As you’d hope, the crops are detailed and bereft of noise, although as also seen in our results pages, there’s a lack of ultimate crispness due to modest in-camera sharpening. This can of course be increased or applied later though as desired.

Once again there’s a great deal of detail and lack of noise, although again a softness compared to many camera’s default image processing settings.

The crops are again noise-free and detailed, and the ability to handhold at slower shutter speeds thanks to built-in anti-shake allows you to easily blur moving water without the need for a tripod.

As you’d hope there’s still no noise and the crops contain plenty of detail – again with latitude for additional sharpening if desired.

The Carl Zeiss 16-80mm also makes it easy to throw backgrounds out of focus.

As before the crops are noise-free, detailed and able to handle extra sharpening for a punchier result.

The Zeiss lens is also a great quality kit lens option for the A700.

We shot his in Program mode, but a larger depth of field could have been achieved in Aperture Priority.

The increase to 400 ISO hasn’t had an adverse effect of the quality, with the crops revealing lots of detail and no noise or noise reduction artefacts to speak of.

The Zeiss lens can be demanding on your focusing in lower light, and has a surprisingly small depth of field even when zoomed-out. So we shot this in Aperture Priority and slightly closed the aperture.

The areas which fall into the depth of field are sharp.

The result is a shot which shows plenty of detail and minimal noise despite an increase in sensitivity to 800 ISO. Do compare this to rivals like the Canon 40D though.

The crops reveal the first real signs of noise in this gallery, although if you check our A700 noise results page, you’ll notice visible artefacts at 800 ISO.

You may wish to compare this sample with one taken at 3200 ISO by the Canon 40D.