Full Review

If you've read my other reviews on our last two cameras, both Nikon Coolpix (L4 & L11), you'll know I thought all along that they were *okay* cameras that just suffered from durability issues.

Boy was I wrong! Meeting this new Sony has given me a whole new digital-camera experience.

I thought I was a lousy photographer... turns out it was the camera! With the Nikons, I could never get a decent shot of a baby, our family, anything low-light... basically, anything.

Since there were some good pictures here and there, I basically blamed myself for all the bad ones. Ha. It was the camera after all. These days, every picture is a great one!

Where the Nikons suffered from tremendous shutter lag - the gap in time between pushing the button and when the camera decides to take the picture, this Sony is practially instantaneous. Where the Nikon couldn't handle anything less than full stark daylight, the Sony goes anywhere and tries its darndest to take a great picture while it's there.

And here's the big thing: where the Nikons had soft, flimsy LCD screens (that both broke in just a few months!), the Sony's 2.4" bright screen is made of a way sturdier plastic (though I still wouldn't push on it or stress it).

The camera itself has a great feel in my palm - a little bit weighty but not so big or heavy that it would ever get burdensome.

The Sony offers a variety of shooting modes, but outside of its respectable movie mode, I doubt I'll use much more than the "Auto" mode because it does most of the thinking for you. Unless you're in very specialized circumstances (beach, near-total darkness), the Auto mode does a great job of it.

The dial to choose mode is substantial and the whole camera feels fairly well-made. I believe it offers 3x optical zoom, and probably a couple of levels of "digital zoom," but I am not really a believer in that, so we'll probably stick with the optical zoom only.

My one annoyance so far is that it only comes with 22mb of internal memory, so you either have to get used to taking 4-8 print-quality pictures at a time or buy memory. We did buy memory; it only uses Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Duo Pro cards, and 4Gb cost about $40 - so just plan on adding that to the cost of the camera, or find a deal where memory comes bundled with the camera.

HOWEVER, that annoyance (one-time purchase of proprietary memory) is definitely balanced out by the fact that this camera takes standard AA batteries. I figure we change batteries way more often than we change memory so the battery consideration should come first. We're using the rechargeables that came with our first Nikon... the cameras may have died, but the batteries are still going strong!

Speaking of batteries, like all digitals, this thing goes through alkalines at an amazing rate. Though it comes bundled with 2 standard alkaline AA's, make sure you have real camera batteries on hand, because you'll only get off a few pictures before the included batteries are useless. I highly recommend rechargeables; our Nikons can take hundreds of shots without needing a charge!