DSC-U50 Cyber-shot U Digital Camera - Silver

CNET editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.8 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Rebecca Viksnins
• Reviewed on: 09/22/2003
• Released on: 10/08/2003

Sleek and slim with a 180-degree rotating lens, the Cyber Shot DSC-U50 is a surefire attention-grabber. It's also ultraportable, weighing just 4.3 ounces with media and batteries installed. In addition to improving on the flexibility and the feature set of the preceding DSC-U30, the U50 is the first camera to use Sony's smaller flash-memory card, Memory Stick Duo. Unfortunately, the new model suffers from the same limitations as its older brother, offers no optical zoom, and produces somewhat noisy images.

The U50 is one stylish point-and-shoot. Its well-constructed metal body comes in silver, black, and burnt orange. Just like the U30, the U50 doesn't have a viewfinder, so you'll have to frame your shots with the 1-inch LCD, which is thankfully high-quality and quite bright. The four setting and menu-navigation buttons on top operate crisply, although they're small and a bit close together.

Like the U30, the U50 offers no exposure compensation and only two resolutions, 1,632x1,224 pixels (2 megapixels) and 640x480 pixels (VGA). But the U50 bests its predecessor by providing adjustable white balance, which comes in the form of four presets. You also get several flash options, manual focus at preset distances, five scene modes, two burst modes, four special effects, and soundless MPEG-1 movie capture. This Sony is the first U-series camera to support the PictBridge standard, which enables direct output to any PictBridge-compatible printer or peripheral.

You can turn on the U50 and be ready to shoot in less than 1.5 seconds, and you'll wait only about 2 seconds between shots. The shutter lag is very short at approximately 0.5 seconds. The fast VGA burst mode let us fire off 10 photos in less than 6 seconds; the 2-megapixel burst mode captures 2 images separated by a 0.6-second interval. The U50 ships with two AAA nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries, which will be more than adequate for an evening in the city. On a full charge, we managed to take 279 pictures, with the flash firing on half of them.

As with the U30, our test shots were mediocre for the 2-megapixel category: sharpness and detail were average; exposure and color rendition were decent; and we saw more noise, artifacts, and blown-out highlights than we'd like. The end result is picture quality suited mainly to e-mailing and making a few small prints to pass around or stick on the fridge.

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