Sony Alpha DSLR-A200

The colors were great on the A200. It kept things natural as far as possible, which isjust the way I like it in my DSLR cameras. It worked perfectly well with all the tricky colors like reds, oranges and greens, without losing out on any precious detail.

Speaking of details, I found the images in my tests to be a bit on the softer side, which would tend to blur out some of the finer details (evident in all the test images posted here). Of course this could be easily fixed in post-processing, but still, the finer image you get from the camera, the better it works for you in post-processing as well.

When shooting the image below using the Night preset of the camera, it boosted the sensitivity to ISO 800 and use a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds. I took a second shot using ISO 400 sensitivity and setting the shutter speed to 4 seconds, and as you can see below (click on the images for full res), the difference between the two is not too much. I can safely say that you can use the Night mode under low light conditions without worrying about major image deterioration.

 Shot using Manual

While the camera does do some good work with images, its speeds leave a bit to be desired. It takes a little over a second to start up and around 2 seconds to shut down. While these speeds are excellent on a consumer compact, it's not on a camera of this caliber. The shooting speeds are a little less than 3 frames per second in burst mode without flash.

The battery life was very impressive at around 700 shots on a single charge (with and without flash).