Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T700 Digital Camera Review

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T700

Digital Camera Review

Oct 10, 2008 - By Tim Barribeau
2 Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-T700 is the beautiful new addition to the company's pocket-sized T line. Armed with a high-resolution 3.5" LCD touch screen, 4x optical zoom, and an impressive 4GB of internal memory, the T700 costs $399.99, and is an impressive camera on paper. While this 10.1-megapixel model is certainly easy on the eyes, its performance on our bevy of lab test wasn't always a pretty picture. Details on the T700's wins and losses follow.
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Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T700


Auto Mode (4.75)
Auto mode is flexible on the DSC-T700. There's a relatively standard Auto mode, but if that is still too much control, there's Easy Mode too. In Easy Mode, you can only set the self-timer (off, on), image size (large, small) and flash (auto, off) -- entirely point-and-shoot. The T700 also boasts smile detection, which will automatically take a photo when one of the recognized faces on screen cracks a grin. This can be set to one of three levels of sensitivity, so it can record anything from a slight smirk to a wide grimace. Finally, there's Scene Recognition to help choose the right settings. When activated, it will detect Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Twilight Tripod, Backlight, Backlight Portrait, Landscape, Macro and Portrait modes based on analysis of the current scene, and choose the best settings automatically. If you set the camera on advanced mode for Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Twilight Tripod, Backlight, and Backlight Portrait, it will take two sequential images to help minimize chances of camera shake, and if it recognizes a face it will go into anti-blink mode. Anti-blink mode detects if your subjects eyes are closed, and then takes a photograph as soon as they open.

Movie Mode (8.75)
The movie mode is adequate, if not impressive. The T700 can shoot at 320 x 240 (8.3 fps) and 640 x 480 (30 fps and 16.6 fps). At least you have a large amount of control during movie mode shooting; you can set the macro focus, timer, image quality, exposure compensation, metering, auto focus, white balance, color mode and image stabilization. We like having as many controls available, even if most users will just leave them on automatic. Keep in mind that the maximum video resolution is 640 x 480, not the high-def video found on more and more compact cameras today, but it's fine for viewing on a standard TV screen.

Drive / Burst Mode (6.40)
In burst mode the T700 can shoot at approximately 0.62 seconds per image, a time we verified in our testing. It can take up to 100 photos in this mode, or until the memory card is full. It also has the standard 2- and 10- second self-timers, which can be coupled with the drive mode to take five pictures in rapid succession once the countdown is complete. For reasons unknown, burst mode can only work at ISO 400 or below.

Playback Mode (7.75)
The playback mode on the Sony DSC-T700 is quite expansive, in terms of controls and options. Moving between images can either be handled by tapping little left and right arrows on the right side of the screen, or by going into a full-screen slideshow mode and tapping on the left and right side of the LCD. The display options during playback mimic those available while shooting, so it can be set to normal, simple and image only, and a histogram can be added or removed. Zooming in on an image is accomplished by tapping on the picture, which brings up controls to zoom in and out, and navigate around the enlarged image. There is a thumbnail mode, which shows 12 images at a time, which can then lead to sorting by date, event, favorites or folder. Slideshows can be run through a number of different presets, including Basic, Nostalgic and Stylish (or a variation of these three focusing on faces), which vary the transition patterns and music. Alternatively, you can set it up the slideshow parameters yourself, and you can even add music to the camera's memory, so your slideshow can be accompanied by the dulcet tones of Rammstein.

The editing controls (which are covered in greater detail in the Picture Effects Mode section) let you stick your images into an automatic scrapbook of 16 different hideous backdrops, add images to your favorites to aid in later sorting, add sharemarks to your images (which are used with photo sharing websites), crop, resize, rotate, red-eye removal, image sharpen, image blur, monochrome around a colored point, fish-eye around a point, starburst effect, radial blur, nostalgic (blur and dim), or facial modification (which turns neutral expressions into terrifying, Joker-ish grins). Finally, there's a wonderfully pointless Paint mode, which lets you draw over the image or add stamps.

There is also a much touted Album feature, which takes advantage of the cameras substantial built in memory. Sony has advertised the T700 as able to sync with their PMB software, and put small versions of your pictures on the camera, so it functions like a pocket sized photo album. The problem with this is that it is only mentioned in passing in either the physical or digital manuals that come with the T700, and actually setting it up to function involves tweaking a number of settings in PMB. Finally, you have to remove your memory stick in order to view the images, as you can't access the internal memory while the card is inserted.

Custom Image Presets (4.83)
The T700 actually has very few scene presets. More and more often, we see cameras that have 20 or 30 scene modes, where this one only has 11. It has High Sensitivity, Landscape, Soft Snap (for soft focus portraits), Twilight Portrait, Twilight, Gourmet, Beach, Snow, Fireworks, Underwater (which works with a special waterproof case) and Hi-Speed Shutter. All of these are fairly standard, and not particularly interesting. We are curious as to how a touch-screen camera would work while in a special case and underwater, though.

Dynamic Range Optimizer
The T700 has a Dynamic Range Optimizer function, which works to adjust brightness and contrast in scenes that have both very bright and very dark objects. It can be set to off, standard or plus. Standard compensates for the entire scene at once, while plus separately deals with different areas of the scene.

Design / Layout Page 8 of 15 Control Options
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