Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T700; all the Sony virtues and Sony faults
Sony is a company that marches to a different drummer. An example: the boss of this Japanese company is Welsh. Thus, as always, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T700 has been designed by Sony without too much regard to the other players.
First a complaint. This applies to almost all other manufacturers as well but with this Sony it is central. It has a wondrous screen that takes up almost the whole of the back of the metal cased camera. Which means no viewfinder. In some countries — Australia being a prime example — this makes focusing very difficult in high summer. Indeed, as with other viewfinder-less cameras, damn near impossible.
No camera company contacted about this gives any sort of logical answer. Mainly they mutter something about there being no customer demand for viewfinders. Which is a total nonsense. It probably just a cost-cutting exercise or, with Sony, a belief of the designers that sleekness is worth more than utility.
So this Sony, like so many other digital cameras, has no viewfinder and you will have to work within that limitation. There is simply no add-on solution of which the writer is aware which will solve this problem when taking pictures in very strong sunlight. True, it has automatic focus but that does not equate to automatic framing.
This is a 10 megapixel camera (as in the DSC-T300 which it replaces) which is easing towards being a standard for better quality gear. It has a 4x optical zoom which, all Gods be thanked, does not protrude from the camera. It has the Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens which has a tight zoom range but by using folded optics it can fit into the body of this slim camera.
(Did you know the Tessar, a famous photographic lens design conceived by physicist Paul Rudolph, sates from 1902?)
One result of this miniaturization is it is quite easy, if you are ham-handed, to stick a finger over the lens when shooting. This does not lead to satisfactory results.
You get 4GB of internal storage which is fairly amazing.
The number of pictures you can store depends, of course, on the quality of the image although by dropping the quality you could probably get to 40,000 images.
So there is a bundled Picture Motion Browser so that you can resize files to fit them in. With that much storage and a 3.5-inch screen which totally takes over the back of the camera it will be tempting to use the camera as a portable photo album and Sony makes much of this.
(For those not using it as a picture display unit that sort of storage becomes important when you use this camera in video mode which is built-in.)
The screen dominates the camera and with the metal casing — available in four different colors — we have a camera and picture viewer as a fashion statement. If you are going to be sleek and sexy and all those good things then some of the practical side gets a bit difficult. There are very few control buttons on the camera – playback button, the shutter button and a fiddly zoom control.
Sony being Sony it has a special USB cable for connecting to a computer and do not lose it or you are stuffed until you get another one from Sony.
Now we come to the controls.
Apple, with its iPhone, changed the way we think about controlling electronic devices. At a guess all other devices will have to follow the Apple lead to some extent. Sony has done so here. Not fully. Not perhaps with such grace and facility. Not perhaps as easy to use. But very acceptable if you are happy with the iPhone control concept.
If you are not happy you should work at it because this is the way we are going to go.
For display the screen is better than OK and about VGA standard. It is much sharper than that on the model it replaces having about four times the resolution. Perhaps not something you want to use to dazzle your friends but very workable, elegant and better than anything else on cameras of this style.
This Sony takes very good pictures. Far better than you might expect with image stabilization and all those good things working to help get a better final result. Good color which is well balanced.
Now we come to a flaw which, for us, makes life very difficult. That battery has no guts whatsoever. Take shots for two hours and you have a flat battery. True, most users are not going to bang off shots for that length of time using the built-in flash. But it is a limitation and one that will be very important to some users.
This is all very Sony. It produces superb gear which is always slightly eccentric.
For your money you get the Sony name, a camera that has Smile Shutter technology with three levels and an anti-blink mode which will automatically take a second shot if someone in the frame blinks. The price, for a camera in this style, is high. But that is what you expect from Sony. Eccentricity — or, if you want to be politer and perhaps more accurate, innovation — and a highish price. Mostly it is worth it.
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