Sony Alpha SLT-A55 Samples

The Sony Alpha SLT-A55 is compared to the Pentax K-5
Pentax K-5, below. This is a DSLR which probably shares the same 16 megapixels Sony CMOS sensor. All images below are 100% unmodified crops from their respective cameras. Both cameras were set on aperture-priority mode with fixed ISO. Both zoom lenses were set to 26mm in focal-length but this still resulted in a slight difference in magnification despite both cameras shooting from the exact same spot. As per our standard methodology, both cameras are configured to output the highest quality JPEG images they can.

Custom white-balance was used on both cameras. It was an extremely cloudy afternoon and the Sony reported an error on every attempt to set custom white-balance. However, it seems to have managed as it produced very similar results to the K-5 which did not report any errors. Since the Sony Alpha SLT-A55 features both standard and Multi-Frame ISO sensitivities, this comparison shows the Multi-Frame ISO when the mouse pointer is over a crop. A peculiar effect that can be noticed here is that at relatively low sensitivities, the Multi-Frame ISO capture causes images to become slightly more bluish. This difference disappears at ISO 1600 and above.

Sony Alpha SLT-A55	Pentax K-5
	ISO 80
ISO 100 Multi-Frame ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200 Multi-Frame ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400 Multi-Frame ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800 Multi-Frame ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600 Multi-Frame ISO 1600	ISO 1600
ISO 3200 Multi-Frame ISO 3200	ISO 3200
ISO 6400 Multi-Frame ISO 6400	ISO 6400
ISO 12800 Multi-Frame ISO 12800	ISO 12800
Multi-Frame ISO 25600	ISO 25600
There is evidence of stronger noise-reduction on the A55 than on the K-5 which hides noise at the expense of added softness. By comparison, the Pentax remains sharp for about 2 stops more than the A55 under these conditions. On the other hand, the K-5's images show a tad more noise due to weaker noise-reduction.	ISO 51200