The super strat is a phenomenon that has been developing over the past few years until now every major guitar manufacturer and a lot of the minor ones produce one. Even Fender have seen fit to produce one and that shows that competition is hard when the original copies the copyists. Also with so many on the market it would seem that there is little room for any more but even so Rosetti have seen fit to import another in the form of the Vision VS200 CAR.

The Vision guitars come in two formats. One is the VX series which is vaguely explorer shaped and the VS series which is the range of super strats. The VS200 (the CAR stands for candy apple red) is basically a strat type with twin humbuckers and an almost flashy tremelo, or 'wang bar' to the rock players amongst us.

The first thing that grabs your eyeballs and keeps them them rivetted to this guitar is its sheer redness. It's probably one of the reddest guitars I have ever seen and the finish is absolutely immaculate. The basic glitter flake is very fine grained and it looks as if it's been covered with about a billion coats of lacquer. This does mean that the neck gets a bit sticky after you've been playing for a while but that's nothing that can't be cured with a damp cloth.

The neck itself is very comfortable and is conducive to fast playing and huge power chords but then that is what it was designed for. It's made from rock maple but the thickness of the paint job makes it difficult to believe that it has ever seen a tree! The rosewood used for the fret board was a little coarse but felt very comfortable and felt as if it gave you a good grip. The frets are quite low and reasonably fat and have been nicely finished so there are no sharp edges for you to catch your wooly vest on. The action felt a little bit high but if you feeling confident then you can adjust it via the truss rod situated at the bottom of the neck. The machine heads are fairly standard looking and do their job as efficently as you could ask for. Like the rest of the hardware on the guitar they're finished in matt black and not easy to scratch.

The body is also maple which makes the guitar very light and always handy for those three day blues jams. It's contoured in more or less the same way as a strat and hangs comfortably, not suffering from stuka syndrome (headstock diving towards the floor like a famous German bomber the moment you take your hands off the neck). The pick ups are a bit nondescript and are just credited as Humbucking on the spec sheet and indeed that is exactly what they are with blades rather than pole pieces. There is also a coil splitter combined push/pull style with the tone control.

Now, on a guitar of this type, and at this price (£305), I would expect a decent locking tremelo but instead they have seen fit to put on an Act Three trem a la Aria Pro but without the locking nut. They have put on a graphite nut but it doesn't seem to stop it going out of tune after only a small amount of Van Halen style wanging which is what these things are supposed to be good at.

Now after all that waffle what it actually plays like. Well as I've already said it's nice and light and well balanced so that puts you in a good frame of mind anyway. Once plugged into the amp on the dirty channel it sounds great. Depending on the amount and type of distortion used you can get a horrible disgusting grunge or sweet singing sustain. It also has a very nice modern sort of tone which surprised me considering how light it is. It didn't have the fat sound of your average Les Paul but it does compare favourably with other similar models on the market.

Switched into single coil the sound alters radically. Unlike coil splitters on other similar guitars which seem only to increase the background noise rather than split the coils. This works very well and really does produce some convincing strat like sounds and sounded really good when set up for playing funk. The tone control also worked very well and you can get some good mellow AOR rock sounds with a bit of careful twiddling.

This guitar would be great if the tremelo was upgraded to something like a Khaler or the price was dropped considerably but as it stands, pricewise, it doesn't compete with the like of ESP, Aria, Fernandez, Ibanez, Tokai, and a lot of others. A hundred quid less and it would be an excellent mid-range guitar giving superb value for money.