Strengths:Very large 2.5 inch LCD to review photos instantly with clarity. Extremely user friedly. Great flash photos with true colors better than the Olympus c-3000. Great movies. AA battery is a big plus.
Weaknesses:In low light setting the photo is grainier than the Olympus c-3000 using the same exposure. Not really a weakness because I always use flash.
Posted Oct 23, 2004 - What is good or bad ? All relative. So I am doing a 2 camera comparison so I won't confuse you with these words. Countless hours have been spend to test them, hopefully this will help people make an intelligent decision. My previous job involved digital camera chip development so I had some exposure on digital imaging. The quality of the photos starts with a good ccd sensor than the colors are processed before it is stored in memory. I am comparing this Sony with my old Olympus C-3000. With the flash on the Sony camera produces very true natural colors compared to the Olympus which looks some what yellowish on facials. The natural color is very important for me because half the photos I take are at night with a flash. Without flash some darker subjects becomes faded but the Olympus still shows a fairly readable image. In bright light settings the camera can not produce the details at the over exposed areas of the photo compared to the Olympus which still retained some image data at the brightest area of the photo. The reason is mostly because the way the colors are processed. Sony had to sacrifice some details to better the image quality in other areas. This is not noticeable for most people because they think the photo is over exposed but if you lower the exposure the subject becomes under exposed so that won't fix the problem. You have to do a side by side comparison to know that Olympus is better in this respect. As far as the shutter lags goes, I have been told that Sony and Kodak are the fastest at about 1.2 second and Olympus and other cameras at 2.0 seconds. After a side by side comparison this proofs to be not completely true, there is barely any noticeable difference in shutter lag both in low and bright light. It feels like Sony is a tiny little fastest but no more than 10%. Without the proper test equipment, I won’t comment further. For those soccer moms and dads the trick is really to hold the shutter button down half way and get the camera to prefocus before taking the picture. You should not pay much more money for the 10% improvement. Most digital cameras can prefocus and you should cut lag time down by about 70% which is a ton better thant he 10% improvement. Especially in low light setting the lag time increases dramatically because it takes the camera longer to focus, so learn to prefocus. This camera is great for those moms who is got too many things to do and forget to charge the camera. You have got to get a camera which uses AA batteries and this camera uses only two of them. All batteries discharge even if you don't use them. Lithium Ion batteries are discharged in about 3-4 weeks so when you need them the most, often they are dead. Alkaline batteries take 3 to 5 years to discharge. They are great backups and they are always ready and can be purchased when you need them. Don’t ever buy a camera that uses proprietary batteries you will regret missing those photos with dead batteries. Also that is how the camera companies ripe people off by selling their proprietary batteries. Olympus, Sony and other manufacturers are getting into using proprietary batteries so be aware. Enough said about image quality and batteries but I think they are the most important issues of buying a digital cameras. Anyway after looking at the low light image quality of the Sony, I was going to take it back. But the more I use it the more I fall in love with it. Sony got the ease of use and features down to a science and makes it impossible for me to return it. It has this very large 2.5" LCD so I can review and share photos without downloading. I think the largest LCD Olympus make is the C-7000 at 2.0” and the C-3000 is only 1.5 inch. From the menus to the buttons. It feels like they are always there when you need them. Movies are great, you can email to your friends and they don’t need any software to see the movies with Win 2000 and up. Originally I was going to get a 10x optical zoom for some of my kid’s events but I figure out that a 3x zoom in a 5 mg camera is actually a 5x optical zoom in a 3 mg camera. You can enlarge a 5 mg image and zoom in than crop and still get a 3 mg resolution. So this camera is like a 5x optical zoom 3 mg camera. Don't get the 10x zoom unless you don't care about the bulkiness and the weight. I tried the macro function last night, the clarity is amazing with no noticeable distortion. You can focus on your finger nails at about 3 inches away with auto focus. My old Olympus need to focus at about 10 inches away unless I use the manual focus which really is hard to use. Another thing is that I love the sound of the shutter because it gives me the picture taken confirmation signal clearly and you can even turn the sound off at meetings. Oh, I discovered another feature on this baby, it has auto shut off. You will be in love if you run to the store and get one. My thumbs up for Sony.
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i have had a nikon swivel, canon powershot (a80 an ...
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