Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program
I was pleased to get the opportunity to evaluate this point-and-shoot entry from Sony. I am usually a Canon shooter and was interested in evaluating something from another manufacturer and this unit did not disappoint.
Image Quality
This of course is what any camera evaluation must center on as without taking good pictures even the most stylish and easy to use camera will come up short. I have taken a number of pictures in different settings from daylight to night. Images are generally sharp and with good contrast. Focus is usually pretty quick but not always accurate. I was surprised that the camera in low light / auto setting tends to not activate the flash, instead decresing shutter to as low as 1/30 second which leads to blurriness in pictures with moving kids. When the flash did activate, it was of limited strength and illuminated objects / people only quite close to the camera. For detailed analysis, I took comparison shots with this camera and both a dSLR and another point and shoot camera, both from Canon. I was surprised at how well this camera does with stationary subjects in low light Sony has really done a great job there. Please see the video portion of this review for details on the analysis. A word about the 16 MP chip on this camera please don't make the mistake thinking this camera is significantly better than a 14 MP camera and way better than a 12 MP camera as that is not a valid assumption. The camera chip is only capable of conveying what the optics deliver to it and optics on a point and shoot by definition / size can't deliver what larger lenses with a dSLR can do. What a 16 MP camera does mean, however, is larger file sizes to fill a hard drive more quickly. This is not a criticism of this particular camera but just something to consider when looking at the whole class of high megapixel point and shoot cameras in general. Increased megapixels beyond about 12 are really not needed by very many photographers. On the other hand, one cannot always haul the big dSLR everywhere and having a point and shoot available is critical since the camera you have with you is the best one for the job and this one does very well indeed.
Form Factor
This is a very small camera. about 3/4 inch shorter than an iPhone and just a bit thicker. It fits very comfortably in a pocket. The lens protector reveals the lens and flash when slid down and also turns the unit on. Buttons are few including an on/off switch and a bit of an oddly designed zoom button which moves back and forth to zoom in and out. The position of the buttons does make operating the zoom function with one hand a bit awkward. Most functions including triggering movie recording are handled via touch screen.
User Interface
This camera is clearly strongly influenced by the iPhone with touch screen providing most of the functionality. As others have said, the touch screen is not as responsive as an iPhone but it works well enough. I did find myself trying to "swipe" from screen to screen which often resulted in inadvertent opening of a menu item. I firmly believe in the principle that a UI should be self-explanatory without referral to manuals and therefore used this camera without looking at the manual (at least that is my excuse for not reading it). Some of the icons were not obvious such as the different quality settings for video, but overall I was able to self-teach the use of the camera over a few minutes.
Memory Storage
I was a bit surprised that the camera uses MICRO SD cards, not the more standard SD cards. I have a bunch of SD cards for other cameras and after opening the box on this one I had to go shopping. I guess I should have been happy that I could use a micro SD card which with an adapter can be used with an SD card reader as Sony could have used only the micro Memory Stick (this camera can use either). Anyone remember Betamax?
Battery
Battery charge was quite rapid I think it charged fully in less than 45 minutes for me. Battery life decreased by a segment after a few minutes of video and 30 or so pictures, many with flash. It is true that a Li Ion cell does not demonstrate its full potential for several charge / discharge cycles so this may well improve. Battery is rated at 630 mAh which is a pretty low number, however. I suspect this is another sacrifice (along with micro SD card use) to make the camera as small as possible.
Extra Features
I was looking forward to the panorama feature as Sony's TV ads showing that seem to indicate the camera will be taking a series of high-resolution pictures and seamlessly splicing them together for you. If you have ever done that job manually in Photoshop, it is a hassle (though there are now a number of software options for that). In any case, the output from this camera is normally a 4608x3456 image, so I thought a panorama might be, say, 12,000x3456 but that is not the case. The panorama shot ends up being 4912x1080 so while it is panoramic side to side there is a lot less information there than I was hoping for in fact the panorama shot is 5.3 MP (compared to 16 MP for a regular picture). It does at least allow wider shots to be completed, though I prefer Canon's solution to this after panorama sequence is selected a ghost image of the first shot allows easy lining up of the second shot and so forth and the camera does not change settings between shots so they are easy to splice together later on.
Overall, I am very pleased with this camera and with its small size and ease of use I plan to use it a lot.
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