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Sony Alpha DSLR A300 review

Full review at: www.cameralabs.com : A ten minute video tour around Sony's latest DSLR, the Alpha A300, by Gordon Laing, Editor of www ...

Sony Alpha DSLR-A300 Review | Digital SLRs | CNET UK

Any self-respecting dSLR has to offer live view these days, but they all rely on clunky mirror movements and need cool-running CMOS sensors. All except this one. Sony's DSLR-A300 uses a regular 10-megapixel CCD and offers instant live view at the flick of a switch, and via a neat tilting LCD too. It can be yours for around �340.

Positives
Sony's live view system is either cheap and crappy or brilliantly simple, depending on whether you like your engineering elegant or you just want it to work. Other live view systems flip the mirror up and open the shutter so that the image falls on to the sensor and gets fed to the LCD. Sony doesn't bother with all that nonsense. Instead, it simply deflects some of the light on to a secondary, lower-resolution sensor in the pentaprism, and it's this that produces the live image. You activate it with a sliding switch on the top of the camera. Instantly, a little shutter blocks off the viewfinder eyepiece and the live image appears on the LCD. There's no clanking of mirrors and no permanently-open shutter leaving your sensor open to dust particles. It's not an elegant solution, but it's a damned good one.

That's not the only good thing about this camera. Sony's built-in Super SteadyShot anti-shake system works with any compatible lens, and thanks to a battery life of 750 shots (unless you use the live view a lot), you can shoot all day on a single charge. The Sony's pictures are really clear and vibrant, and the detail is good too. But wouldn't you get even more detail with the 14-megapixel DSLR-A350? Well, it does offer another 4 million pixels, but it doesn't really capitalise on them and overall the detail is pretty similar.

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