Sony Alpha A350

Sony was a relatively late entrant into the DSLR market, buying into the party by licensing Konika Minolta’s designs a couple of years back. But the A350 is the third generation of Sony Alpha and it’s an impressive beast.

Riding with stabilisers

The A350 has a massive advantage over the traditional DSLR ruling classes of Canon and Nikon. It has in-body image stabilisation, effectively making every lens you put on it about two stops faster. It’s a compelling feature and one that’s made the Alpha range very popular.

The standard kit lens also has a better zoom range of 18-70mm compared to the 18-55mm of the standard consumer offerings from Nikon and Sony. On top of that, the Sony’s auto focus with the kits lens is unnervingly fast and accurate, especially in low light where others struggle.

Features galore

The A350 also brings the increasingly trendy Live View feature to the party, for framing shots using the 2.7in monitor screen. What’s more, it trumps all-comers as far as pixel count is concerned, packing 14.2 megapixels.

Also useful is the fact the screen itself is a pull-out affair. You can angle it downwards to let you frame over-the-head Live View shots; or upwards for when you want to put the camera down low and get a worm’s eye view of things. It doesn’t swivel out or rotate in the way camcorder screens do though.

The downside? Well, it’s pug-ugly for starters. DSLRs aren’t known for their elegance, but this really is no beauty. Second, the range of lenses available is limited compared to the massive choice for Canon and to a lesser extent Nikon DSLRs. We also found the menu system less clear and intuitive than Nikon or Canon.

More serious is the optical viewfinder, which presents you with a frustratingly small frame and gives the feeling of looking down the wrong end of your binoculars. And finally it’s not one for sports photographers, with a maximum burst rate of just 2.5 shots per second.

In the end, it’s a very tricky toss-up at this price point between the Canon EOS 450D and the Alpha 350. We still prefer the feel, speed and heritage of the Canon, but on features alone there’s little doubt that the Alpha has the edge.