Advantages: Only £350! Disadvantages: plastic body,noise problem
This is by far, the best camera i own, i had the sony a100 wich unfortuantly broke, but the sony a200 delivers more with a bigger lcd screen and higher iso settings of 3200, i would strongly recomend this 10.2 megapixel camera to anyone.
The sony a200 sports a 18-70mm lens, which adds a bit more telephoto coverage, then other models aimed at this price.
The only problem with the sony a200 is when the camera focuses, it tends to make a lot of noise, and can take quit a while to focus on subjects, but apart from this, it is a realy nice camera, it is slightly smaller than the a100, but it still sports a plastic body, but thats expected of a slr at this price.
The camera has many more feutres inside, as sony use there feutres in the body, while other companies use lens based ones.
The camera has a Bionz image processing engine ...
camera is compatible with the old Minolta lenses - which are cheaper and often better that the Sony ones (for more advanced photos). The manual settings are easy to use, however are a little rigid, and I find do not give you the same flexibility as some of the more expensive digital SLRs or manual ones (Cannon ones are very good for this), however for the price of the Sony, the settings are reasonable.
Down to the most important point - image quality. I cannot really find fault with this at all, and this is comparable to some of the much more expensive Canon and Pentax SLRs! The lens provided with this camera is not the best for very close up and macro photography, however it tends to perform very well for any other shots - and there is always the option to change to a better lens for these purposes.
Overall - excellent camera ...
Advantages: Great battery life, comfortable in the hands, picture quality. Disadvantages: Flimsy memory card and remote release slot.
I was looking for a new camera and had a budget of around £300.
Compact cameras such as the Panasonic Lumix TZ and the Nikon Coolpix P80 kept coming up, as did the Nikon D40 and the Sony a200. I decided to go for the Sony in the end as it was a name I trusted and I had used a compact Sony in the past.
The quality difference between my old compact camera and this camera was incredible. Shots always seem to come out crisp and clear, whatever lighting conditions the picture was taken in. Battery life is great and the percentage meter of battery power remaining is invaluable.
The camera fits well in large hands, and all of the buttons and dials on the camera are comfortably positioned. Having only used a compact camera in the past, the sheer number of options took a while to get used to, but once I was familiar with the camera everything ...
