A58 Review

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classiccameras
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Re: A58 Review

Unread post by classiccameras »

Agree about new improvements or detriments mean different things to different people.

My pet thing is image quality and colour rendering. In the Ephotozine review yes, they said there was better detail and performance because of the higher pixel count etc. but they could not bring themselves to offer more than the word 'good' for picture quality in their summery. In Ephotozine's reviews of the A37 and A57 they gave both models 'excellent' for picture quality. My personal opinion is Sony should have stopped at 16mp, but they did not want to get caught lagging behind the sales orientated pixel race being driven by Canikon.

I bought my A37 purely because it was smaller and lighter than my Nikon D5100 and gave excellent IQ especially with the KM lenses, it is however not as good as my Nikon in the IQ department, especially Jpegs.
I guess there will always be differences of opinion and I do respect other opinions.

Greg.
Interesting thoughts, especially about Sensors, As you may have noticed, Nikon have now started using Toshiba sensors in some of their models rather than sticking solely to Sony for the whole range. There may be a raft of reasons why but I'm not privy to them, but looking at Nikon's philosophy of striving for ever better IQ and performance must be big on the list along with cost.
Or does Nikon know more about Sony's future than we do.

I wonder if Sony are playing a tactful game here by trying to force people over to the NEX system. Olympus and Panasonic did this with 4thirds to M4thirds much to the annoyance of the dedicated E system users. A lot jumped ship because of this.

I know Barry has serious reservations about Pentax and I do to a point, especially their lenses which are really quite bad in comparison, but I think they are a brand worth looking at and there is always Tamron and Sigma to stick on the front.
At least Pentax have not dug themselves a hole they can't get out of, they are ticking over very nicely at 4th place in the DSLR world with no intention of challenging the big boys, because of their cult following.

Pete
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bfitzgerald
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Re: A58 Review

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I can't really recommend Pentax based on my own experience. I had 2 models and one had mirror blur with the SR unit in a specific shutter range, the other had disaster FF in low kelvin light. The company never admitted to either issue, never tried to rectify the problems in production, and ignored my correspondences to them. So my view is that they are not a company that I want to deal with in any way shape or form and I strongly suggest others avoid them too.

That seems OTT, and some might wonder why I'm letting this Sony problem play out. Simple reason is if a company makes the effort, deals with a problem or ideally helps the customer somehow, I'll stick around. If not I walk away.

Sure Pentax have some good ideas, they are easy to use and have in body IS. Since Ricoh took over they've jacked up lens priced again, and a lot in the USA too. You can look at some Sigma and Tamron lenses to fill the gaps and for better value. But I seriously doubt the company is going anywhere with Ricoh, it's not been an improvement over the Hoya ownership either. I just don't feel they are a safe bet. I've had doubts about Sony and still do, but at least you can lay your paws on a lot of s/h Minolta glass. Pentax have very little s/h AF lenses wise for buyers and what there is around is way out of whack price wise.
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Re: A58 Review

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I see your point with Pentax, I had a Kr for a while and it performed OK.
Most of what I said was taken from a Pentax open day at my local dealer where I suspect there was some biased views and sales pitch from Pentax UK, but then you would get the same from all the others.
A good indication is the ammount of second hand cameras seen on the shelves of my local dealer. They are heaving, literally dozens of Canikons and Pentaxes up to the KR, but no K30/K5 +.

The K30 & K5 were and still are a very popular DSLR's and got much praise from many review sites. I think there were big issues with Pentax DSLR's up to the Kr and things started to improve with the K5 and K30, perhaps not perfect yet, but what camera is.
I'm not sure where Ricoh intend to go with Pentax. but I hope they don't wreck such an iconic name.
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Re: A58 Review

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I give them some credit the K-30 (iffy looks aside) is quite a nice camera for what it is, with a good viewfinder and decently specified.
K-5II I have not tried one but did the older K-5. They can certainly make good stuff if they put the effort in, just my own experience left a bad taste in the mouth.
I have similar thoughts on Nikon, they have some excellent well specified/handling (mostly) great flash system but it all fell apart with the AF which was just shocking.

I'd find it hard to suggest Nikon to anyone, that drove me bananas AF is all over the place.

As for Sony I think the A58 has left a few folks scratching their heads. Will be interesting to see how DPR take to it (as they've previously been enthusiastic on the SLT models)
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Greg Beetham
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Re: A58 Review

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I think they are all wondering what to make in a camera that might attract buyers now, Canon tried the super small idea and Sony with the latest intro model with a couple of more MP's than the Canon intro models...of course.
Greg
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Re: A58 Review

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Sony have had pretty small [SLT] DSLR's for some time now in the form of A33/55/35/37. It will be interesting to see just how well the new Canon 100D sells. The new Nikon's such as the D3200 are not really that small by comparison.

Barry, what did you not like about the Pentax K-5, I think I read some where that most of the Pentax range were suffering from slower than average focus times, but things had improved on the K-30 and K-5 11/S!!
This is certainly an area where Sony are better than most.
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Re: A58 Review

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Greg Beetham wrote:I think they are all wondering what to make in a camera that might attract buyers now, Canon tried the super small idea and Sony with the latest intro model with a couple of more MP's than the Canon intro models...of course.
Greg
In case Sony gets flack for "cramming in the megapixels" with the new 20MP sensor, the Canon 18 MP sensor would be about 21 megapixels if it were as large as the APS-C format everybody else uses. Sony still uses some of the largest photo-sites in the industry.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: A58 Review

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Canon will do ok with the EOS 100d, it might have the same boring sensor, but it offers a small body and more importantly it has "Canon" stamped on it.
Biggest mount or not they will sell quite well I would think.

I don't have a problem with the 20mp CMOS, it might have been a better choice for the A77 at the time. But it doesn't seem to offer any advantages bar 4mp over the 16mp one. I really hope they call it quits for 24mp on APS-C it's getting a bit silly really
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Re: A58 Review

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bfitzgerald wrote:Canon will do ok with the EOS 100d, it might have the same boring sensor, but it offers a small body and more importantly it has "Canon" stamped on it.
Biggest mount or not they will sell quite well I would think.
I was at a store today and happened to see the 100D so I picked it up and held it a couple of minutes. Yes, it is quite small but, of course, it isn't really thinner. It didn't feel bad. Of course, I have become accustomed to using the E-M5 so it is almost a monster compared to it. :lol:
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Greg Beetham
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Re: A58 Review

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KevinBarrett wrote: In case Sony gets flack for "cramming in the megapixels" with the new 20MP sensor, the Canon 18 MP sensor would be about 21 megapixels if it were as large as the APS-C format everybody else uses. Sony still uses some of the largest photo-sites in the industry.
Sony and flak? perish the thought. One point regardless though is that the 24MP APS-C sensor in the A77 is much more noisy than the 24MP FF sensor in the A99 or even the A900, and yet DXO gives it such a high rating…very strange, but the new 20MP sensor should be better than the 24 was…well should be.
Their calculator must have spat a big end, they give the A900 a dynamic range of 12.2EVs with a low light ISO of 1415 (overall score of 79?) against the A77 with a dynamic range of 13.2EVs and a low light ISO of 801 but an overall score of 78?
If you can make any sense of that you’re doing better than me. :roll:
Greg
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bfitzgerald
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Re: A58 Review

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DxO makes no sense to me for a few reasons. Margin of error present on all types of testing, yet no mention of this from the company. Second point is no details given on the tests how they are conducted, do you really trust a site that won't give you information about how they test?

Look at this result
Capture.JPG
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Even though the A65 has an identical sensor and identical processor the score varies more than you think.
Capture 2.JPG
(77.68 KiB) Downloaded 2253 times
Now we have the older D90 scoring quite high. I owned both a D90 and D7000, both are decent at high ISO. DR wise the D90 IMO at lower ISO had better DR (less prone to blowouts even taking into account the D7k's hotter metering. I'm sure DxO test DR across the entire ISO range so their overall number might not be indicative of the actual results you get esp at lower ISO levels.

A57 v the 24mp Sony SLT's I cannot for the life of me match results at very high ISO levels of 6400 working in raw even down-sampling. I can't get the 24mp sensor to produce as good an image as the 16mp no matter what I do. D90 older but decent sensor, according to DxO it's superior to the A57 for low light. That is not my own experience of both cameras.

DxO might be fun and some swear by it, but it falls down IMO in actual field use, the numbers just don't convey real world results in many cases.
Look at this
Sony 3 models.JPG
(76.95 KiB) Downloaded 2253 times

Nobody in their right mind would rate the A900 as better for low light than the A580, the images just don't convey that. And why does the A700 score so low? Yet using a sensor similar to the D90 that scores so high?
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Re: A58 Review

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I ignore those top level scores on DxO. Click on the Measurements tab and the info in there is more interesting.
classiccameras
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Re: A58 Review

Unread post by classiccameras »

I have never used DxO as a means of determining a camera's performance, yes, some people dote on these scores and when a new camera comes out with yet higher scores, its a must have situation. DxOMark scores do not correlate in my experience to the end results from some of my cameras old and new alike.
In my experience, some of the best pictures I have ever taken with all parameters considered, was from my old Nikon D5000 [same sensor as D90] and that was just 12mp.

The pictures I get from my A37 are in my opinion better than a Nikon D5100/7000 [same sensor] because the colour depth and hues are so much more pleasing to the eye and subtle detail is still there yet it scores lower on the DxO chart. I think its colour that puts Sony ahead of its competitors.
DxO scores in my opinion have no bearing on real world pictures.

Lastly, I think most camera manufacturers have gone past the 'Sweet Spot' in their misguided quest for ever more pixels which is sales driven. Review sites [some] are raving about these very high pixel count cameras and use DoX scores in their review. They are giving them higher marks than previous models with lower pixel counts, never mind that picture quality in some instances is actually inferior to the model it replaces. This is where DoX does not help and can mislead the less experienced into thinking very high scores mean very high quality pictures, not so in some cases.
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Greg Beetham
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Re: A58 Review

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bakubo wrote:I ignore those top level scores on DxO. Click on the Measurements tab and the info in there is more interesting.
What bothers me about the all of the results from DXO (also on the Measurements page) is they are apparently obtained from a theoretical 300dpi ‘print’ which is in turn obtained from a ‘normalized’ 8MP image reduced by a DXO process from the original image file. (If I’m reading it correctly that is).
If that’s the case there is plenty of room for errors to creep into the woodwork during all that theoretical simulation and calculation, possibly part of the reason why they deliver seemingly strange scores at times.
Greg

Btw Barry I see you got the A900 to show, it wouldn’t turn to page 2 for me (it seems to sit there spinning its wheels in one of the views) so I got impatient and used the figures from the A850, expecting the figures would be very similar for identical sensors.
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bfitzgerald
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Re: A58 Review

Unread post by bfitzgerald »

I'm cautious of DxO and how it translates to the real world so I prefer to look at images from the cameras to decide how they do. Part of me thinks the ranking is there to promote their software (which I've not tried for a while it was dog slow the last time I looked at it, though some seem to like it)
It's a bit like computer processors, you can run synthetic benchmarks (and some folks love that), but it does not always accurately reflect real world deployment/performance (as a rough ball park fine but not much more), just as I don't think it does with cameras.

It's like the comparison sites like snapsort, a spec sheet does not make a good camera! (my Pentax and Nikon experience echoes that firmly)

Anyway another review is up for the A58:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/sony-a58_ ... era_review
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