Sony Cybershot DSCW120
MSRP on this little sony is $189 but don’t pay full list. Ten minutes shopping at either Amazon, B+H, Adorama or Ritz will net you a savings of about $20. Don’t pay full price.
Sony Cybershot DSCW120/B 7.2MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom with Super Steady Shot (Black)
This little sony is a 7 megapixel digital camera which is more than enough resolution to give you poster sized prints. If you need more megapixels, you’re in a different price point than this camera can offer. Double the money, and double the price, the Canon Powershot G10 would be a good solution if you need mega megapixels.
The lens is a Carl Zeiss 4x Optical zoom a 4x zoom gives you a 50mm-200mm Zoom range. you’ll miss out on superwide shots but for daily use this is a handy zoom ratio to have and pretty much standard for cameras in this price range.
The 2.5 inch LCD display is a little small by today’s standards but it’s bright and clear.You’ll have no problems composing or reviewing your photos. Most other compacts in this price range offer a 3 inch screen. But this camera comes in about $150, so expect a corner or so to be cut.
Like the Canon’s Sony too has face detection which does what you’d think it would. The camera has the technology to detect faces. This is an important feature as the camera adjusts exposure and focus for the most important part of your photos, the faces. If the faces are exposed correctly usually all the other parts just fall into place.
One neat feature of this little Sony is ’smile detection’. Smile detection expands on face detection by allowing you to set the camera so that it will detect laughs, smiles, or grins and releases the shutter automatically when any of these happen. No more ’say cheese’.
Sony calls a mixture of the high ISO capablities of this camera and optical image stabilization “Sony Double Anti Blur Solution” (who dreams up these names? ). I real world terms what this means is that this little guy has two features. The first being auto ISO adjustment up to ISO 3200 which allows you to get faster shutter speeds when the light is low. This is important as this gets you more sharper photos. The downside is there may be more noise in the image and the image may not be a as clear or saturated in colors. The image stabilization compenates for moving photographers, or subjects, or both – and gets you sharp photos you might otherwise. These are two must have features in my view.
Here’s another example of ad copy gone wild: The sony comes with Dynamic Range Optimization Standard. Wow. Real world this means that if you’re taking photos of bright scenes you won’t lose detail in the whites or bright parts of the image. The camera will adjust exposure so you get detail in the highlights of the photo.
The sony’s got a movie mode,but it’s only VGA (640×480). If you need better video than this might not be for you. If you don’t care about video (I don’t) then this will do just fine.
The auto-focus is a 9-point auto focus factoring in 9 different areas to adjust autofocus accordingly. This will allow you to focus in other ares besides the center of the image and will help with your composition.
One of the neat, and old school features that this Sony has is a real optical viewfinder. You can compose with the viewfinder, rather than with the LCD screen. ( I might be showing my age here, but I can’t get used to composing with the LCD screen)
Want to shoot action? The Sony Cybershot DSCW120 has a burst mode averaging 1.5 frames per second (fps) for up to 100 frames. Great for grabbing baby’s first steps or birthday cakes blown out.
There’s some other features like being able to connect to your HDTV and the like, but this is about the camera and it’s features. If you need this feature, it’s there.
For $150ish, this is great little digital camera. The downside is the smaller LCD screen. the upside is the high ISO to 3200, image stabilization, face detection, and smile detection. The 9 point autofocus is a very nice feature at this price point. Some DSLR’s have this feature but you have to spend north of $1000.
As I mentioned above, list price is $180 but you can grab this for about $150 by checking Adorama, Amazon, or B+H. Please consider buying through the links I just mentioned as it’s a great way for you to help me help you and it doesn’t cost you anything and you save money off regular price. It’s a good way for us to help each other.
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