CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 07/07/2004
- Released on: 06/15/2004
Editor's note: We have changed the rating in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale. Click here to find out more. Since the jumbo 2.5-inch LCD occupies about 75 percent of the rear surface of the DSC-W1, there's not a whole lot of room for controls, but what's there is intelligently placed and easy to access. The rear controls include an LCD control, a button that serves as both a resolution control and a quick-delete key, and a small but efficient cursor key/set button cluster. Three of the cursor buttons do double duty to adjust flash options, macro settings, and the self-timer.
The W1 has a fairly traditional layout, but it's crammed into a tight space.
This 8.7-ounce snapper is well balanced enough for one-handed shooting; your thumb rests on the zoom rocker while your index finger falls atop the shutter release. A recessed power switch (placed out of the way, where it's unlikely to be pressed by mistake) and a 12-position knurled mode dial are the only controls on the top surface.
This ingenious arrangement--the DC-in port has a separate doggie-door within the the memory-card slot cover--allows the W1 to maintain a neater appearance while charging.
In manual or programmed shooting modes, you access contrast, sharpness, saturation, ISO, white-balance, and other settings via the Menu button; twirl the top dial to Setup mode, and the menu button pulls up four nested screens of camera controls, including autofocus options, Memory Stick Pro formatting, and an array of infrequently changed options.The DSC-W1's 3X optical zoom truncates your view at both the wide and long ends of the scale, offering the equivalent of a 38mm wide-angle lens. You'll have to back up against the wall in tight confines indoors or step up to compensate for the shortish 114mm (35mm equivalent) telephoto setting. The excellent macro capabilities, however, will take you down to 2.3 inches at the wide-angle setting and can focus down to one foot in tele mode. You'll have to rely on the five-point or center-frame autofocus options, though. Manual distance settings are limited to five discrete steps, the smallest of which is 0.5m (almost 20 inches).
This camera does provide a good mix of automated features that help you capture well-exposed, sharp pictures under a variety of conditions, coupled with options and manual features that will engage emerging photo enthusiasts. For example, the manual exposure mode lets you directly set shutter speeds from 30 seconds to 1/1000 second, and your choice of two f-stops, which vary depending on the lens zoom setting. With the lens set at its widest view, you can choose either f/2.8 or f/5.6 and opt for f/5.2 or f/10 at the telephoto setting. You can fine-tune your exposure quickly using EV adjustments (plus or minus 2EV in 1/3EV steps). For more-flexible controls, you'll need to step up to the W1's older brother, the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-V1.
The DSC-W1 provides only six scene modes: Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Candle (indoor/slow shutter speed), Landscape, Beach, and Soft Snap (soft-focus portrait).
If you'd rather snap photos than ponder exposures, this Sony will be happy to calculate the correct settings for you, using a multipattern metering scheme that uses 49 different points in the frame to calculate exposure for even the trickiest scenes. When faced with backlit or other high-contrast subjects, you can switch to spot metering, which limits exposure calculations to a crosshair that appears on the LCD. The camera deploys a preflash to set electronic flash exposure using through-the-lens metering.
Want to mix movies with your stills? The DSC-W1 can capture good-quality video clips with tinny, but acceptable, audio at 640x480 resolution and 30 frames per second (fps), as long as you're using Memory Stick Pro; it only supports 15fps with the older version of the Memory Stick. Spring for a 1GB card, and you can record a 44-minute mini documentary with this palm-size moviemaker.It's amazing how much a generously sized LCD improves a compact camera's ergonomics. The 2.5-inch, 123,000-pixel display on the DSC-W1, the same as on the DSC-T1, is large enough that you can carefully compose shots without eyestrain. There's enough space on the screen for a readable live histogram without crowding the usual array of status indicators. This is one camera that will tempt you to use the LCD rather than the smallish optical viewfinder for most photos, indoors or out. The screen does become difficult to view under direct sunlight, though. Critical review of your photos is a pleasure on this big screen, particularly when you use the wide-angle/tele toggle to zoom in on fine details. The screen is large enough to accommodate both nine-image and sixteen-image index displays, so you can review groups of pictures at a single glance. The menu displays are large and easy to read, too.
The W1 runs off AA batteries and lasted for more than 600 shots with our standard 1,850mAh nickel-metal-hydride pair.
Impressive burst-mode capabilities highlight this Sony's generally average performance figures. Although its burst rate is only 1.4fps, the W1 can shoot up to 9 high-resolution frames at this speed. Switching to 640x480 resolution, we grabbed 100 snapshots in two minutes, which works out to 0.9fps. The camera also has a Multi-burst mode that can snatch 16 mini-images in less than a second, and tile them into a single 1,280x960-pixel frame--nice if you need to analyze your golf swing.
You won't lose many shots waiting for the W1 to wake up. You can crank out your first shot within 2.3 seconds of powering on, which is very good for this camera's class. Things slow down a bit thereafter, with typical shot-to-shot times a mediocre 3.4 seconds, increasing to 3.7 seconds with flash.
At 0.75 second with high-contrast subject matter, typical shutter lag was acceptable, but not outstanding. But that increases to a molasses-slow 2.1 seconds under low-contrast lighting, even with the autofocus assist lamp.Given that the relevant elements of the W1's imaging system are identical to those of Sony's P100, the fact that our test images from the two cameras are almost indistinguishable came as no surprise. As with the P100, the W1's images were properly exposed but showed limited dynamic range, especially in the highlight end of the blue channel, which results in oversaturated images during post-processing and blown-out highlights. Despite the pedigree of the lens, images weren't as sharp overall as they should have been. Combined with excessive postprocessing on very detailed areas, such as grass, complex photos are suitable for only scaled-down screen display and on a case-by-case basis for prints as large as 8x10.
Since it uses the same lens, sensor, and firmware as its 5-megapixel sibling, the DSC-P100, we're not surprised that the W1's images show limited dynamic range. For example, look at the loss of highlight detail in the bright yellow dandelion petals.
Incandescent light occasionally fooled the automatic white-balance controls, delivering muddy, extrawarm colors; the Tungsten preset was better but still not as neutral as we'd like. Unfortunately, the W1 lacks manual white balance adjustment. Sunlight delivered better results, with good, if cool, flesh tones. Noise wasn't much of a problem until ISO 400, and Sony's automatic noise reduction feature at slow shutter speeds seemed to counter the extra fuzziness that long exposures often produce.
Excessive postprocessing and compression artifacts such as the detail you see from the shot above make us wary of recommending the W1 for making large prints.
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