Re A350 etc – I had to make a difficult decision whether to take the A350 or A700 to Alicante last week. I took the A700. In a way I am glad, because we ended up in the city for their big midsummer Fogueres de S. Juan festival with parades and fireworks every night and street life lively until 4 every morning. I shot over 1000 night pix. But the A350 would have been superb for pix over the heads of crowds, for the fireworks, and many other uses where I really missed it. I needed both cameras, but could not take them due to weight/space. The A700 turned out to have developed worse back focus, and also collected dust on sensor, for the first time. I was able to clean the sensor easily enough with a blower, but the back focus issue lost me optimum quality on many low light shots with the 28mmm f2. I now intend to do the DIY fix, as I did with my D7D. It seems that as time passes, the sensor is most likely to settle slightly forward of its factory set position.

David

I have this camera and like the other Sony digital equipment we have used it is first rate in all the aspects David so lucidly points out. (I have other Sony Digital Cameras and also several cameras made by the other leading manufacturers and they have all been surpassed by this latest offering). A month in Europe is planned starting in just a few days and the Alpha 350 will be the main gear put to daily use … enough said!

Minolta brand diopters (+1, -1, etc) are difficult to find for older Minolta cameras (XD-11, XE-7, X-700, etc). Are you aware of any other brands that might be fit here as well?

My article here continues to get pointless attacks on dPreview from one individual – I remain banned from replying to any of this stuff, so here goes:

Barry Fitzgerald wrote:
>
> That’s just a cop out. And probably the most ill informed comment I
> have ever seen DK put up. Its a cynical attempt to defend the weak
> high ISO performance of the A350, and add some kind of very
> unconvincing dribble about the good old days of film…brought back
> on digital.

Nothing to do with ‘the good old days of film’. It’s just a creative choice you can make by disabling all NR and working at 3200, which happens to produce a more attractive result expected. The article was partly prompted by finding this out, not the other way round. I received some 20 x 16 Ilford pre-mounted inkjet boards to test in my Epson 3800 and I was thinking how ordinary the average inkjet from a digital image looks unless you print on art paper (which I usually do). These boards are gloss and pearl. Then I started thinking about what sort of image I’d like to try printing, and remembered the prints I used to make on Cibachrome from 3M (Scotch) 1000 chrome, with soft muted colours and crisp strong grain plus added Cokin soft/filter FX.

From that, I experimented by dusk light with the A350, using the 100mm soft focus on maximum softness. The JPEGs are not much use – even with NR off the grain effect of the noise is too softened – but ACR conversions from raw do exactly what I wanted.

The grain is still a bit too fine at 13 x 19 inch print size, and cropping from half the image looks better. That’s exactly the same technique b/w workers used with Tri-X processed in Geoffrey Crawley’s FX-16 formula designed, according to Geoffrey, to produce ‘obtrusive’ grain. But I think all this is before Barry’s time, so he won’t really have any idea what’s being talked about, any more than if I rambled on about putting HPS through Neofin Red.

David

“…and is currently the pick of the high resolution, feature packed budged DSLR’s on the market.”

i.e. They consider the A350 – “Best in Class”.

Andy Westlake of dPreview made this comment to a poster complaining about the poor quality of the A350 samples gallery:

“The A350 is capable of excellent results at low ISO, and we’ve explained and demonstrated that, but it’s behind the competition at higher sensitivities.”

What is wrong with this statement?

I’ll tell you – the A350 has no direct competition. There is no other 14.2 megapixel body you can buy for £399 in the UK. The only ‘competition’ existing is the Pentax/Samsung 14.6 megapixel body at a much higher price, with a very different kind of Live View.

The root of the complaints about the dPreview test is that the high resolution and unprecedented low price-point of the A350 are not taken in full consideration. The competition is assumed to be any other camera around the same price, whether 10 or 12 megapixels or lower.

David

Although one week has passed since I was banned from dPreview forums, I remain unable to post (my login has been restored). This has left me unable to reply to some comments which doubt my integrity as a journalist.

This is the reply I would have given, tonight, to one post which is just the latest in a series from a handful of individuals:

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I don’t think anyone is unaware that a personal review of the Alpha 350 written on photoclubalpha is there for a specific audience, and my background is easily found out. I started writing for photographic magazines in 1970 at the age of 18, became technical editor of ‘Photography’ in 1973, Associate editor of ‘Photo Technique’ in 1975, and also editor of ‘The Photographer’ the same year. I also started writing for the Minolta Club magazine in 1974 (before that I used Pentax, and wrote for their magazine).

I’ve worked at different times, producing magazines or undertaking product trials and as a consultant, for Kodak, Ilford, Agfa, Jessop, Paterson and briefly as one half of Bergamot Ltd, creators of new b/w darkroom products working with Chimifoto Ornano in Italy and packaging them for the UK market. You will also find my name on a few photographic books as author, and many as editor. My first book commission was to write the Darkroom Section for John Hedgecoe’s original ‘The Book of Photography’.

I do not own shares in any photographic company and I receive no retainers or payment from any photographic company; between 1981 and 1985 I was paid by Minolta (UK) Ltd to build their user club from an original 800 members to over 12,000 by 1988. The ceased to pay any support once we passed 5000 members. We never paid any royalty to Minolta for the right to continue running the club.

Sony has no dialog with me although I know their Alpha manager personally, as he moved from Konica Minolta. He was not positive towards the Minolta Club when there, and made it clear on moving to Sony that he would prefer to see it shut down and replaced by a corporately-designed user website.

Since 1987 I have co-owned Icon Publications Ltd with my wife Shirley, producing at any time up to four different photographic titles and 24 issues a year, plus websites from which we earn no income whatsoever. We are very much dependent on magazine advertising, and any sign of bias on my part would lose me our most important advertisers, Canon and Nikon.

Sony has never advertised in any magazine we have published. I have been paid one cheque by Sony UK – for expenses to fly from Scotland in 2006 and attend a meeting to discuss why I should close the Minolta Club and to hear their plans for the new Sony UK User Club website

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