Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F828

Pros: Lots of control options and produces results good enough for some types of professional work

Cons: None I can think of for this type of camera

Summary: As an professional industrial photographer for 25 years, and someone who uses medium format film as a matter of choice, I am extremely impressed with this piece of equipment. I am using a borrowed Sony Cyber Shot DSC-F828 with a 2Gb microdrive storage to shoot some product pictures for a web site and printed brochure. I have found the results to be more or less flawless. I particularly like its manual controls as well as the aperture and shutter priority modes. The lens is good – as far as I'm concerned Carl Zeiss T* lenses are the best that money can buy. I have an old Contax 139 35mm slr with Carl Zeiss lenses and it produces far and away the clearest, crispest, aberration free images of any camera I've ever owned. Lack of an Adobe colour space setting is a non issue, really. Opening up the tifs in Photoshop and converting the colour space is hardly rocket science and takes no measurable amount of time. In any case I don't use Adobe RGB, rather a custom colour space that I prefer, so an image would have to be converted anyway. I haven't detected any lens aberations and hardly any artefacts. As for the weight of the thing, it just doesn't compare to the heaviness of my normal equipment which is a Pentax 645 and Mamiya RB67. It feels as light as a feather beside those cameras. I am really very impressed and am seriously thinking of buying one for certain work because it produces very decent 300dpi images up to 10 x 8 inches – good for offset printing - in a variety of lighting conditions. I do so hate the meaningless marketing expression "prosumer" that has been used to categorise this camera. It does its job really rather well and I can certainly recommend it to any serious photographer who doesn't have a huge budget for a "professional" model. The results wouldn't make it out of place in a professional armoury of tools.