The Sony Alpha’s Business End

The back panel of the Sony Alpha bristles with more than a dozen different controls, buttons, and knobs. That might seem like a lot of controls to learn, but you’ll find, as I noted earlier, that it’s a lot easier to press a dedicated button and spin a dial than to jump to a menu every time you want to change a setting.

The controls on the back panel of the Sony Alpha DSLR-A850 are divided fairly evenly between the left and right sides of the body. I’ll discuss most of the controls in separate groupings according to which side of the body they are located on. There are some major features of the camera that don’t fall readily into either of those groups. Those key components, which are labeled in Figure 2.8, include the following: