Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900

Playback Mode

One of the major advantages to the high-resolution, 920,000-dot LCD is that images in playback show up crystal clear, so you can see if a shot came out well or not. The T900 also has quite a variety of slideshow options, so you can show off your holiday snaps to anyone you come across. It comes with four types of music, as well as the ability to upload your own MP3s with the bundled ‘Music Transfer’ application. There are three different transition effects, and you can chose between showing all images, or just photos taken on a specific date. If you use the cradle that the camera ships with, you can use a standard HDMI cable to plug into an HD TV, but one isn’t included. If you don’t want to lug the cradle everywhere, you’ll have to shell out an extra $30 to Sony for an HD cable that will plug directly into the camera.

The camera also offers some interesting ways to organize your images. It defaults to Date view, which simply files everything by the order in which it was taken. You can mark certain images as your favorites, and only look at those, or browse by folders on the Memory Stick. By far the most intriguing is ‘Event View’ which analyzes the date, time and frequency of the photographs, and clumps them into ‘events’. The logic here is that you most likely take photos in clusters. A dozen or so at the park, then a few later at a birthday party, and maybe some of an especially brilliant full moon. The T900 tries to figure out these events, and can view the images accordingly.

You can also filter your images by faces, and even specific face types, looking for children, infants or smiles. Not having any infants in our testing labs, we make no promises as to how well this works.

Histogram - Overlays a histogram on the LCD	Date View - Sorts images by date taken

In-Camera Editing (5.00)

There is absolutely no shortage of editing controls with the T900, with every possible twee, tacky or downright ugly filter thrown in for good measure. Plus, since it’s a touch-screen camera, there’s the obligatory paint mode for virtually scrawling on images as well. Some editing tools are straightforward, like the ability to rotate, trim, resize to 1920×1080 or 640×480, or remove red-eye. Some are slightly more esoteric, but not unknown, like sharpening, soft focus, fisheye lens, retro (like a toy camera) and radial blur. Finally, there are the oddballs: partial color, which leaves a small area of color but fades everything else to black and white; cross filter (adds star-shaped highlights around areas of light in the photo); and the terrifying Happy Faces, which detects a face, then morphs its mouth into a smile. Finally, there’s Paint mode, which lets you draw on the photos; stamp tiaras, dolphins and hearts all over them; and add one of 15 different hideous frames, which can then be saved as either three-megapixel images or at VGA size.

Mr. Jerusalem kindly volunteered to show off the Editing Effects that the T900 offers, in all their hideous glory.

Direct Print Options (2.00)

Direct print options for the T900 are limited. For both PictBridge and Direct Print Order Form (DPOF), you can select which image you want to print, but not multiple copies or a proof sheet of thumbnail images.