HonourableTyr
Senior Member
Construction is solid, although the fibre reinforced plastic does leave room for improvement with a full alloy casing. It is lighter than a full metal camera which is one advantage of its outer construction. Weather sealing is fantastic to have but, it is only as effective as the weakest point which is the lenses at the moment. Only about one month away from the release of the first sealed lenses with high speed silent motors.
Features are generally very good but it has one or two things included that make you wonder why they bothered. The multiple exposure mode is just too slow to use for anything except studio work where the position of an object is changed VERY slowly. Continuous shooting is very slow in this mode and generally just over 1 frame per second.
The image quality is very good when coupled with a decent lens. The kit lenses are a little too soft around the edges for my liking but with my 20 year old manual A50f1.7 images are incredibly sharp and clear from about f4 onwards. Even wide open the images have lots of detail, and a nice shallow depth of field. Noise is generally well controlled and very usable to ISO400 with some loss of detail at ISO800. I generally only use ISO1600 for B&W photography as the loss of detail is too high for colour.
It is very easy to use if you know what you are doing. It is very difficult to use if you know nothing about photography. This is one problem I've encountered several times in the SLR market. People buy or are sold the camera because of the image quality and then can't figure out why it doesn't work. I'm ignoring these situations when rating because they are just silly.
Value for money is excellent, £450 (~$900) is the cheapest price here in the UK (July 2007) for the body only and £500 with the 18-55mm kit lens.
Problems:
Vertical banding at ISO1600 when the image is incorrectly exposed and then pushed in post processing by more than 1EV Step.
Features are generally very good but it has one or two things included that make you wonder why they bothered. The multiple exposure mode is just too slow to use for anything except studio work where the position of an object is changed VERY slowly. Continuous shooting is very slow in this mode and generally just over 1 frame per second.
The image quality is very good when coupled with a decent lens. The kit lenses are a little too soft around the edges for my liking but with my 20 year old manual A50f1.7 images are incredibly sharp and clear from about f4 onwards. Even wide open the images have lots of detail, and a nice shallow depth of field. Noise is generally well controlled and very usable to ISO400 with some loss of detail at ISO800. I generally only use ISO1600 for B&W photography as the loss of detail is too high for colour.
It is very easy to use if you know what you are doing. It is very difficult to use if you know nothing about photography. This is one problem I've encountered several times in the SLR market. People buy or are sold the camera because of the image quality and then can't figure out why it doesn't work. I'm ignoring these situations when rating because they are just silly.
Value for money is excellent, £450 (~$900) is the cheapest price here in the UK (July 2007) for the body only and £500 with the 18-55mm kit lens.
Problems:
Vertical banding at ISO1600 when the image is incorrectly exposed and then pushed in post processing by more than 1EV Step.