Sony has been known to produce high-end cameras for a long time and in its latest effort to bring out a competitive DSLR in the Indian market Sony has produced the A68 which boasts of having the world’s highest number of phase-detection AF points (79). We got our hands on the camera and decided to test it out!Look, body and feel
The camera is quite light, weighing in at 596g (body only) and 675g (with battery and media) which, compared to other modern day DSLRs, is considerably lighter. The Sony A68 looks very similar to the previous A77 II model and comes with an accessory shoe cap, battery charger BC-VM10A, body cap, eyepiece cup, micro USB cable, power cord, rechargeable battery NP-FM500H, shoulder strap in-box. The camera supports Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick XC-HG Duo, SD, SDHC, SDXC memory cards (UHS-I compliant) and has an electronic viewfi nder instead of the usual optical viewfi nder. The 2.7-type TFT LCD with 460, 800 dots and manual brightness control was quite good, even in extreme sunlight.The grip of the camera is quite well-designed as well, with a neatly placed fi nger grove for better grip. The camera supports the standard Sony A-mount and has an integrated auto-focus, manual-focus button on the body as well. The design is simplistic and elegant. While there are around 14 lenses with weather sealing for A68 available the A68 body doesn’t have weather sealing which is a big negative as most DSLRs come with a basic weather seal these days. This completely limited our scope to shoot while we went for a monsoon trek.
Performance
While the camera had good performance in some spheres, it did lack a few things as well. The focussing deserves a special mention as it was fast and very accurate. We shot with the camera in dense fog but the camera did not take any time looking for focus. Another feature the A68 boasts of is its built-in sensor shift image stabilization which negates the need to have the more expensive IS lenses. The camera has Wide, Zone, Centre, Flexible Spot, Expanded Flexible Spot and Lock-On AF. The electronically-controlled shutter makes minimal noise and is smooth.The colours however were not as vibrant as we would’ve hoped for. Since we got an18-55 kit lens with the review unit, we couldn’t playaround with the images much in terms of different focallengths and depth of field. However, because of thein-built stabilisation of the camera body the imagesappeared quite sharp in low light at higher focal lengthsas well. The plastic lens mount seemed a little fragilebut Sony has made it work for a long time and doesn’tseem to have any plans for changing it anytime sooneither. The electronic viewfinder is quite comfortablebut the 1.44million dot resolution is average at best compared to other cameras in the same price range which provide an EVF. The contrast in the images was not up to the mark as well. For a camera that costs as much as this does we expected a lot from it.
ISO
The ISO performance of the camera is average. The camera holds image quality steadily till ISO 1600, but starts showing visible grains from ISO 3200. Edge sharpness reduces drastically in ISO 6400 and the image quality deteriorates massively above ISO 12800. It is advisable not to go above that since the image becomes completely unusable in ISO 25600. Colour noise is visible in the shadow areas from ISO 6400 which makes it very difficult to bring out details from shadows in post-processing. The overall ISO performance of the camera was disappointing as we expected a lot more from it.
In conclusion, the Sony A68 did not live up to our expectations. We did like some features in the camera, but comparing it to similarly priced cameras from other manufacturers, we did feel that it could’ve done better in terms of features and image quality. The focussing was super fast, and the images were sharp even in low lighting conditions which left a positive impression. But it did lack in some other spheres like contrast and vibrancy of colours in the images. Overall it is a balanced camera that could have done much better in our opinion.
0 comments:
Post a Comment