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The Sony Alpha A350 gives its user a crisp, clear 2.7 inch LCD with 230,000 pixels, a 9 point auto focus system and 14.2 megapixel images.

The LCD has an anti reflective coating, so that your view is uncompromised by bright light, and a tilt option, allowing you to move the screen to face completely upward or all the way downward (and anywhere in between) I’m not really sure why Sony didn’t make the LCD a full tilt and swivel option like most of its competitors.

The Sony Alpha A350 has given the battery icon a little revamp and instead of the standard battery meter your will find on most camera’s – the A350 displays a percentage of remaining life as well as a bar image (four bars; 100%, one bar 25% etc).

The Alpha A350 is powered by a lithium NP-FM55H battery which allows for up to 730 shots from a full charge, using the optical view finder or plus minus 400 shots using Live View. You can increase the camera’s battery life to 1,500 shots in one charge by adding Sony’s new vertical battery grip, the VG-B30AM. The vertical battery grip will also help you when handling the camera in portrait mode.

The Numbers: The Sony Alpha A350 weights in at 682 grams with the battery and just under 600 grams without it. ISO maxes at 3200. Shooting at 2.5 frames per second while using the OVF and just 2 fps while using Live View mode.

The Sony Alpha A350 has an automatic pop up flash which springs out when the camera deems nessisary. This automatic action can be turned off allowing the user to deploy the flash manually with the use of a little button on the left hand side of the lens housing mount, next to the little orange Alpha logo.

Sony’s Alpha A350 produces images with rich, vibrant colour and fine detail with help from the APS-CCD image sensor and BIONZ (®) processing engine. When you are shooting in low or dimmer lighting conditions, the SteadyShot image stabiliser will enable shutter speeds from 2.5 to 3.5 times slower than would be possible without this feature.

Autofocus with the view finder is started up automatically with Eye-Start Autofocus, when you bring you eye to the view finder you will find that the auto focus system is ready for you. This is possible because of a little infa-red light that pics up the movement of you eye to the view finder.

Anti dust features are built in by way of a low pass vibration, shaking the dust particles off the lens at start up. This
won’t remove any sticky substances, but is always a great feature for lens care.

Sony has added a really great button, FN; press it and immediately all of your favourite functions appear on the LCD in the form or a simple worded menu.

A second button worth mentioning is the Smart Teleconverter 2 x zoom button. You can only use this option in Live View, but according to Sony this will turn the camera’s 70mm kit lens into a 200mm zoom! What it does is crop the image from 14.2 megapixels to 7.1 (or 3.8 depending on the zoom you use) without experiencing the blurring normally found in digital zoom.

SteadyShot helps the user to stabilize images with any lens mount.

I found the body quality excellent. Thick plastic with a rubberised hand grip and plenty space for two handed operation. There are around 20 external control buttons for all of the commonly used features (including ISO and a
Live View / OVF View switch). The Sony Alpha A350 has space for a Compact Flash card for memory storage and an external flash gun hot-shoe neatly covered by a slip off plastic cover.

My Conclusion: I’ll give the Sony Alpha 350A a 3 star rating. It’s a great camera for beginners.