color shifts relative to the correct mathematical translation of colors in its subjects, but had pretty good accuracy overall. Most noticeable was a shift in reds toward orange, and yellow toward green, with some shifts in cyans and blues as well. Hue is "what color" the color is.

Saturation Adjustment
The Sony A350 has a total of seven saturation settings available (only five are shown below), three above and three below the default saturation. This covers a pretty wide range of saturation levels, about as wide a range as you're likely to find photographically relevant, apart from special effects that are arguably better achieved in software. The fine steps between settings mean you can program the camera to just the level of saturation you prefer.

Saturation Adjustment Examples
-3	-1	0	+1	+3

The table above shows results with several saturation settings, see the Thumbnails index page for more (look for the files named A350OUTSAT0x.JPG). Click on any thumbnail above to see the full-sized image.

Sensor

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Good color with both the Manual and 2,700 Kelvin white balance settings, though very warm results with Auto and slightly warm with Incandescent. Average to slightly above average positive exposure compensation required.

Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, the Sony Alpha 350 produced very warm color with its Auto white balance setting. The Incandescent setting wasn't too far off the mark, but had a slight magenta cast to it. Both the Manual and 2,700-degree Kelvin settings produced more accurate results. It was a bit of a toss-up between them, as the Manual setting was a hint warm and the Kelvin option a little more true to white value. Though the Manual setting did preserve a touch of the original mood, the 2,700-degree Kelvin mode produced the most accurate overall color. At +1.0 EV, the average amount of positive exposure compensation for this shot, the exposure is just a hair bright in all modes but Auto, which required a touch higher exposure compensation at +1.3 EV. However, results at +0.7 EV were too dim overall. Color looks good throughout the frame, with only the slightest purplish tints in the blue flowers. (Many digital cameras reproduce these flowers with a dark, purplish tint, so the Alpha 350 actually performs a little better than average here.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.

Outdoors, daylight
Very good results under harsh lighting, with good handling of contrast, detail, and color.

Outdoors, the Sony Alpha A350 performed well, requiring just +0.3 EV exposure compensation for the Portrait to avoid rendering Marti's face too dim, clipping just a few highlights in process. Contrast is a little high, as you might expect under such harsh lighting, but the camera does a better than average job of holding onto detail in both the deep shadows and bright highlights, with Sony's default standard Dynamic Range Optimization taking some of the credit here. The Sony A350 nailed the exposure in the House shot, and managed not to blow-out many highlights at all, or lose shadow detail in the process. Color balance is good as well, with good saturation considering the bright lighting. The camera's contrast adjustment did a very nice job of toning down the exposure without creating any strong color variations in the skin (though skin tone does change slightly). Overall, very good performance.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
Very high resolution, 1,800 ~ 1,900 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,900 lines per picture height in the horizontal direction, and about 1,800 in the vertical direction. Extinction didn't occur until about 2,600 to 2,800 lines on the 2X res target. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Sharp images overall, though minor edge-enhancement on high-contrast subjects. Minor noise suppression visible at low ISO.

Sharpness. The Sony Alpha 350 produced, good detail overall, but with slight softness. Some edge enhancement artifacts are visible on high-contrast subjects such as the crop above left, but overall results are still good. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows only minor noise suppression, as the darker areas of Marti's hair show a lot of detail. Individual strands are still distinguishable even in the lighter shadows, though they begin to merge as shadows deepens. Still, good performance here, especially considering the smaller photosites on a 14 megapixel sensor. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

RAW vs In-Camera JPEGs
As noted above, the Sony A350 does a pretty good job at balancing between sharpness and visible sharpening artifacts in camera JPEGs. A little more detail can be obtained from carefully processing RAW files, though, without additional artifacts. Take a look below, to see what we mean:

Camera JPEG (Fine)	RAW via Sony IDC	RAW via ACR

In the table above, mousing over a link at the bottom will load the corresponding crop in the area above. Examples include in-camera Fine JPEG (the A350 doesn't have an Extra-Fine setting like the A700), RAW file processed through Sony's Image Data Converter SR version 2 software, and RAW file processed through Adobe Camera Raw version 4.4, then sharpened in Photoshop. (We've found that sharpening results in ACR are inferior to those obtained with the Unsharp Masking tool in Photoshop itself. For the Sony A350's images, we found better results with no sharpening at all in ACR and then 250% unsharp masking with an 0.3 pixel radius.)

Note: ACR renders colors somewhat differently than either the A350 or the Sony software, so the greens in the trees are rather different. There's no mistaking the increase in detail though, regardless of changes in color or tone.

ISO & Noise Performance
Low noise at ISO 100 and 200. Effects of noise reduction visible from ISO 400 up.

The Sony Alpha A350 produced low noise at its lower sensitivity settings, however we start to see some slight smudging and loss of detail already at ISO 400, along with noise pixels and some chroma noise in the shadows. As you'd expect, noise and loss of detail becomes more apparent at ISO 800, with noise "grain" becoming increasingly courser. At ISO 1,600, along with increased detail loss, the chroma noise becomes more obvious and no longer relegated to just shadows. ISO 3,200 continues this trend with even more detail loss and blotchiness. Keep in mind that these are 14 megapixel files, though, so detail loss may not be quite as apparent at normal print sizes. The ISO 3,200 shot with the same exposure compensation as the others in the series was also underexposed despite being twice the shutter speed and the same aperture as the the ISO 1,600 shot, indicating a possible linearity issue with the A350 sensor's sensitivity as ISO is increased. See the Print Quality section to find out what the recommended maximum size print is at each ISO setting.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution and good exposure at the default setting. Very good shadow detail. Very good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images in near darkness.

Sunlight. The Sony Alpha A350 handled the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above pretty well. Though contrast is a little high, shadow and highlight detail are very good. The camera's contrast adjustment also did a good job of decreasing overall contrast without producing strong color variations. A lower-than-average +0.3 EV exposure compensation was required to keep Marti's face from looking too dark, as the default exposure was a touch dim. This resulted in some lost highlights in Marti's shirt and in some of the flowers, but not as much as we're used to seeing in many consumer models, thanks again to . Be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

Contrast Adjustment
We really like it when a camera gives us the ability to adjust contrast and saturation to our liking. It's even better when those adjustments cover a useful range, in steps small enough to allow for precise tweaks. Just as with its saturation adjustment, the Sony A350's contrast setting meets both challenges.

Minimum Contrast, normal D-R setting
Contrast set to lowest, +0.3 EV	Contrast set to lowest, Auto Exposure

At its lowest contrast setting, the A350 did an excellent job of preserving highlight detail, maintaining natural-looking skin tones, and holding nice detail in the shadows. The A350 captures good color outdoors, though just slightly on the warm side. Overall, very good results here, especially when the contrast setting is tweaked.

Contrast Adjustment Examples
-3	-1	0	+1	+3

The series of shots above shows results with several different contrast adjustment settings, showing the minimum step size around the default, as well as both extremes. While you can see the extremes, it's hard to really evaluate contrast on small thumbnails like these, click on any thumbnail to go to the full-size image.

One very nice feature of Sony's contrast adjustment is that it has very little effect on color saturation. Contrast and saturation are actually fairly closely coupled, it's a good trick to be able to vary one with out the other changing as well. Sony did a good job here.

Sony's DRO (Dynamic Range Optimization)
While the Sony A350's contrast adjustment feature works very well, their Dynamic Range Optimization system is a critical part of it. This system analyzes the range of brightness of each image, and adjusts the camera's image processing parameters accordingly, to make the best use of the available dynamic range. Three options are available on the A350: DRO Off, Standard DRO, and Advanced DRO. Unlike the A700, the A350 does not allow you choose the strength for the DRO effect. Standard DRO looks at the entire image and effectively adjusts contrast and brightness across the entire image for best effect. Advanced DRO analyzes everything, but makes local adjustments to bring out shadow detail and preserve highlights.

DRO Examples
DRO Off	DRO Standard	DRO + (Advanced)

The crops above show the results of three DRO settings. They were shot in rapid succession, but you'll notice that minor movements by Marti mean that the shots aren't absolutely identical. The cropped areas are very closely equivalent in terms of light level though. As you can see, the bulk of the difference between different levels of DRO is found in the shadow areas. By default, the Sony A350 shoots with DRO set to the Standard level. Interestingly, there's a pretty pronounced difference between DRO Standard and Off, in terms of exposure. We confirmed that the shots above were all captured with the same aperture and shutter speed settings, but the DRO Standard version is 2/3 of a stop or so lighter than the shot with DRO turned off entirely, a behavior we saw with the A200 and A700 as well. Still, the DRO-enabled shots have fewer clipped highlights than the DRO Off shot with a simple exposure boost applied to bring the shadows up to the same level.

As noted in the A100 review, we felt that DRO had some limitations, but the technology seems to have matured very nicely in the intervening time since that model was introduced. It works well enough and with little enough impact on normally-lit subjects that we'd be entirely comfortable leaving it in Standard mode all the time. (Sony obviously felt so too, since it's on by default, but it's unusual that we would be comfortable leaving an image-tweaking option enabled by default.)

	1 fc 11 lux	1/2 fc 5.5 lux	1/4 fc 2.7 lux	1/8 fc 1.3 lux	1/16 fc 0.67 lux	1/16fc No NR
ISO 100	1.6 sec f2.8	3.2 sec f2.8	6 sec f2.8	13 sec f2.8	15 sec f2.8	15 sec f2.8
ISO 200	0.8 sec f2.8	1.6 sec f2.8	3.2 sec f2.8	6 sec f2.8	8 sec f2.8	8 sec f2.8
ISO 400	0.4 sec f2.8	0.8 sec f2.8	1.6 sec f2.8	3.2 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8	4 sec f2.8
ISO 800	1/5 sec f2.8	0.4 sec f2.8	0.8 sec f2.8	1.6 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8
ISO 1600	1/10 sec f2.8	1/5 sec f2.8	0.4 sec f2.8	0.8 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8	1 sec f2.8
ISO 3200	1/20 sec f2.8	1/10 sec f2.8	1/5 sec f2.8	0.4 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8	0.5 sec f2.8

Low light. The Sony A350 performed very well on the low-light test, capturing usable images at the lowest light level with the lowest sensitivity setting (ISO 100). Images are a little dim at the lowest light level, but still usable, and you can always add exposure compensation or use manual mode to brighten them up by using a longer shutter speed. Color balance looked quite good with the Auto white balance. Noise was fairly low up to ISO 400, but as expected, became more noticeable with higher ISOs. There were also a few hot pixels visible at ISO 1,600 and 3,200 and lower light levels. The camera's autofocus system was able to focus on the subject almost down to the 1/16 foot-candle light level unassisted (and in complete darkness with the AF assist enabled). Keep in mind that the longer shutter speeds here demand the use of a tripod to prevent any blurring from camera movement. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) Digital SLRs like the Sony A350 do much better than point & shoots, but you still shouldn't expect a quick autofocus lock with moving subjects.

Output Quality

Print Quality
Great print quality, good color, sharp 13 x 19-inch prints.

The Sony A350's printed output is really impressive, able to output usable 16x20-inch prints at ISO 100. They're slightly soft, but really quite good. 13x19-inch prints are a little better, though. ISO 200 shots print the same as 100, producing a good 16x20 or great 13x19. ISO 400 images do just fine at 13x19, and of course are better 11x14, but not by much. ISO 800 shots also look good at 11x14, though chroma noise in dark areas is less than appealing. But at 8x10, they're less of a problem at arm's length. ISO 1,600 shots remain quite good at 8x10, even with noise reduction turned off. ISO 3,200 shots, however, need to step down to 5x7; but they're actually better at 4x6. A little noise suppression post-processing does a lot to fix the 5x7 version. I used Noise Fixer to remove most of the chroma noise and the image looked a good deal more like the ISO 1,600 version. Another impressive performance. As expected, the results as you go up the ISO ladder decay a little more quickly than they did on the 10-megapixel Sony A200, but with noise suppression technology and careful sharpening, you should be able to get greater detail out of the A350's low ISO images than you do from the A200.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon i9900 studio printer, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon i9900 review for details on that model.)

Viewfinder

Sony A350 Viewfinder

The Sony A350 features a digital SLR design, so the optical viewfinder offers a true, through-the-lens (TTL) display. A dioptric adjustment dial accommodates eyeglass wearers, letting them adjust the viewfinder optics between -3.0 to +1 diopters. The viewfinder eyepiece has a fairly high eyepoint (specified at 20.8mm from the eyepiece, 16.7mm from the eyepiece frame with the dioptric adjustment set to -1 diopter), better than the A200's 17.6mm/13.5mm eyepoint. Magnification is lower though, at 0.74x for a 50mm lens and -1 diopter of dioptric correction, versus the A200's 0.83x magnification.

The Sony A350's viewfinder uses a pentamirror design. The advantage of a pentamirror is that it is lighter and less expensive, and in the case of the A300 and A350, it also allows for the unique, tilting mirror live-view mechanism; however an all-glass pentaprism design delivers more light to the viewfinder eyepiece, thanks to its more efficient internal reflection. As a result, the Sony A350's viewfinder image is not as bright as the A700's, which uses a true pentaprism.

The Sony A350's extensive information display is identical to the A200's, and features a series of focus and exposure target marks in the center of the view that highlight briefly when the AF system is activated. Camera information appears beneath the image area in a small strip, and reports all of the major camera settings, such as shutter speed, aperture, flash mode, EV compensation, etc. To the far right side of the strip is the Super SteadyShot (anti-shake) scale, indicating the degree of stabilization whenever anti-shake mode is activated. The information readout in the viewfinder activates whenever you half-press the Shutter button, and remains active for a few seconds afterward.

A pair of horizontal infrared sensors just below the viewfinder, which we've highlighted with a green rectangle, detect your eye as it approaches the viewfinder, and deactivates the LCD information display if you have the auto-display option enabled. Through the Custom menu, you can also set these sensors to enable the autofocus whenever your eye is in range of the eyepiece, which makes the A350's autofocus seem even more responsive.

Viewfinder Test Results

Coverage
Good accuracy from the optical viewfinder, quite tight in Live View mode.

The Sony Alpha A350's optical viewfinder showed about 95 percent coverage accuracy with our Sigma 70mm f/2.8 prime lens. This is quite good for a consumer digital SLR, matching Sony's specification. In Live View mode the accuracy was not quite as good, with only about 91 percent coverage (a bit better than Sony's 90 percent spec.); probably limited by the amount of space available for the Live View sensor in the pentamirror housing. In both cases, the coverage appears to be tilted somewhat relative to the main imaging sensor.

Flash

Sony A350 Flash

The Sony A350 features a built-in, pop-up flash, which operates in either Auto, Fill-Flash, Slow-sync, Rear Sync, Wireless, and Flash-off modes. To release the flash from its compartment, press the button on the left side of the pentamirror housing. Close it again by pushing the flash head back down.

The Flash mode is changed from the Function screen. In Auto flash mode (available only in the camera's Auto or Scene Selection modes), the camera automatically determines when to fire the flash based on the existing lighting. In Fill-Flash mode, the flash fires with every exposure, regardless of lighting conditions. Slow-sync mode fires the flash for foreground fill exposure, while allowing the background to burn in. The Rear Flash Sync mode fires the flash at the end of the shutter time, rather than the beginning. If you have moving objects in the scene with lights, as with a car, this will produce a sharp image of your subject, with a "motion trail" following behind it when shooting at slower shutter speeds. The flash is off when it's closed.

The Wireless mode lets the Sony A350 work with compatible remote flash units with wireless capability, specifically the Sony HVL-F56AM and HVL-F36AM. Four separate control channels are available for wireless operation, to allow multiple photographers to work wirelessly in the same area without interfering with each other. You can only control the power to a single flash or group of flash units though: It's not possible to separately control the exposure for two or more groups of external flash units, as it is with the Canon (two groups of external units plus the camera's own flash) or Nikon (three groups plus the camera's flash) wireless systems.

A Red-Eye Reduction option is available through the Custom 1 menu. When Red-Eye reduction is enabled, the camera will fire a few low-power flash pulses before it actually snaps the picture, to make the pupils of your subjects' eyes contract.

The Sony A350 offers two methods of flash metering, set through the Record menu. Its default mode is called ADI, which stands for Advanced Distance Integration. In this mode, it bases its flash exposure on the lens aperture and distance feedback from the autofocus system, as well as on the light reflected back from a pre-flash. By determining how far away the target subject is, the camera knows how much flash power is required to illuminate it, and is less likely to be fooled by subjects that are unusually light or dark overall. Alternatively, the Pre-Flash TTL (through the lens) method bases the exposure determination solely on a small metering flash before the main exposure. Used in conjunction with the spot autofocus option mentioned earlier, the ADI flash metering should be more accurate with small subjects against a different colored background than the pre-flash method.

Flash exposure compensation can be set via the Camera 1 menu, measuring two stops lower or greater, in 1/3-stop increments.

The Sony A350's built-in flash has a Guide Number (GN) of 12 meters or 39 feet at ISO 100. Maximum sync speed is 1/160s. High Speed Sync (HSS) shooting with shutter speeds up to 1/4,000s is available with Sony HVL-F56AM, HVL-F42AM, and HVL-F36AM external flash units.

The Sony A350 also has a top-mounted hot shoe for attaching an external flash unit. The shoe design and contact arrangement are set up for Sony's and Minolta's own dedicated flash units.

Flash Test Results

Coverage and Range
Powerful flash at close range, with good coverage. Our standard shots required average exposure compensation.

Coverage. Flash coverage was uneven at wide-angle (18mm), but much more uniform at telephoto (70mm). In the Indoor test, the Sony A350's flash underexposed our subject a little at its default setting, requiring a +1.0 EV exposure compensation adjustment to get good results (perhaps slightly overexposed, but +0.7 EV was a bit too dim), which is about average for this shot. The camera's Slow-Sync flash mode produced more even results, though with a stronger pinkish-orange cast from the room lighting. The Slow-Sync flash also required exposure compensation of +1.0 EV.

Flash Range: Wide Angle
6 ft	7 ft	8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft
1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100
12 ft	13 ft	14 ft	15 ft	16 ft
1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/60 sec f3.5 ISO 100

Flash Range: Telephoto
6 ft	7 ft	8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft
1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100
12 ft	13 ft	14 ft	15 ft	16 ft
1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/125 sec f5.6 ISO 100

ISO 100 Range. At wide-angle, flash shots at ISO 100 remained bright all the way out to a distance of 16 feet. At full telephoto and ISO 100, the target remained bright to about 14 feet, though it was slightly dimmer overall than the wide-angle shots.

Manufacturer-Specified Flash Range
Wide-angle	Telephoto
11 feet ISO 100	7 feet ISO 100

Manufacturer Specified Flash Test. The A350's built-in flash has a Guide Number (GN) of 12 meters at ISO 100. That works out to about 11 feet at f/3.5 and 7 feet at f/5.6, the maximum aperture of of the kit zoom lens at wide angle and telephoto respectively. In the wide angle shot above, the Alpha 350 performs as Sony says it will, producing good exposures at the rated distances. The telephoto shot was a little dimmer, as it was in our ISO 100 series, however this is probably due to differences in evaluative metering, not flash range. Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. We've now also begun shooting two shots using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims.

Imatest Results

Sony A350 Imatest Results

We routinely use Norman Koren's excellent "Imatest" analysis program for quantitative, thoroughly objective analysis of digicam test images. I highly recommend it to our technically-oriented readers, as it's far and away the best, most comprehensive analysis program I've found to date.

My comments below are just brief observations of what we see in the Imatest results. A full discussion of all the data Imatest produces is really beyond the scope of this review: Visit the Imatest web site for a full discussion of what the program measures, how it performs its computations, and how to interpret its output.

Here's some of the results produced by Imatest for the Sony A350:

sRGB Accuracy Comparison
Sony A350	Canon XSi	Nikon D60	Pentax K200D

The Sony A350 showed very good color accuracy, as well as fairly accurate saturation levels. Hue accuracy was quite good, with most of the hue shift occurring in the cyans, blues and reds. Average saturation was 103.8% (3.8% oversaturated) and average "delta-C" color error was only 5.2 after correction for saturation, which is also very good. (Delta-C is the same as the more commonly referred to delta-E, but delta-C takes into account only color differences, ignoring luminance variation.) Overall, excellent color accuracy for an SLR, especially a consumer oriented model. (Most consumer-oriented SLRs produce more oversaturated color. Many consumers prefer this to the more accurate color of the A350. If you like less-"punchy" color, the Sony A350 would be a good choice.) Mouse over the links below the illustration above to compare results with other recent models.

Adobe RGB Accuracy Comparison
Sony A350	Canon XSi	Nikon D60	Pentax K200D

As is true of most SLRs, when using the Adobe RGB color space (which provides a much wider gamut, or range of colors that can be expressed), the Sony A350 delivers more highly saturated color, with an average saturation of 108.5% and average saturation-corrected hue error of 5.38 "delta-C" units. Again, mouse over the links below the illustration above to compare results with other recent SLRs.

This image shows how the Sony A350 actually rendered the colors of the MacBeth chart, compared to a numerically ideal treatment. In each color swatch, the outer perimeter shows the color as actually captured by the camera, the inner square shows the numerically ideal color, after correcting for the luminance of the photographed chart (as determined by a second-order curve fit to the values of the gray swatches), and the small rectangle inside the inner square shows the numerically ideal color, without any luminance correction. This image shows the excellent hue accuracy, as well as a contrast curve that results in slight overexposure at the ends of the tonal scale. Overall though, the colors are impressively close to their "correct" values.

There's a lot in this particular graph, as always, a lot more than we have room to go into here. (This set of plots has also changed a little in the more recent versions of Imatest. Some of the plots that were shown here previously are now shown in other Imatest output. Since we largely focus on the Noise Spectrum plot, we'll only show the graphic above, which includes that plot.)

In comparing these graphs with those from competing cameras, I've found that the Noise Spectrum graph at lower right is the most important. Cameras that manage to shift their noise spectrum to higher frequencies have much finer-grained noise structures, making their noise less visually objectionable. In the graph above, this would show up as a noise spectrum curve that remained higher on the right side, representing higher noise frequencies. The champion at this was the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, which produced remarkably fine-grained image noise, even at very high ISOs.

The Sony A350 does a good job of keeping a fair of the luminance noise energy at high frequencies; what little low-ISO image noise that's there is more fine-grained as a result. The red and blue channels are a little noisier than the others, but that's not at all unusual , and not visible even when closely inspecting low ISO shots. (Unless you look at the individual color channels, where you can see some blotches in the red channel in flat tints of certain colors.)

What's a little odd here though, are the spikes that occur in the Noise Spectrum plot every 0.125 or 1/8 cycles per pixel. The source of the noise spikes appears to be the lighter pixels along the edges of the 8x8 pixel blocks used in the A350's JPEG encoding. We first saw this phenomenon with the Sony A200 and it appears the A350 is similar, though the spikes are not quite as pronounced. To illustrate, below are modified crops from the Sony A350 (left) and Nikon D60 (right). After cranking up the contrast and magnifying by 200% (overall, a pretty significant manipulation, these artifacts aren't nearly as visible in the unaltered image), the abrupt edges of the 8x8 blocks in the A350 crop can be easily seen. Block edges cannot be seen in the Nikon D60 crop, nor can they been seen in converted A350 RAW files. Interestingly, "normal" JPEG compression reduces the size of the spikes, compared to "fine," rather than increasing them. This might be an issue, but the overall noise levels are so low that the noise spikes aren't really visible at ISO 100 under normal conditions. Bottom line, the Sony A350 noise levels are low at low ISO.

Middle gray patch, very high contrast, magnified 200%
Sony A350	Nikon D60

Here's the same set of noise data at ISO 3,200. Here we can see there is a shift towards the left of the graph, indicating a much courser grain structure to the noise. And indeed, when ISO 3,200 images from the A350 are closely examined, this effect can be easily seen. The red channel also has significantly more noise at lower frequencies than the other channels, though at higher frequencies the noise in both the red and green channels are much closer to the others, compared to the results at low ISOs. Visually, red-channel noise has a very distinct, prominent grain structure, more so than that in the blue and green channels. As a result, you'll tend to see red blotches more so than other colors in shadow areas at 3,200 ISO.

This chart compares the Sony A350's noise performance over a range of ISOs against that of other cameras. While I continue to show noise plots of this sort because readers ask for them, I each time point out that the noise magnitude is only a small part of the story, the grain pattern being much more important. Here, we can see that the Sony A350's luminance noise starts out quite low, comparable to most of the competition, then rises at roughly the same rate as the others to ISO 400. It continues to rise to ISO 800, where some of the competition's high ISO NR has already kicked in. (Decreasing noise levels, but at the expense of some fine detail.) Then we see A350 noise levels drop dramatically at ISO 1600, where its more aggressive high ISO NR kicks in. It then rises again, ending up at level much lower than the D60, the only other camera in this group that has an ISO 3,200 setting. (Note however that the Nikon D60's High ISO NR option defaults to "Off", which explains why it appears to do worse than the D40x model it replaces, which defaulted to "On".) Do keep in mind these measurements are at default settings, so the shape or position of the curve could be influenced by the settings you choose to use. The Pentax K200D's plot is a good example of this. Its noise magnitude is higher than the others, but that's partly because the K200D's default contrast and sharpness settings are a bit on the high side.

Sony A350 Dynamic Range Analysis

A key parameter in a digital camera is its Dynamic Range, the range of brightness that can be faithfully recorded. At the upper end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is dictated by the point at which the RGB data "saturates" at values of 255, 255, 255. At the lower end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is determined by the point at which there ceases to be any useful difference between adjacent tonal steps. Note the use of the qualifier "useful" in there: While it's tempting to evaluate dynamic range as the maximum number of tonal steps that can be discerned at all, that measure of dynamic range has very little relevance to real-world photography. What we care about as photographers is how much detail we can pull out of the shadows before image noise becomes too objectionable. This, of course, is a very subjective matter, and will vary with the application and even the subject matter in question. (Noise will be much more visible in subjects with large areas of flat tints and subtle shading than it would in subjects with strong, highly contrasting surface texture.)

What makes most sense then, is to specify useful dynamic range in terms of the point at which image noise reaches some agreed-upon threshold. To this end, Imatest computes a number of different dynamic range measurements, based on a variety of image noise thresholds. The noise thresholds are specified in terms of f-stops of equivalent luminance variation in the final image file, and dynamic range is computed for noise thresholds of 1.0 (low image quality), 0.5 (medium image quality), 0.25 (medium-high image quality) and 0.1 (high image quality). For most photographers and most applications, the noise thresholds of 0.5 and 0.25 f-stops are probably the most relevant to the production of acceptable-quality finished images, but many noise-sensitive shooters will insist on the 0.1 f-stop limit for their most critical work.

The image below shows the test results from Imatest for an in-camera JPEG file from the Sony A350 with a nominally-exposed density step target (Stouffer 4110), and the A350's contrast and DRO settings at their default positions.

These are pretty good numbers for a current-model DSLR, in the mid- to upper range of cameras we've tested. More significant than the absolute dynamic range (7.19 EV) is the somewhat steep slope and/or relative abruptness with which the density curve (the curve in the top left of the figure above) ends in the highlight area, and particularly so in the shadows. The ideal shape for a tone curve is more of an "S" shape, with a longer tail in both the highlights and shadows. A long tail at both ends of the curve means that the camera approaches pure black and pure white gradually as the subject passes outside its tonal range. While this doesn't necessarily preserve more data in an absolute sense, it will provide smoother gradations in highlights and shadows, and in particular will preserve more shape in objects having highly saturated colors. Bottom line? Not quite as good as the A200 (which has larger pixels), but still a nice job.

Processing the A350's RAW (ARW) files through Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) version 4.4 improved dynamic range by about 2/3 stop at the highest quality level. (It bears noting though, that extreme manipulation of RAW files to extend dynamic range can introduce severe color shifts in the resulting files: This dramatically increased dynamic range may only be really usable when converting the images to black and white. - As is the case with most cameras.) These results were obtained by using ACR's automatic settings; slightly better results may be possible by adjusting the sliders manually, but I found little improvement in my own twiddling. Worth noting here is that ACR's default noise reduction settings reduced the red- and blue- channel noise (see the plot in the lower left-hand corner) relative to the levels in the in-camera JPEG. ACR also shifted even more of the noise energy into high spatial frequencies, making its residual noise even less objectionable than that found in the camera JPEGs.

Dynamic Range, the bottom line:

The net result was that the A350 exhibited very good dynamic range, its in-camera JPEGs perhaps helped a little by the A350's default "Standard DRO" (Dynamic Range Optimizer) setting. It should be noted though, that the DRO feature does nothing to increase the fundamental dynamic range of the camera: That's purely a factor of the sensor and associated electronics. We saw almost no difference in DR values (within 0.02 EV) with the three DRO settings (Off, Standard and Advanced DRO+), which isn't really a surprise: What DRO does is optimize use of the available dynamic range, pulling some of the extreme tonal values into the visible range. It doesn't change the actual underlying dynamic range of the sensor.

To get some perspective, here's a summary of the Sony A350's dynamic range performance, and how it compares to other digital SLRs that we also have Imatest dynamic range data for. (Results are arranged in order of decreasing dynamic range at the "High" quality level.):

The results shown in the table are interesting. One of the first things that struck me back when I initially looked at test data for a wide range of d-SLRs, was that here again, purely analytical measurements don't necessarily correlate all that well with actual photographic experience. There's no question that the Fuji S3 Pro deserves its place atop the list, as its unique "SR" technology does indeed deliver a very obvious improvement in tonal range in the highlight portion of the tonal scale. I was surprised to see the analytical results place the Olympus EVOLT as highly as they did, given that our sense of that camera's images was that they were in fact noisier than those of many other d-SLRs that we looked at. In the other direction, I was quite surprised to see the Nikon D2x place as low on the listings as it did, given that we found that camera's shadow detail to be little short of amazing.

One thing that's going on here though, is that we tested each camera at its lowest ISO setting, which should produce best-case noise levels. This is in fact what many photographers will be most interested in, but it does perhaps place some of the Nikons (like the D40) at a disadvantage, as their lowest ISO setting is 200, as compared to the ISO 100 settings available on most other models.

Sony A350 Resolution Chart Test Results

The chart above shows consolidated results from spatial frequency response measurements in both the horizontal and vertical axes. The "MTF 50" numbers tend to correlate best with visual perceptions of sharpness, so those are what I focus on here. The uncorrected resolution figures are 1,902 line widths per picture height in the horizontal direction (corresponding to the vertically-oriented edge), and 1,630 lines along the vertical axis (corresponding to the horizontally-oriented edge), for a combined average of 1,766 LW/PH. Correcting to a "standardized" sharpening with a one-pixel radius increased both vertical and horizontal resolution slightly, resulting in an average of 2,249 LW/PH. Corrected results are good, but not quite as high as one might expect for a 14-megapixel SLR.

To see what's going on, refer to the plots below, which show the actual edge profiles for both horizontal and vertical edges, in both their original and corrected forms. Here, you can see that the edges (first plots below) have a very subtle in-camera sharpening applied, resulting in very clean edges with little overshoot. (Once again, we're happy to see that the Sony A350 doesn't sharpen its images too much, so it doesn't obscure fine detail as much as some cameras do.)

Menus

Sony A350 Modes and Menus

Capture Modes: When powered on, the camera is automatically placed into Record mode. The Exposure Mode dial on top of the camera sets the main shooting mode, with the following options:

•  Full Auto: This mode places the camera entirely in control of the exposure, though the user can adjust the exposure compensation and all options in the Function menu, including Flash, Autofocus, White Balance, Metering, AF Area, and D-Range Optimizer modes.
•  Program AE (with Shift): This mode places the camera in control over both aperture and shutter speed, while the user has access to all other menu functions. Turning the Control dial with or without shifting the Exposure Compensation button cycles through a range of equivalent exposure settings, enabling the Program Shift mode.
•  Aperture Priority: This mode puts the user in control of the aperture setting while the camera selects the best shutter speed. (The aperture range varies with the lens in use.)
•  Shutter Priority: Allows the user to set the shutter speed, from 1/4,000 to 30 seconds, while the camera selects the most appropriate aperture setting.
•  Manual: Provides complete user control over the exposure, including both aperture and shutter speed settings. A Bulb shutter setting also becomes available in this mode, allowing variable length exposures for as long as you hold down the shutter button.
•  Night Portrait/View: Night portrait uses flash to expose your subject in the foreground, while leaving the shutter open a little longer to allow the background lighting to burn in. Night View exposes illuminated night scenes properly while maintaining a dark background.
•  Sunset: Optimizes settings to capture rich, warm sunsets.
•  Sports Action: Enables continuous AF and continuous drive modes while favoring faster shutter speeds to capture moving subjects.
•  Macro: This mode is for close-up pictures of small objects, enhancing color in flowers, etc.
•  Landscape: Optimizes settings to produce sharp, colorful landscapes.
•  Portrait: Optimizes camera settings to reproduce warm, soft skin tones against a slightly blurred background.
•  Flash Off: Disables the flash for shooting in a location where flash photography is prohibited or undesirable, while leaving the camera in Automatic mode.

Sony A350 Menus

Pressing the Menu button provides access to the camera's full menu system. The following options are available in most camera modes as menu tabs at the top of the display:

Rawindex

Digital Cameras - Sony A350 RAW Test Images

The tables below show selected representative images from our test shot series that were shot in RAW mode.

Depending on your browser, you can download the images by clicking on the links, or by right-clicking on the links and selecting "Save Target As...", or similar. Some browsers change the file extension to .TIFF. In that case, just rename to .ARW after downloading. You can see the full set of in-camera JPEG shots, including exposure information extracted from the EXIF file headers, on the Thumbnail index page.

NOTE: These are very large files (~15+ megabytes each). They're here for you to use, but please be considerate of our bandwidth; don't just download everything willy-nilly. - Thanks!

Still Life

Multi-Target

Indoor Portrait, No Flash

Outdoor Portrait

Far-Field

Comparison

Sony A350 Feature Comparison

The chart below compares the A350 with other, current Sony SLRs. What we've done below is to present something of a hybrid comparison between these four models. A red cell means that a given camera performs below the others, a green cell means that it performs better, and a yellow cell means it falls somewhere between. In cases where two cameras share a superior capability, both their cells will be colored green, etc. Sharp-eyed readers may find some areas where we haven't chosen to highlight a particular difference. Those cases are simply ones that we don't feel are significant in typical use of the camera.

Note: If your browser is not showing all columns properly, try the "Print this Page" link at the bottom of this page.