 Everybody's smiling with the W170 |
| Review Date: June 5, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Hector Bruce, South Devon, England |
I've already got an alpha 100 D-SLR, but there are occasions when its just not the time to lug a great big camera round with all the different bits that go with it. So I thought that this would be a good everyday sort of camera. I was wrong.
It's a fantasic camera! I could end up using it more than my D-SLR as the pictures are of the same quality, but in such a small case!
The last compact digital camera I had was another Cyber-Shot, the P-10, but its 5 years old now, and how its all changed. Everything is so fast, from turning it on, to focusing, to zooming, to taking as many pictures you want in a row, its all instant!
However, I really think the best points of this camera are the functions that do it all themselves. Face detection and the Smile Shutter. No longer is face detection a gimmick, everything is adjusted to make those faces look the best they can, focus, exposure, white balance, and flash are all adjusted. And it plays a role in the Smile Shutter, the most fantastic thing you will use for a long while.
Just focus the camera, press the shutter, and smile! It really works, and is so fun to use, you can also set the camera to child priority, so that the camera will only fire when the children in the photo are smiling, I hear sighs of relief from parents everywhere!
But using the Smile Shutter you will always get great people pictures, as i've found, after the first smiling picture, the subject laughs so much at the camera that it just keeps going!
All of this, and a lot more, in something you can fit in any trouser pocket, what an age we live in.
Ok, a couple of tiny gripes. The camera is slower to focus when zoomed in to the max 5x's, but only by about a second. The other is that in my 5 year old camera, the infoLITHIUM battery used would tell you down to minute how long you had till it ran out, all of my Handycam's do this too. This camera CAN do this, but you have to purchase an infoLITHIUM battery seperatly, would have been nice to include it in the box.
Overall though, its a supurb piece of kit, and i'm sure it will capture many moments, probably 95% with smiling happy people due to the Smile Shutter, to come. |
Very Happy Indeedy
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| Review Date: August 10, 2008 |
| Reviewer: D. Hadley, UK |
Had this for about a week and I'm really impressed with it. Pictures look very good (yet to print anything off mind!)& the x5 zoom is excellent. I was very surprised by the size of this little gem, much smaller and slimmer than I thought. Have had lots of laughs with the smile detect feature(which actually works). Quality of video capture is also excellent.
Only negs are it can take a second or 2 to focus when zooming in & the vertical streaks that appear on the screen during bright settings (a built in feature of the camera)take a couple of seconds to disappear but certainly wouldn't put me off purchasing it (if I hadn't already!)
Overall, excellent camera at a great price. |
Aren't these cameras getting good?
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| Review Date: August 7, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Ian Spencer, Solihull |
I've been addicted to the cheaper Sony cameras for some time - not that there is anything unreliable about them, it's just the one daughter who thinks they should bounce off concrete and have some magic retrieval system for when they are left on buses in another country.
The last camera I had was the DSC-600, which was good, but did distort noticeably on wide-angle shots.
The gadgetry on the W170 is good. There are a few features which I have been impressed with:
* The ISO setting lets you take blur-free pictures without grain in low light settings like church interiors. Not sure why it does not automatically kick in in its auto mode as it is so effective.
* The focusing works well, with the feedback squares picking out what it is thinking about, and the shutter press easily distinguishes between the pre-focus and the picture take. Biasing towards faces seems to do the trick. Out of the 500 or so pictures I took across a couple of weeks, I never had a focus problem, which is a first for me.
* The simplified menu system with big graphics makes it easy to know how it is set up. Also, there is an integrated menu so you can find all the options rather than trying to remember how to get into the menu to pick up a particular feature.
* The lens is a big wide angle lens - a proper 28mm equivalent which any 35mm camera person will know is the mainstay of that format. Though there is some pincushion distortion, it is reasonably well contained, especially compared with others.
* Super bright large screen, visible even on bright days.
* Super long life battery - over 300 shots means that you don't need a spare as there is always time to charge up before it runs out (unless you really, really want to bore someone).
* It remembers which way round you held the camera - no more rotating pictures on your computer!
Minor negatives - poor, small, viewfinder (but not really needed with the screen working so well), custom battery (but probably do not need a spare as it works so well), non-standard complicated USB cable with delicate looking camera connection. Arguably, the Sony Cyber-shot W150 Digital Camera (8.1MP, 5x Optical Zoom) 2.7 inch LCD - Silver would have done just as well - I don't need the extra couple of million pixels but as the W170 is now cheaper than the lower spec model...
All in all, another gem from Sony. |
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