Editorial Review:Product Description:8.1-megapixel effective recording * Carl Zeiss® Vario-Tessar® lens * 5X optical zoom (2X digital/10X total zoom) * 2-11/16' color LCD with anti-reflective coating * 35mm equivalent lens focal length: 30-150mm * top JPEG resolution: 3264 x 2448 * Super SteadyShot® optical image stabilization * high sensitivity mode (ISO 3200) for low-light shooting without flash * Smile Shutter technology detects smiles and automatically shoots when focus is fixed * Face Detection technology controls focus, exposure, color, and flash for more natural skin tones and reduced red-eye * Intelligent Scene Recognition mode automatically adjusts settings in 6 difficult lighting environments * Dynamic Range Optimizer for accurate contrast between light and dark areas * 9-point autofocus for group shots and off-center subjects * automatic macro focus for shooting closeups without manually changing focus mode *
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
-
Mostly good.
I bought this for my girlfriend who had been using an older Canon SD200, and she had a lot of trouble adjusting to it. This camera is capable of very good image quality, but the menus and controls are not so easy to navigate. Make sure you turn off the Auto-ISO function or else you will get noisy pics. And from what I can tell, you can not turn off Auto-ISO in the "Easy" or "Auto" modes, which makes them useless...maybe I just haven't figured it out yet. SteadyShot works well. I like that you can zoom to 100% in the playback function, so you can really see if the picture you just took was sharp or not.
Rating: -
Good Camera
Pros:
Generally speaking, this camera is easy to use. The quantity is enough for most non-professional users. The launch time(from pressing power button and ready to take photos) is very short, only 0.8s. The quantity deserves its pixels.
Cons:
Bad battery time and limited functions.
Summary:
I recommend to buy a camera in this price. Maybe it is not the best value/price ratio in the range. But you would not regret buying this camera.
Rating: 
-
Good camera (but not great)
I'm a Canon fan. Our last 3 cameras were Canons... but my wife and I decided that we'd give Sony a try. We liked the bright, crisp screen, the compactness of the camera, the quick startup time, the long zoom range (5x optical), the convenient settings dial, the layout of all the buttons, the ease of use of the menu options and basic camera functions, slideshow playback (with music), and let's be honest here, it's nice to have a camera in the color you like (rather than the boring silver/black). Everything seemed fine from what we could tell on our visits to Best Buy.
But after we got the camera, we started to see some things that we couldn't tell from our trips to the store.
- Poor image quality. Pictures look fine when resized to fit your computer monitor, but when you zoom in to the actual size of the picture, you'll notice that the quality is not that sharp.
- Shutter delay. I know that all cameras have some shutter delay, but it was quite noticeable and annoying on this camera. It takes longer than it should to focus, especially in medium- to low-light. (It was fine at the store, but then again, the store is pretty bright.) The delay is even worse with the flash.
- Slow flash. You can't set the flash to red-eye or no red-eye. You can only turn the flash on and off. That means that the camera will sometimes do the red-eye flash if you don't want it to... so by the time it actually snaps the picture (after the focus delay, of course), you've already lost your photo moment. This is especially true for taking pics of our baby. There's no way around it.
- Smile feature. We actually LOVED this feature, especially when you give smile-priority to your child -- so that when your child finally smiles, it snaps the picture. The bad thing is that you have to be literally smiling ear-to-ear (which looks very unnatural) for it to take your pic. Same for the child/baby. Nice idea Sony, but bad execution. It'd be nice if you could set the smile threshhold/meter to a lower setting, so that you don't have to smile as big.
- Few manual settings. I generally like to mess around with some basic settings -- like flash, no-flash, no-red-eye-flash, white balance, exposure, etc. These are pretty basic functions, but these are difficult to change on this camera because you just can't change these things easily or at all. I feel constricted to only do what the camera 'allows' me to do, which is very little. It's fine for people who are brand new to digital cameras, but not ideal for anyone else.
- Video quality/size. By default, I believe the video size is set to 320. The quality is absolutely *horrendous* at this setting. But if you increase the size to 640, the video is very nice -- but the file size is absolutely *huge* (compared to Canons, where the size is much smaller for a 640 video). On the positive side, there's no time limit on the video, so you can shoot as long as you want. But be warned, it will eat up space on your computer very quickly!!
These nuisances made us fed up within a week. We've traded in our Sony for a trusty Canon. Sorry Sony, we gave you a chance... but you just didn't impress us.
Rating: -
had the camera two days, love it
I've only had the camera for 2 days and I think it is great I never went and tested it in a store, I choose it merely from all the features and comparisons, I will write a longer review later. the only downside I have found so far which I didn't come across while shopping is NO ZOOM IN VIDEO MODE!! not real happy about this, but the video quality is fantastic. wanted anyone shopping now to know this. otherwise it is a fantastic camera it feels great in the hand, easy to use and even more stylish than i thought
Rating: -
Good pictures - but maybe an onboard software issue
I bought this camera right before a recent month long vacation. It took great pictures and unexpectedly was able to capture things in unusual light I didn't think it would handle. However, I had several problems. I attempted to take several pictures of camouflaged critters, and the camera just couldn't focus. I tried multiple settings, but the lizards and bugs were not patient enough for me to work until I could find a setting that would focus in close up conditions on a hard to distinguish subject. I still haven't figured out how to get this to happen and the companion instruction book offered no help that I could find for this kind of thing. The other problem I had is that the camera seemed to occasionally lose its little mind. I would turn on the review function and start paging back through my pictures, and the camera would turn itself on and drop out of review mode. Sometimes no matter what I tried to do it would not allow me to review my pictures. This issue would clear up if I left the camera off for a few hours. Then sometimes I would have it on a setting on the dial and be taking pictures and the menu describing the dial settings would appear on screen and rotate through settings without me touching the setting dial. At times it would do this rapidly. To get it to stop I turned off the camera. When I turned it back on, this problem would mysteriously have resolved itself. But despite these weird behaviors I was happy with the pictures I captured, and if there were not the what looks like an onboard software problem, I could wholeheartedly recommend the camera.
