The Sony A58 joins the SLT Alpha range as the Sony A57 replacement and sits just above the entry level 37. New to the Sony A58 are a host of features that should appeal to photographers who are starting to get more serious about their photography and want to take more control over their pictures.

Along with the Sony A58′s newly designed 201-megapixel Exmor APS-C HD CMOS sensor and Sony’s translucent mirror technology, the A58 adds an increased ISO range from 100 to 16,000, full HD video recording, an improved EVF and an enhanced Bionz image processing engine.

It’s an impressive spec list indeed. Here Amy Davies takes a look at what this new Sony Alpha camera has to offer in her Sony A58 review video.

Sony A58 Review Video Transcript

Sony has introduced a new camera at the bottom of its SLT line-up, the a58. It replaces not one,but two cameras – the a37 and a57, in an attempt to simplify the beginner range of Alpha cameras.

The a58 is a DSLT – the T standing for Translucent and referring to the fixed mirror inside the camera. Unlike normal DSLRs, light travels directly through the mirror, rather than it flipping out of the way. This means that the camera can offer faster frame rates and quicker autofocus speeds in live view – which the camera is effectively always shooting in – and video mode.

The a58 has a fairly hefty body, with this large grip and rubberised coating helping when shooting one handed.

On the top of the camera is a mode dial for switching between the various shooting modes on offer, including fully automatic, fully manual and semi-automatic options, such as aperture and shutter priority. There are quite a few other options also found here, including scene mode, sweep panorama and picture effects.

The buttons on the back of the camera are well laid out, with easy access to almost everything with your right thumb. Only the main menu button is more inaccessible, but with the quick function menu accessed with this button, you should find that you don’t need to delve into the full menu very often.

You can access all the most commonly used settings, including white balance, Drive Mode and Picture Effects, via this function button. It’s also here that you’ll find Auto Object Framing, a new feature for the Alpha series which automatically crops your images for what the camera considers to be a better composition.

We’d previously seen Auto Portrait Framing, but with the addition of Auto Object Framing, any kind of photo can be cropped, rather than just people shots.

At the top of the camera is a zoom button, this is used to activate Sony’s Clear Zoom function, which uses By Pixel Resolution Technology and doubles the effective focal length of whichever lens is attached. We’ve been impressed by how well this performs compared with other forms of digital zoom before, and a similar performance is put in by the a58.

Unfortunately, a lot of the most interesting features of the a58 can’t be used when shooting in raw format. These include Picture Styles, Clear Zoom and Auto Object/Portrait framing.

Annoyingly, this means that you need to delve into the full menu, switch off raw format shooting, then go back to whatever you’re trying to use. This can be a bit of a tedious process and we had hoped Sony would have come up with a better solution for this by now.

As there’s not a traditional mirror in the camera, the a58 uses an electronic, rather than optical, viewfinder. Sony has used an OLED in the a58, compared with the LCD in the a57. It’s a noticeable improvement, offering a clearer and brighter view. Some don’t like electronic viewfinders, but there are a couple of distinct advantages.

The ability to see any changes you make in live time via the viewfinder is useful, as is the captured image popping up to help you know whether you’ve nailed the shot or not. This sensor here automatically switches to the viewfinder, and switches off the LCD screen, when the camera is lifted to the eye.

The 460,000 dot screen isn’t fully articulated, but it does tilt up and down to make it easier when shooting from some awkward positions in landscape format. It’s not as much help when shooting in portrait format though.

It’s quite a low resolution screen, but it doesn’t suffer too badly from glare or reflection, with the ability to tilt the screen helping if the sun is very strong. Once again, Sony has chosen not to incorporate a touchscreen on its entry-level model.

One of the problems with a translucent mirror is that less light is able to get to the sensor, sometimes meaning that the lens hunts around to attain focus, especially in lower light conditions. The A58 kit lens has quite a noisy focus mechanism, so this can be a little distracting in certain situations.

Sony Alpha cameras have impressed us before with their excellent image quality, and the a58 is no different. Generally, it produces very detailed shots with good colour rendition and exposure.

It’s worth experimenting with different Picture Effects and Styles, as well as the Sweep Panorama when you want to get more creative, too.

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The Sony A58 joins the SLT Alpha range as the Sony A57 replacement and sits just above the entry level 37. New to the Sony A58 are a host of features that should appeal to photographers who are starting to get more serious about their photography and want to take more control over their pictures.

Along with the Sony A58′s newly designed 201-megapixel Exmor APS-C HD CMOS sensor and Sony’s translucent mirror technology, the A58 adds an increased ISO range from 100 to 16,000, full HD video recording, an improved EVF and an enhanced Bionz image processing engine.

It’s an impressive spec list indeed. In our hands-on Sony A58 review video, Ali Jennings of our testing team runs through all of the Alpha 58′s key features and explains what in particular they’ll be looking closely at in our review.

Hands-on Sony A58 Review Transcript

It joins the SLT Alpha range as the replacement to the 57 just above the entry level 37 and see a host of updated features that should appeal to those just starting out with an SLR style camera.

As an SLT (Single-Lens Translucent Camera) the 58 doesn’t have an optical viewfinder but instead uses translucent mirror technology and an electronic viewfinder, which has it’s benefits but historically also flaws.

However with the 58 the EVF has been updated and in the early sample that I’ve seen the new OLED technology that replaces the LCD version in the 57 is a massive improvement, with no noticeable lag and excellent clarity. This clarity may help to convert some of the EVF critic but obviously not all.

One of the key benefits of this EVF system is that what you see through the viewfinder is what you get, so exposure preview, effects will be captured as you see through the viewfinder, and you also get 100% frame coverage a feature that really only appears on high end and Pro SLRs with optical viewfinders.

The 58 takes a jump to 20.1 million pixels from 16.1 in the 57 and combines this with the updated Bionz processor which promises to deliver better low light noise performance, but sticks to the already impressive sensitivity range of ISO 100-16000. We’ll bring you the results of the image quality tests once we have a full production model.

Other features that are new and of note are Auto Object Tracking which comes  as the evolution of the Auto Portrait Framing feature seen on the Sony NEX and Cybershot cameras. This crops to correct composition in camera and in use the Portrait version that we’ve tested in the past has worked well. This feature is joined by two further Auto modes Macro and Tracking, again once we have a full sample we’ll test these out.

Lock on AF is another feature new to the 58, and we’re told it provides a wide focus area that’s able to identify the focus subject and lock on. The illustration of this looked interesting and if it’s as good as it looks it could be a real winning feature especially for families wanting to capture their kids or for people just getting into wildlife and sports photography.

The Sony Alpha 58 will go on sale with the new 18-55mm Kit lens for £450 or with the dual lens kit which also includes the 55-200mm for £600 in mid-April. We’ll bring you the full review soon, for now for more information check out Techradar.com.

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