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Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program The DSC-W730 contains a 16.1 megapixel sensor in the 1/2.3" format (about 28 square millimeters, smaller than a fingernail). The obvious drawback here is noise. The more pixels you cram into a small area, the more digital noise that will be evident in the resulting file. On its own, that's a reduction in quality that negates the need for such a dense sensor; who cares about the extra megapixels if you're not getting any more actual information, just noise? All it's doing is filling up your hard drive faster. In the case of the DSC-W730, you're talking about around 6.5MB per image. You'll even hit the limits of the optics well before 16.1 megapixels, so there's absolutely no reason (other than marketing) for Sony to put such a sensor in this camera.
Unfortunately, they did it anyway. And probably because of the increased sensor noise, they decided to really crank up that in-camera noise reduction. It looks awful, and it's evident at all ISO settings. This NR cannot be reduced or defeated. It's there for good, and it's even noticeable when viewing an image on my computer at 50% of its original size. Of course, the higher the ISO, the more destructive they get with the noise reduction, which just makes matters worse. The issues are somewhat less noticeable when shooting low ISO outdoors with the lens at its widest setting. In fact, in that specific scenario I'd say the image quality is pretty good. Once you change any of those parameters though, you start to see more problems.
The lens is an 8x optical (25-224mm in 35mm terms) lens, f/3.3 at the wide end and f/6.3 at the tele end. In other words, slow and dark. You will almost always need to use the flash indoors, especially if you're zooming in at all. Autofocus indoors with zoom is spotty at best and generally takes a couple of seconds to lock on to something (if it can lock onto anything at all). Sony attempted to combat this by adding a retina-frying orange LED as an AF-assist lamp, but while it might occasionally increase the odds of getting good focus on a subject indoors, it doesn't really seem to speed the process up at all. Outdoors (and sometimes indoors with the lens zoomed out all the way), the camera locks focus much quicker (around half a second).
In the majority of cases, indoor flash photos are exposed pretty accurately. Outdoors without flash, I noticed in many cases the camera underexposed by 1/2 to 1 stop, and sometimes even more underexposed that that when trying to shoot indoors without flash (especially when zoomed in at all). Combined with the existing noise from the ISO setting and the very heavy handed application of NR, trying to bring up the exposure of those ambient light indoor shots to normal levels is going to increase the shadow noise quite a bit. It's not pretty.
The build quality is about what I'd expect from a low-end compact in this price range, entirely plastic. It may not be particularly confidence inspiring, but for the most part it seems pretty solid. It's small and light enough to carry easily in a pocket. I'm not a huge fan of the shutter button though, which has no distinct half-press. It's there, but you can't really tell when you've gotten there like you can with most cameras. You just sort of rest your finger on it with some light pressure.
There are a couple of interesting features, such as a panorama mode that operates similar to that of a phone camera -rather than taking several shots and stitching them, it does a panning style capture. There's a "smile detection" mode, which I admit was fun for a couple of minutes. When engaged (there's a shortcut button on the camera for it so you don't need to dig into the menus to turn it on) it actively searches out a smiling face. When it sees one, it automatically takes a picture. I'm not sure how it works with groups (do they all need to be smiling, or just one?) but regardless I think the novelty won't last long with that feature.
My suggestion? Honestly, if you're determined to find a camera in this price range and you can't save your pennies for something better, I'd recommend looking at the used/refurb market. For example, top-of-the-line Canon Powershot SD cameras from late 2009 were about the same size and weight as this DSC-W730, around 12 megapixels (still more than enough for any camera this size), built like small tanks, with better optics and overall better image quality. These days even those high-end models can be bought for less than this camera. A quick search shows that an excellent condition Canon Powershot SD980 IS can be had for around $60-$80 (or refurbished by Canon for $129 which I think includes a warranty) and that was the best, most expensive Powershot SD model of its time. It even has a big touchscreen display.
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