Sony Alpha A550

Buttons & Dials

The camera controls are laid out reasonably well, with the menu button conveniently at the far left for fast, no-search access. As you turn the mode dial, the LCD shows the current position and some text explaining the purpose of each setting, a nice touch. And having dedicated buttons to pull up drive mode, exposure compensation and ISO settings makes sense. Labeling the quick menu access button ‘Fn’ make a bit less sense, and the same goes for labeling the OK button ‘AF’ — yes, it can autofocus, but that’s not the primary function. Ordinarily we also like to see the four-way controller used for quick access to shooting settings, which wasn’t done here, but the overly narrow, slightly finicky controller wouldn’t have been much good for this purpose anyway.

Creative Styles

Sony uses its Creative Style system to provide varied color reproduction profiles. The A550 includes six, as shown below (by contrast, the Sony A900 has thirteen Creative Style settings). While the number of styles really doesn’t matter much, one of the missing modes here is Neutral, the setting that produced the most accurate color in our tests of the A900.

The shots below were taken in indirect sunlight using automatic white balance. The Creative Style descriptions are Sony verbatim from the product manual.

The provided Creative Styles can be adjusted only several parameters, namely contrast, saturation, and sharpness. Unfortunately, there’s no way to save an adjusted style as a new custom setting.

Picture Effect Samples
Standard Vivid Portrait Landscape Sunset B/W More...

In-Camera Editing

We’re not thrilled with the variety of image playback options available, and the direct printing options are sparse at best, but they’re positively luxurious compared to the in-camera editing capabilities. They are, in a word, nonexistent, except for the ability to rotate an image. To clarify, you cannot resize an image, crop it, adjust its color or contrast or add filter effects, tweak the dynamic range, remove red-eye… you get our drift.

Menu

As with most SLRs today, the A550 uses a two-level menu system: a quick menu on the LCD screen while shooting, providing fast access to the most frequently used settings, and a more traditional multi-part full-screen menu system for additional camera settings.

The quick menu is displayed by pressing the Fn key. When shooting in Live View mode, it appears as an overlay on the scene image; when shooting with the viewfinder it’s shown on a black background. The two displays are nearly the same, except for the two additional functions (face detection and smile shutter) which are available only in Live View mode.

There are two ways of making adjustments in the quick menu. If you press the center button on the four-way controller, you get a screen listing your setting options, which can be navigated with the controller. You can also just move the on-screen highlight to the setting you want to change and turn the control dial, which will cycle through your options directly.

By default, if you leave the highlight on a quick menu setting, an explanatory Help Guide text box appears. These can be useful, but they also cover up other available menu choices. The display can be turned off easily in the Setup menu.

And speaking of the main menu section, it follows the Sony convention of Halloween colors: white text on a black background with a bright orange highlight. It’s very legible on the beautiful A550 screen, and we appreciate the fact that each menu section is only a screen long, so you don’t have to scroll down to see hidden options. Of course, that’s more practical with this camera than some other models, since there really aren’t a lot of options available. With no in-camera image editing, button customization or custom settings storage, a simple menu system is a practical design.

Instruction Manual

The camera comes with a 180-page Instruction Manual, which applies to both the A500 and the A550. It’s small — roughly the size of a 4×6 print — which provides welcome portability. The text is well written, making even potentially difficult concepts like high dynamic range shooting reasonably easy to understand, and everything is covered, including items like scene mode explanations which are too frequently left out of the manual. The diagrams are pretty good too, though they could have been larger. The only real train wreck we found here is the index, which is just a step to the left of useless. Looking for high dynamic range information? Nothing under ‘H’ for ‘High’ and no, there’s no listing under ‘D’ for Dynamic range either. Wondering about the metering pattern? It’s not listed under ‘metering.’ Instead, it’s the very first entry in the index, ‘40-segment honeycomb pattern metering’, apparently assuming that you already know the answer and are just looking it up to kill time.

You can download a pdf file of the complete instruction manual by clicking here.