Great DSLR camera with excellent image quality, and inexpensive

I have always been interested in photography. My problem has been venturing farther into it and becoming serious hobbyist, due to prohibitively expensive equipment and film, not to mention dark room equipment, lab costs, etc. I’ve owned some digital point and shoot cameras, but that’s all they were – point and shoot. I wanted something more, perhaps if not semi-professional, then at least a very good amateur single lens reflex camera. The problem was I could not afford it.

Enter Sony Alpha A200. This is an awesome piece of digital SLR equipment. I was looking for a good camera that would get me introduced to a digital SLR  world, with all it’s wonderful qualities, such as RAW format, the manual controls, the ability to view the end result on the fly and not having to wait for darkroom processing, and much, much more.

I have been looking for an under-$700 kit, including a camera and starter lens, and have researched the heck out of the DSLR cameras in this range. This is by no means a comparison review, but I thought I’d mention a few competitors to this camera. The Nikon D40 was too small to my liking, and too light, also coming with only 6 megapixels, no image stabilization, and features a little out of date. It had some good points too, such as low light image quality, reliability and just well, it’s a Nikon! The cons outweighed the pros for me, and so they did for Canon Rebel Xsi and Olympus 10 megapixel competitor (can’t remember exact model). Also a big negative for me was the country of manufacturing, for the cameras listed was either Taiwan, China or Malaysia. Nothing against those fine countries, but the quality is not up to par with Japan in those countries, and I don’t care how well the QC checkes the finished product. The Japanese made |electronics| are just better, period (note I placed an emphasis on “electronics”).

When I came across Sony Alpha A200, I wasn’t even aware that Sony made the digital SLRs. I always knew their excellent Powershot models, but D-SLRs? Turns out Sony bought out the Minolta/Konica (or is it the other way around?) division, and basically rebadged one of their cameras to get started. This camera had a very nice feel to it; didn’t feel too small at all and fit nicely in my hand (which I would say is a medium sized hand – not too large, but not small either), unlike Nikon, also had a very nice weight to it, so your arm doesn’t get tired so quickly. The features were what won me over to this camera, and here are few worth mentioning; very quick autofocus, that never left me wishing I switched to manual mode; it just seemed to pick up exactly what I wanted to be in focus. There’s nifty eye motion detection, which starts focusing as soon as you bring the camera to your eye, as well as the position sensor, which flips the image on the LCD screen vertically or horizontally, depending on how you’re holding the camera. That LCD, by the way, is very bright and easy to see, unless it’s in direct sunlight. All the manual options are nicely displayed on that LCD (the A300 and above feature the LiveView, allowing you to use LCD instead of viewfinder, but I found that with the weight of the camera, it’s not very comfortable). Both the function and menu options are very intuitive and easy to navigate; it took me only about 30 minutes worth of tinkering (I do hate the manuals) to figure out most of the features and options available.

The Steadyshot image stabilization is great, and the fact that it’s actually in the camera itself, allows you to use a wide variety of older Minolta lenses, compatible with Sony’s Alpha mount, and still enjoy image stabilization. That fact also makes lenses you buy, a bit cheaper, although there are plenty of expensive lenses (Carl Zeiss, etc) available for later on when you graduate from amateur to serious amateur. On camera flash is fairly weak, and useless, unless you shoot from close distance, at which point it washes the image out, so I purchased and use the external Sony flash, which allows many many more ways of bouncing light off the ceiling, walls, use it wirelessly, etc. Never looked back. I can’t imagine any brand’s on camera flash anyways, as they are all about the same.

The only flaw of this camera is low light image quality, but only if you’re really blow the image up to large sizes, for any ISO above 200. For regular 4x6 shots, it’s just fine, but if you plan on making a poster out of your shot, it may be a problem.

It’s also a great bonus that this camera is now being retailed for under $600 in a kit with 28-80 lens, and IT IS MADE IN JAPAN.

Overall it’s a great camera, and I would recommend it to anyone, including my mother. Hurry up and buy one while the Minolta lenses are still aplenty on Ebay.