CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/23/2002
- Updated on: 10/15/2002
- Released on: 05/01/2002
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 We find the wheel a bit too small for large fingers. |
This camera offers just about everything you could hope to find in a good digital model. You can select from among full-program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, manual, movie, scene, setup, and playback modes via the mode-selector knob on the camera's top. A scroll wheel allows fast, convenient adjustment of the aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation, and 14-step manual focus. While small, the various control buttons are spaced widely enough for precise use.
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 Get the awkwardly connected lens cap out of your way by grabbing a pair of scissors and a longer cord. |
Our greatest design complaint, though minor, is the tethered lens cap, which often got in our way during our shooting tests. The cord is too short, making it difficult to keep the cap out of the way.
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 A setup menu option offers a quick way to specify the increment for bracketing. |
A combination of two stops of exposure compensation, three preset flash intensities, and selectable ISO (Auto, 100, 200, and 400) gives this camera a great deal of flexibility. If you're skeptical about the 49-zone light meter, you'll like the automatic three-shot exposure-bracketing feature. Two other metering options, spot and center-weighted metering, round out the exposure settings.
Sony's hologram focus works effectively, even in near darkness. It projects a pattern onto your subject with a low-energy laser, which gives the autofocus mechanism a high-contrast target to lock down. You can select the size and position of the autofocus target within the frame, a handy feature when a nearby subject is not centered in the frame, for example.
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 A dainty, pop-up flash reaches farther than expected, delivering bright, even illumination up to about 16 feet. |
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 Included accessories |
There's a hotshoe too, in case you need an additional flash. The MVC-CD400 offers several sizes of JPEG in two compression options: raw TIFF and MPEG HQX video with sound. TIFF output is about 11MB, while the highest-quality JPEG images are about 3MB.
Shooting with the MVC-CD400 requires more guesswork than we'd like. Powering up the camera takes about 5.5 seconds. Once on, tripping the shutter release can be agonizingly slow, as it was with the MVC-CD300: shutter lag runs between about 1 and 4 seconds. As a result, shot-to-shot time ranges between about 2 and 4.5 frustrating seconds. Even if you try shooting in a burst of, say, three shots in less than 2 seconds or in multi-image mode (16 images tiled in one frame), this camera still won't handle sport shots or candid shots well.
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 Each CD-R/CD-RW disc holds 156MB of images. |
To download images to a host PC via the supplied USB cable, you must use Sony's USB driver and proprietary transfer program--a ridiculous requirement these days since almost all cameras mount as drives via USB. Compared to moving files from camera to host via Windows Explorer, Sony's scheme feels clumsy and slow. Of course, the easiest way to transfer images is to pop the disc into your computer's CD-RW drive.
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 We shot about two discs' worth of pictures before the battery died. |
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 Input/output ports |
Sony powers the MVC-CD400 with its proprietary InfoLithium battery. The camera's digital battery meter displays the approximate remaining battery life in minutes, and the MVC-CD400's AC adapter doubles as a battery charger.
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 The camera produces natural colors quite well. |
The MVC-CD400 captures detail better than a child genius with a photographic memory. We snapped a few macro shots of lantana, and the fine hairs on the plant's stems and leaves showed up clearly and sharply in our images. We were also pleased with the color rendition under most lighting conditions. There are six white-balance options, including one-touch, which we used to tailor color balance to the ambient lighting.
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 In fairly close shots of objects containing parallel lines, you'll see some wide-angle barrel distortion. |
On the downside, we noticed a fair amount of barrel distortion at the wide end of the lens. While distortion wasn't as prominent in normal shooting as in extreme situations, it never went away.
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 At high ISO settings under low-light conditions, noise increases and detail decreases, though it's no worse than with other cameras of its class. |
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 The Carl Zeiss lens yields minimal chromatic aberration; we noticed only very minor purple fringing. |
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