Sony - Cybershot W80 Digital Camera Review

The W300 was designed to appeal to both casual users who want a compact or ultracompact digicam with lots of point-and-shoot features and automatic operation, and to photo enthusiasts who value tweakability, pocketability, ease of use, very good optics, and DSLR-like resolution.

FEATURES OVERVIEW

The W300 features Sony's Super SteadyShot optical image stabilization, 12 user selectable scene modes (including a new underwater scene mode) and an intelligent scene recognition mode - the camera automatically recognizes five popular scene types. There's also a new Extra High Sensitivity mode (ISO 6400) plus an Extra High-Speed Burst mode - 1.9 fps (for up to 100 images) at full resolution, or 5 fps at 3 megapixels.

In addition the camera provides five color modes, including a "real" color setting (for less in-camera processing and more accurate colors), and an improved AF system with automatic macro shooting. Sony's new Dynamic Range Optimiser (much like Nikon's D-lighting feature) which allows users to tweak brightness and contrast over the entire image frame or area by area to recover image detail lost in highlight areas or boost shadow detail without losing highlights.

The W300 is a natural choice for those who like to shoot portraits - the camera's Face Detection AF can not only identify and isolate faces, it can also distinguish between adult faces and the faces of children and it can detect when a face is smiling and then trip the shutter automatically. The W300 can reduce red eye at exposure or post exposure, and offers in-camera cropping and/or adding retro-style portrait touches like feathering or shadowing the borders of the image frame.

The W300's menu system is clunky and unnecessarily complicated - there is both a Menu button and a "Home" button (both of which lead to essentially the same place) and that seems a bit redundant. In my opinion users of any enthusiast-level digicam should have direct access to the exposure compensation mode and the ability to immediately delete an image immediately after review: with the W300 both actions require a trip to the menus.

Basic shooting modes on the W300 are as follows:

• Easy: Basic point-and-shoot mode designed for beginners, with LCD screen instructions and severely limited (image size and flash on/off) user input.
• Auto: An more advanced point-and-shoot mode with more user input, Face Detection control, Scene Recognition, and red-eye reduction.
• Program: Point-and-shoot operation with expanded user input - access to sensitivity, white balance, flash options, Dynamic Range Optimizer, color modes, and IS.
• Scene: Scene options include beach, extra high-speed burst, extra high sensitivity, fireworks, landscape, snow, Soft Snap (portrait), twilight, twilight portrait, high sensitivity, Smile Shutter, and underwater.
• Manual: User controls exposure settings (shutter speed and aperture) and all other options.
• Movie: The W300 can record video clips at 640×480 at 30 fps (requires Memory Stick Duo Pro card), or 640x480 at 16 fps or 320x240 at 8.3 fps with regular Memory Stick Duo cards. Video clip duration is limited only by memory card capacity.