Sony Alpha DSLR-A550 review: Sony Alpha DSLR-A550

7.1

Sony Alpha DSLR-A550

The Good

Generally above-average performance for its class; excellent high ISO sensitivity profile relative to competitors; large, tilting LCD; fast Live View autofocus.

The Bad

Poor color accuracy; Live View provides only 90 percent coverage; awkward design for shooting via optical viewfinder; no video.

The Bottom Line

If you're a Live View-oriented shooter who doesn't care about color accuracy, the Sony Alpha DSLR-A550's good performance and decent noise profile make it attractive for the money. Otherwise, you can find a better camera.

Photo gallery:
Sony Alpha DSLR-A550

Sitting in the middle of Sony's somewhat overcrowded dSLR product line, at first glance the Alpha DSLR-A550 seems like a promising competitor around the $1,000 price point. It comes in two kits: a body only version and one with an 18-55mm lens. The A550 has a slightly different and less-expensive sibling, the A500; in addition to the sensor resolution differential between the two, the A550 has a higher resolution LCD--the same one used on the A700 and A900--and a faster burst option.

The A550 is heavier and bulkier than its lower-end siblings are--though it's lighter than the competition--but with a much better grip design. Its siblings are about three-quarters height, which feels much less secure than the A550's full-height grip. While it feels solidly built, its plastic housing leaves a cheaper impression than similarly priced models like the 50D did. And even for a midrange dSLR, Sony doesn't make good use of the extra space, with too many buttons and labels unnecessarily crowding the body. For instance, the Smart Teleconverter--digital zoom--doesn't belong on a camera like this, and the D-Range Optimizer doesn't really require a dedicated button. They just get in the way while you're trying to distinguish among the drive mode, ISO sensitivity, exposure compensation and exposure lock button, which all feel identical.

Usually more buttons mean a more streamlined shooting experience, but the A550 seems designed for LCD-based shooting rather than viewfinder shooting. On one hand, the viewfinder displays image stabilization status--bars show how close to steady it is--and will indicate if the lens is in manual focus mode. But it fits those in by trading off for more traditional information, such as ISO sensitivity. That means you have to look at the back display to change it. The viewfinder prompts mixed reactions as well. On one hand, it displays the focus indicators as large boxes, which is a nice switch from the tiny dots favored by viewfinders a price class down. However, the viewfinder is small with a low magnification factor. And since the LCD extends out a bit past the eyecup, you actually have to cram your face up against the camera to see through it. I've left cheekprints all over it.

Usually on dSLRs with buttons on the top right, they're placed forward enough to easily reach with your forefinger. On the A550, they're set closer to the camera back where you can't comfortably reach them with either your thumb or forefinger unless you lower the camera. On the cheaper models, Sony puts controls for the ISO sensitivity and drive modes on the navigation switch on the back of the camera. I think that placement works better than the three hard-to-reach buttons on the top of this one.

The Fn button on the back pulls up drive mode, flash settings, autofocus mode, autofocus area, ISO sensitivity, metering, flash compensation, white balance, DRO/Auto HDR, and Creative Styles. But the switch you use to navigate them feels a bit too flat, without enough tactile feedback; I frequently ended up pressing the AF button while moving around the options. (I discuss the settings interface further here.)

While not as flexible a design as a flip-and-twist articulated LCD, Sony's tiltable displays are nice for shooting at odd angles. The A550's display is otherwise pretty comparable with the competitions'. If you use Live View a lot then you'll appreciate the A550's fast Live View autofocus, as well as the MF Check LV mode, which not only magnifies the focus area but also adjusts the displayed exposure so that you can actually see what you're doing. While Live View displays only 90 percent of the scene--that's even less than the optical viewfinder--the MF Check LV mode displays 100 percent.

While not bursting with novel features, the A550 does have a couple of interesting capabilities. There's Auto HDR, a variation on the Hand-held Twilight mode, one of the few things I liked in the company's DSC-HX1 megazoom. Auto HDR snaps two sequential shots at different exposures and combines them into a single shot with "optimal" highlight and shadow detail. It doesn't have quite as much control as I'd like--you can manually select the amount of the bracket at up to 3 stops in 1.5-stop increments or leave it in auto, but it's limited to two shots and it doesn't save the individual frames, just the combined result and only as a JPEG. But it does seem to work better for extended the dynamic range over Sony's DRO, and the fully automatic setting doesn't override your ISO sensitivity setting as I'd expected. There's a couple seconds performance overhead on shot-to-shot time as it processes and saves the image.

The camera also includes a Speed Priority Continuous Advance mode that forgoes continuous focus and exposure adjustments--they're fixed on the first shot--to boost the frame rate to 7 frames per second up from the rated 5fps. While it makes the camera sound like it outspecs the competition on a features chart, this mode has pretty limited usefulness; to stay in focus, the subject needs to either be moving in such a way that it always remains the same distance from you or always be beyond the lens' infinity focus distance, and the lighting on the subject needs to be consistent.

(You can get a complete description of the A550's features, controls and operation by downloading a PDF of the manual.)

The special speed mode doesn't seem very important, though, because the A550 does pretty well without it. It powers on and shoots in 0.4 second. To focus and shoot in good light takes about 0.3 second, and in dim light it's still a pretty zippy 0.7 second. Two sequential shots run about 0.7 second--a hair slower for raw--which rises to about 0.9 second with flash enabled. Burst shooting runs about 4.3 frames per second.

Sony Alpha DSLR-A550 photo samples

Though the A550 is the same 14.2-megapixel resolution as the cheaper A380, the A550's Exmor CMOS sensor delivers much cleaner images at all ISO sensitivities than the CCD used by its sibling. They're sharp and relatively clean, with solid exposures, at least through ISO 400. ISO 800 looks very good on my high-end, color calibrated monitor but slightly noisy on my cheapo standard-issue display. At ISO 1,600, detail starts to mush up a bit, but for the most part detailed photos can remain usable up through ISO 3,200. As is typical for its class, ISO 6,400 and higher are more emergency modes than for everyday shooting, but the A550 displays better noise suppression at these midrange ISO sensitivities than we usually see from Sony. Its ISO 6,400 shot, for example, is much cleaner than our equivalent shot with the full-frame but older A900 and A850 models. While not a complete mess, like most cameras in its class ISO 12,800 is definitely best for small sizes.

But, as we've seen repeatedly with the Sony dSLRs, the Creative Style defaults yield poor color accuracy and oversaturation, and you can't tell that's what's happening because there's no "natural" style or its equivalent. Nor does Sony tell you what the contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings are for each style; they're all listed as 0, from which you increase or decrease. With the A380, at least, the raw versions were more accurate, but the A550's raw files look as bad as the JPEGs. At first, I thought it was the Adobe Camera Raw settings, but they looked the same in Sony's mediocre Image Data Converter SR raw-processing software. Nor does that software give you a way to strip the Creative Style settings from the image. You can rectify this to a certain extent by shooting in AdobeRGB rather than sRGB, but that's not practical for many people.

Given its excellent midrange noise profile and above-average performance--two of the most important reasons to buy a dSLR--it's frustrating that the Sony Alpha DSLR-A550's awkward design and poor color rendering keep me from being able to recommend it without so many caveats.

Shooting speed (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Time to first shot

Raw shot-to-shot time

Shutter lag (dim light)

Shutter lag (typical)

Nikon D5000

0.2

0.5

0.7

0.3

Sony Alpha DSLR-A550

0.4

0.8

0.7

0.3

Canon EOS 50D

0.2

0.3

0.9

0.4

Sony Alpha DSLR-A380

0.5

0.5

0.6

0.4

Nikon D90

0.2

0.6

0.9

0.4