Sony Alpha 35 (SLT-A35K)

The Sony Alpha 35 is the current entry-level D-SLR camera in the Sony lineup. As such it demonstrates the company's belief in the SLT design, which eschews the traditional optical viewfinder for an electronic one.

Because there is no need to lock the mirror when switching to live view as there is with a traditional D-SLR, moving between the rear LCD and the EVF is seamless.

An external microphone input is available, although if you're using a shoe mount mic, you'll need to purchase an adapter to fit on to the proprietary hot shoe that Minolta developed, and that Sony has continued to use since acquiring its camera division in 2006.

We shot the standard PCMag Labs test scene with the Sony Alpha 35 and its 18-55mm kit lens.

This 100 percent crop shows you the level of detail you can expect from the Alpha 35 and its kit lens when set at 18mm f/3.5.

The Alpha 35 performed quite well in terms of speed. It starts up and captures a photo in just under a second, only requires you to wait 0.19 second between shots, and records a minimal 0.14 second shutter lag.

I used Imatest to measure the sharpness of the photos captured by the Alpha 35 and its 18-55mm kit lens. At 18mm the images scored 1,705 lines; they increased to 1,746 lines at 35mm and topped out at 1,922 lines at 55mm.

The Alpha 35 is a very fast camera that performs well in lower light and can grab some very nice video. It is held back by an electronic viewfinder that doesn't live up to the quality of those in Sony's other cameras and a kit lens that doesn't quite eke out enough sharpness to match the 16-megapixel sensor.