Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G1

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Sony claimed at the PMA show that the software bundle for the G1 was not yet finalized, but their site lists it as coming with the usual selection of Picture Motion Browser for Windows. This is a basic, but adequate application, but it remains to be seen if they include a special version to support the wireless LAN capabilities of the G1.

 

The G1 comes with a dock that connects to the bottom of the camera, but this was not available for examination at the PMA show. Sony claims the camera will come with USB, A/V and power connector cables, but it is not clear if these will connect directly to the camera or to the dock. If it’s the latter, this is a pain; if you are on the road, you’ll need to take the dock with you to recharge the camera.

 

	The battery port and MemoryStick Pro Duo slot are packed closely together.

The usual selection of direct print options are supported. The G1 is PictBridge compatible, so it can connect directly to a supported printer. It also supports the DPOF format for flagging images for later printing; no surprises there. In theory, the support for the DLNA format should allow it to print wirelessly to printers that support it but none of these are available yet.

 

The G1 comes with a 1220 mAh lithium-ion battery. Sony don’t make any claims for battery life on this yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it on the short side since that large, bright screen must drain the battery.

 

An impressive 2GB of RAM is built into the G1, and that is enough to shoot a picture-intensive weekend trip at 6MP without worrying about memory cards. More storage space can be added in the form of a MemoryStick Pro Duo card which are available in up to 4GB capacities. That’s an impressive combination, and the G1 also allows you to copy images between the two quickly and easily.

 

Wireless image transfer – Using the built in 802.11g wireless LAN interface, two G1s can swap images. This can happen in two ways; collaborative shooting or image gifting. With collaborative shooting, images captured on one camera are automatically transferred to the other, a process that takes a couple of seconds. The process works both ways, and it could be useful if you want to keep backup copies of images. In image gifting mode, the user on one camera selects images and sends them to the other. In the demo at PMA, this process took about 5 seconds an image.

 

Unfortunately, the process of connecting the cameras in either mode is a little ungainly. You have to set both to the appropriate mode, then press the WLAN button on the top of the camera at the same time. The linking process then takes between 10 and 15 seconds. This has to be done every time the cameras are turned on; you can’t leave two cameras permanently connected. It also has to be redone if you switch from collaborative shooting to image gifting mode, which is a real pain since the process of setting up the connection takes too long and involves too much hassle. In the end, the recipient is more likely to say “just email it to me later”.

 

The wireless image transfer should also allow images to be wirelessly transferred to an appropriately equipped PC, but we were unable to try this feature out at the PMA show. We’ll test it further when we get a review unit in.

 

SteadyShot – The G1 includes optical image stabilization, where an element of the lens moves to compensate for shaky hands and the like. We weren’t able to test the effectiveness of this feature at PMA.