The good: Exceptionally streamlined, comfortable shooting design; broad, functional feature set, including sensor-shift image stabilizer; excellent photo quality; generally fast performance.

The bad: A few design quirks; proprietary hot shoe.

The bottom line: A top-of-the-line amateur digital SLR camera, the Sony Alpha A700 will delight Konica Minolta diehards and makes a great choice if you don't already have a stake in other lens systems.

Read full review of the Sony Alpha DSLR-A700 »

By Lori Grunin, CNET.com
Oct 17, 2007

We know Sony's older, entry-level Alpha A100 has its share of fans, but we never got a chance to shoot with it, which made the 12-megapixel Alpha A700 my introduction to Sony's take on dSLRs. And we soon found that the unprepossessing, very un-Sony-like design camouflages a sophisticated dSLR that's enjoyable to shoot and can hold its own quite well against models from veteran camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon. True, much of the DNA for Sony's dSLRs comes from the company's acquisition of deceased long-time player Konica Minolta, but simply relying on good genes never gets you very far in a fickle consumer electronics market.

Sony offers several bundles for the A700: body only (S$2,199); a kit with a Carl Zeiss 16-80mm lens (S$3,399) and a kit with an 18mm-to-70mm lens (S$2,399).

Design

The body itself is dust- and moisture-resistant, with an aluminum chassis and a magnesium outer shell. Weighing 690g, the A700 feels solid and well made. Thanks to a deep indent on the grip beneath the ledge holding the shutter and a dial--much like the design of the Canon EOS 40D--the A700 also feels exceptionally comfortable and stable to hold. Like its Konica Minolta ancestors, the A700 implements a proprietary hot shoe. Though it doesn't really matter for flash units, which are proprietary as well, the odd connector may limit your choice of accessories that use the hot shoe as a dumb mount. Not a critical problem, but one to be aware of.

     

For more details on the Z75's features, click on the image.

Operating the A700 is pretty straightforward. Since it lacks a monochrome display on the top, you configure settings via a combination of direct-access buttons and the LCD. A function button pulls up the Quick Nav interactive information display of all your current settings, which you navigate via a big, comfortable joystick. Only focus modes (single-shot, continuous, single/continuous autoselection, and manual) and the three metering modes (spot, evaluative, and center-weighted) have their own selection switches. As with all dSLRs of this class, you control shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, and program shift with dials.

One of the few issues we have with the A700's operation is the way it handles switching among the three user-definable custom presets. Rather than allocating three separate slots on the mode dial as on the 40D, there's a single Memory Recall slot that brings up a selection screen when you rotate the dial to MR. Once you make your selection, however, the screen disappears until the next time you rotate the dial.

So if you shoot for a while using MR1, for example, you must then rotate the dial away and back to MR in order to select a different preset. How much this bothers you will depend upon how heavily you depend on the custom settings; we use them increasingly as time goes on, which inflates our annoyance a bit. On the other hand, and more importantly, the A700 doesn't seem to lose overrides when it goes to sleep the way the 40D does.

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