Upgrading from the trusty DSC-F505V

Author's Rating:

Pros: Sturdy, excellent pictures, LCD viewfinder, design.

Cons: Odd shape if you're not used to it.

The Bottom Line: 
If you can get over the styling, this is an absolute must for the enthusiast consumer. Brilliant images without the cost of a multi-thousand $$$ full-on Canon D1.

Author's Review
I'm a long-time Sony fan. I've had their products in one form or another since the days of the original Walkman. It was a huge and pleasant surprise when my dad's wedding present to me a few years back was the DSC-F505V digital camera. After a couple of years good use, time came to upgrade. I love the DSC-F505V, and it seemed logical to me to upgrade to it's newer, bigger brother.

The DSC-F717 is a powerhouse of a digital camera. It's over 5 megapixels in image resolution, and they've solved a lot of the problems and drawbacks of the original F505 / F505V cameras. The biggest change is the LCD viewfinder. To complement the LCD screen on the back (which, honestly, just doesn't work in bright sunlight), there's now a tiny camcorder-like LCD viewfinder too. It's brilliant - I used it for the first time on a bright sunny day last weekend and it makes all the difference in the world. It has dioptre adjustment for people who wear glasses, and it echos all the on-screen information from the rear LCD into the viewfinder.

Another improvement is exposure bracketing. You can set the DSC-F717 to take three exposures - one over- one correctly- and one under-exposed, for when you must have the right picture from a one-shot opportunity.

There's all sorts of other improvements too. I'll cover those in the remaining body of the review.

Speaking of bodies, the Sony has a metal casing which feels reassuring to hold. The odd design is a love-it or hate-it affair but I think if you've not used one of these before, you should try it out. Once you do, you'll find it the most natural digital camera to hold, taking the weight of the camera in one hand (the lens) and using the other to operate the various controls. If you've used or owned an F505 camera, you'll notice straight away that the 717 is quite a bit larger and heavier. It's not unpleasant by any means, but if you, like I, had a neat little camera bag that everything fitted into before, you might find you'll be upgrading that too.

The control layout is fairly logical with the shutter release well placed. Behind it is a multipurpose jog/shuttle/data entry wheel that can be used to pick menu options and set various operational parameters. The complexity and depth of the menu system in the Sony is vast, but they've managed to lay it out in a fairly logical fashion. You don't ever feel so buried in the menus that you forget what it was you were trying to achieve. All the on-screen menus, and all other displays for that matter, are very readable in all conditions.

The main selector dial on the top of the camera has brought back the "green" mode - twist the dial to this position and everything in the camera becomes automatic. Great for a quick photo. If you want full control, you've got shutter-priority mode, aperture-priority mode, and full manual. The camera can also adjust its sensitivity to light, emulating the wet-film ISO speed settings, and it's noticable. On the older camera, dim-light shots came out dim. Now they come out bright and clear, if not a little grainy. Finally, there's some presets "scene" modes for landscape, portrait, and postcard type photography. These set up the camera to favour the foreground or background appropriately. There's also a couple of night time scene modes which work with and without the flash.

Compared to the DSC-F505 cameras, the exposure and metering system in the 717 seems much improved. It handles contrasting light and dark areas very well, and there's minimal CCD noise in plain areas of the image. The flash seems more powerful too - to me anyway. It's a true TTL metering flash - when you take a photo, the flash fires twice - once to meter the scene, and once to shoot the image. This means you can slave a flash to the 717 and get proper TTL metering from it - something almost unique to this camera in this price range.

Speaking of accessory sockets, the 717 finally sports a method of connecting a cable release. Thank the Lord! Of course the cable release is a separate item, but I would seriously consider getting one if you do astronomical or nature photography with your digital camera.

The focusing system on the 717 is a cinch to use. You can choose from one of 6 modes, or zones, to concentrate the focus on, and I've yet to see an out-of-focus picture from my camera. The macro mode is very good too, picking up objects so close to the lens that you would have to backlight them to get an exposure. If you're in the dark, the 717 has a laser autofocusing system that projects a red pattern on to the object to be photographed, so even then, your pictures will be pin-sharp. And if you really must, the 717 sports two nightvision modes. One is nightframing, that uses an infra-red filter and a pair of in-camera illuminators to allow you to see in complete darkness to frame your shot. When you take it, the flash fires and you get a true-colour photo. The other mode is full-on night vision mode where you'll end up with a green-and-black exposure sensitive to infra-red, taken in complete darkness. Neat, but possibly of limited usefulness.

Shutter-lag is almost non-existant to the casual user now. The F505 cameras had a terrible lag problem, and you'd often end up missing the fast-moving object you were trying to capture because the camera spent so long arsing around trying to warm the CCD up and take the picture. Not so on the 717. Stab the button and the picture is taken almost instantly. And speaking of fast-moving subjects, the 717 now also has burst-mode where it can take 3 photos in quick succession, thus maximising your chances of getting the shot you want.

There are ancilliary controls on the side of the lens barrel. The most important one is the white-balance button. Although the auto-white-balance does a bloody good job in all but the most extreme conditions, Sony give you a couple of presets (indoor incandescant, indoor bulb, outdoor) as well as the infintely preferable "user" mode. To do this, get sheet of white paper and point the camera at it. Hold the "user" button for a second and you're telling the camera "this is white". The camera will then adjust for any colour-cast and your paper will appear white in the viewfinder. The Sony can remove pretty lurid colour casts too. I photographed the main foyer in the Paris casino in Las Vegas last year and it came out all yellow. When I went back this year with my new camera, I took a small white card with me (actually, I keep it in the camera bag now). When I instructed the Sony to remove the colour cast, the picture came out perfectly, showing the white marble and pillars without the yellow hues cast on them by the chandeliers. Sweet.

At the front of the lens barrel is a multipurpose ring. Normally, it's a zoom ring. You can use the 'T' and 'W' buttons on the side of the lens if you want, but the ring will seem more natural to anyone who's used an SLR camera. Hats off to Sony for this one too : in one of the menus, you can tell the camera if you want the zoom-in to be a clockwise twist, or anti-clockwise. Effectively this not only caters for personal taste, but left-handedness too. Like me.
In manual focus mode, the ring becomes the focussing ring - again, it seems very natural to anyone who's used an SLR.

Like many digital cameras, the Sony comes with some limited movie modes too. There's some novelty ones that take rapid strobe-like images for sports shots (low res, though), through to the truly useful Hi-Q mode. This is a fill-up-the-memory-stick mode where the camera will just keep shooting 320x240 moving images until you run out of space or choose to stop again. The framerate is about 15fps - a little jerky, and the compression is suitably questionable, but for sending video-postcards, it's ace. We used my new camera a couple of weeks ago to video a house we were looking at. It was invaluable to be able to go back to those little movies and check out stuff we had questions about later.

The memory card supplied with the camera is a typically stingy 32Mb card. A couple of years ago that would have been great, but with higher resolution images, it's inexcusable to supply such a small card to start you out. Sony stick to their Memory Stick cards which are the ones about the size of a stick of gum. I prefer them to the other types because they look like they could take a real beating without breaking, and because they have a physical 'lock' switch on them to prevent writing to the card.

You also get a beefy strap, lens cap and cord, the charger / power supply and all the cables and drivers needed to connect it to either a TV , or to your PC to transfer images. The camera can output NTSC or PAL video so you can connect it to just about any TV to look at the images. One thing worth mentioning here : the power adapter is about the size of a small housebrick. It's not as heavy, but it does seem unfeasibly large given that it provides as much wattage and voltage as my cellphone charger, and that is about 1/8 the size. Weird. However, it does accept 110-250v AC, 50/60Hz power, so you can take it anywhere in the world with you to charge your camera up.

The battery is one of Sony's "stamina" batteries. Don't believe the numbers on the box - those are for low-res images, shot in ideal conditions without the flash. However, you'd be unlucky to do a day's vacation shooting with this camera and have the battery run out on you. At least it estimates the time remaining in the display, so if things are getting low, you know to recharge.

What about picture quality?
Well that depends what you want from your camera. For website photos, this camera is way overpowered. For CDROMs to send to your mates, it's perfect. For 6x4 and 5x7 prints, it's perfect. For 8x10 prints, it's perfect. Want to go higher? I reckon you could probably get a reasonable 16x20 print from this camera too, but I've not tried it myself yet. If you start to go much higher, the prints will look obviously like they've come from a digital camera. That's no fault of the camera, but you've got to understand that a pixel can only be blown up so large before you start to see it as annoying.
If you're an absolute perfectionist, and you take a lot of contrasty, moody photographs, then you'll find the odd colour fringing here and there. If you don't know what colour-fringing is, then I can safely say you're the type of person that will never notice it. If you do know what it is, then I'll tell you it's not intrusive and you'd have to be in there at pixel level with Photoshop to find it....
The DSC-F717 does come with in-camera sharpening modes. Typically, a lot of magazines will tell you to use these but I've always found that the sharpening enhances not only the edges in the image, but the noise and JPG compression artifacts too. Frankly, I'd leave it off - I do - and then use Photoshop for those images you want a little more punch from. There's nothing wrong with the unsharpened images from the Sony though. It's rare that I'll go in and do this afterwards.

Technophobe
Something you have to realise about buying a digital camera is that it will be obsolete when you click the "order now" button, or sign the credit card receipt. I'm brilliant at doing this - I adopted laserdisc just as DVD came out, I adopted betamax just as Sony brought it to the end of it's life. I just know that Sony are waiting until I've had the 717 for a month before unleashing the DSC-F919 on the world. If you're the type of person who worries about redundancy in your electronic goods, then you're never going to get anywhere. Ease off a bit, and consider the DSC-F717. Even if/when it is superceded, this purchase will last you a good 3 or 4 years before you need to upgrade. In fact, for most users, you'll probably not need to upgrade at all - it will come down to personal peference at the time. Suffice to say my DSC-F505V served perfectly for three years, in all weathers and conditions, and continues to do so with its new owner. I expect nothing less of the DSC-F717, but deep down I know I'll catch the technobug in a couple of years time and upgrade once more :-)


The really important bit. If you're planning to buy this camera online, I would recommend you do some serious research into the various sellers. I bought mine from B&H video (my review of their online web presence is here : http://www.epinions.com/content_86984134276) because I went for reputation over price. I would recommend you do too, because buying cameras on the internet seems to be one of the last strongholds of truly appalling and shoddy service. Sure there's a lot of places that massively undercut the opposition, but a lot of them sell grey imports and more than a few don't have full online ordering. You'll get all your details into their system, and when you click the "confirm order" button, they'll give you a 1-800 number to call to "complete the order". Of course at this point, they already have your credit card details, and can pile on the high-pressure sales tactics and hideously expensive shipping costs. You've been warned!

And finally
There's so much to the DSC-F717, that short of a full professional review, you're not going to really understand what it's all about. If you're an info-hungry researcher of a consumer like I am, then I've got to recommend Steve's Digicams (http://www.steves-digicams.com/). His reviews are as unbiased as those here on epinions.com, but he goes into nauseating detail about the cameras. Frankly, I can recommend the DSC-F717 hand-on-heart to anyone considering buying it. But if you just must have that extra piece of research, go and take look at that site, then come back here and rate my review as being "very helpful" to you.....not only did I review the camera, but I've warned you of the pitfalls of buying online and told you where to get even more info. I'm just too kind...........