SONY CYBER SHOT DSC-T77

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T77 ($299.99 direct) is a beauty.

Its compact design, metallic features, and touch screen make it feel like a luxury item. Aside from color fringing in the corners of images, most users will find the shots they take dazzling. The camera’s 3-inch LCD touch screen is very responsive, and the user interface is more intuitive than those of competing touch-screen models, such as the Nikon Coolpix S60 or the Kodak EasyShare v1073. The less-expensive Canon PowerShot SD790 IS ($249) and Nikon Coolpix S610c deliver images that are on a par with T77’s, but they don’t have touch screens and fun in-camera retouching options. Beyond that, this Cyber-shot is just handsome. Of course, as with any camera that employs a touch screen, battery life suffers.

The T77 has very slim build, measuring just 2.4 by 3.8 by 1.3 inches (HWD) but feels rock solid. Two of these in your pocket would probably feel like one Canon PowerShot A1000 IS. The camera comes in silver, black, pink, green, or brown. My review unit had the hue of a deep-brown leather couch or dark mahogany. Dropping down the lens shield on the front turns the camera on. The lens has a focal range of 6.18mm to 24.7mm (35mm equivalent: 35mm to 140mm) with corresponding maximum f-stops of f/3.1 and f/5.9, and a 4X optical zoom.

Sony’s touch-screen interface works well. It displays a lot of information without overcrowding. Because the large, white icons are projected over black lines that border the image in standard aspect ratio, they’re almost always visible. When you’re shooting pictures in 16:9 mode, the entire screen becomes the viewfinder and the white icons float over the image, still easily readable. The screen on the $199 Kodak EasyShare v1073, by comparison, shows small gray icons that tend to blend in to what’s on the LCD. If you don’t remember where all the controls are, you have trouble finding buttons sometimes. The Nikon s60 doesn’t display as much info as the T77—for example, it takes four clicks to change the ISO setting, whereas the T77’s interface lets you do the same job in just one.

Sony includes physical buttons for the most commonly used mission-critical operations: on/off, shutter release, playback/shoot, and zoom in/out. This makes life a lot easier—having to work with the touch screen for these operations could become a nuisance. The zoom control on the Nikon S60 is an icon; as a result, you’re often relying on the touch screen, and that becomes very frustrating. If you’re the type of user who takes pictures only in Auto mode, you’ll probably use the T77 touch screen only to view your pictures in playback mode.

The T77 is reasonably quick camera. It’s not the fastest I’ve tested, but you definitely won’t feel as if you’re always waiting for it to catch up to you, as you do with some cameras. First of all, it comes alive quickly: In testing it was able to pull off its first shot in an average of 2.28 seconds after I slid down the shield. And wait time between shots averaged a speedy 2.54 seconds. You won’t have to worry much about shutter lag, either. Using a Shooting Digital shutter lag test, the average of my trials came out to 0.33 second—that’s lightning fast. With so little delay, you’re far less likely to miss important shots.

I use a hardware and software suite called Imatest to get an objective rate for key image characteristics that determine image quality. I concentrate mostly on noise, sharpness, distortion, and color fringing. The T77 performed well in all of these categories except color fringing. Test results showed that most images, when closely inspected, showed color fringing in the corners. On my resolution tests, the T77 captured an average 2,009 pixels per picture height at the center of the lens, which is excellent. It indicates that the center of pictures should be very sharp. Toward the corners of the lens, this number decreased by 24 percent, but there’s bound to be some decrease, and anything less than 30 percent is acceptable. The results indicate that the camera should offer consistently sharp detail throughout images. The Nikon s60, by comparison, captured an average of only 1,683 pixels in the center, and this number decreased by 31 percent towards the corners.

As with most point-and-shooters, you’ll find distortion at both ends of the lens, but the amounts were tolerable. In the wide-angle position, barrel distortion is evident. At the full telephoto position, there’s a bit of pincushion distortion.

Noise levels are acceptable up to and including ISO 400. At ISO 800, things become very dicey, even though you can set the ISO up to 3200. At that highest level, however, you’ll probably be disappointed with the result. Imatest indicated that even at ISO 1600, the noise level was so high that it compromised sharpness by roughly 70 percent.

When I looked at shots I’d taken with the T77 and the Nikon s60 after a morning of rain, I found that the T77 had definitely produced slightly sharper imagery. In a picture of a motorcycle, droplets of rain on the chrome had more definition. As Imatest had indicated, the T77’s images showed some color fringing when viewed at actual size. In the same motorcycle photo, the white lane divider stripes on the street’s black pavement had reds bleeding from one side and blues from the other.

The T77 can record video at 640-by-480 resolution, more commonly known as standard definition (SD). Sony saves high-definition recording for the $399 Cyber-shot T-500. Video recorded with the T77 looks and sounds good. I wish, however, that the camera could take advantage of its 16:9 LCD screen and record widescreen SD video at that aspect ratio at 848-by-480 resolution. The Casio Exilim z250 offers this capability.

Sony has jam-packed this shooter with features, including face and smile detection. With smile detection, you just keep the camera pointed at the face in question—the camera snaps a picture when the smile appears. The T77’s strongest feature, however, is its large assortment of in-camera editing options. There’s a cornucopia of fun effects to choose from, among them soft focus, fish-eye lens, radial blur, and retro. You can even increase someone’s smile ( see the slide show for details ). Each effect has different intensity levels, and the camera adds the effect to a copy of the image, so the original stays intact.

This camera has a lot of features that will impress, but battery performance isn’t one of them. We don’t do a formal battery rundown test for cameras, but, in any case, just taking picture after picture until the camera’s battery runs out of juice isn’t indicative of real-world performance. Why not? Because much of the time spent using a camera involves viewing images on its LCD screen, which can drain the battery without taking a single exposure. This camera has a big LCD, and one that is a touch screen, so I’d expect its lithium ion battery life to be shorter, and the T77 didn’t surprise me. With most cameras, I can test for an entire week on one charge. The T77 required multiple charges during my review period. You may want to carry a spare battery, if you pick the T77.

The Sony Cyber-shot T77 faces tough competition when it comes to point-and-shoot cameras that deliver image quality and speed without draining your bank account. The Canon PowerShot 790 IS, Canon s610, and Nikon s610c, for example, deliver comparable images without the color fringing. Still, Sony’s handsome T77 offers good speed, solid imagery, and exciting in-camera editing tools, all of which add up to a very good buy—just don’t forget to bring along an extra battery.

Source:-its is all about technology blog