Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G1

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No viewfinder is present on the G1. You have to use the LCD screen to compose and shoot your images. This isn’t a great hardship, though. The LCD screen is very attractive, and the absence of a viewfinder is almost standard practice on point-and-shoots.  

 

The LCD screen on the G1 is a monster at 3.5-inches and 921,000 pixels. It is one of the highest resolution screens that we’ve seen and probably one of the highest in any camera, ever. And it shows – although it is hard to judge a screen in the garish and migraine-inducing lighting of a trade show, the prototype G1 we looked at displayed bright, sharp images with deep blacks and rich colors. The live preview of the image to be captured was acceptable, although there was some flickering evident.  However, until we can test it under different lighting conditions, it remains to be seen if this was merely the camera getting a headache from the lighting or if it is a real problem. The glossy coating of the screen tended to pick up fingerprints. When the camera is closed, the LCD takes up the entire back of the body.

The flash of the G1 is small and located too close to the lens for comfort. This could produce serious red-eye problems. Sony claims a range of 0.3 to 9.2 feet at the wide end of the zoom and 0.8 to 7.2 feet at the telephoto end. They also claim that pushing the ISO up to the maximum of 1000 increases the wide range to 16.1 feet and 13.1 at the wide and telephoto settings respectively, but we weren’t able to test this at PMA. This is a rather short range, and this could prove to be a problem as there is no way to connect an external flash, and Sony does not list an external flash amongst the available accessories. One interesting feature is that the camera does include a flash power control, where you can increase and decrease the power of the flash within a limited range. 

The G1 has a 3x Carl Zeiss optical zoom lens, with an aperture range of f3.5 to f4.3 and a focal length of 6.33mm to 19mm. The 35mm film camera equivalent focal length is 38 to 114mm, which is a pretty average range for a point-and-shoot, but it is a bit disappointing at the wide end. A few less millimeters there would make for better group shots.

 

What the G1 does include though is Sony’s Super SteadyShot image stabilization, an optical image stabilization system that moves one of the lens elements to account for camera movement. Again, we were not able to test this feature, but our tests on previous Sony models have shown mixed results.

 

The zoom control was suitably responsive, allowing for zooming all the way in and out, in just a few seconds. Pushing it to the left zooms out and to the right zooms in.