Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX5

Handling (5.00)

The TX7 is a small, thin camera that looks cool, but it is a little awkward to hold onto. There is nothing on the front of the camera for the fingertips to hold onto, and the smooth coating of the camera makes it slippery, especially with sweaty hands. There is a set of ridges on the back for the thumb to grip to, but these are rather small, and it is a little too easy for the thumb to sit on the screen, which means that the touch screen doesn’t work as it is supposed to.

Buttons & Dials (5.50)

There are just a handful of physical buttons on this camera: on the top are the power, shutter and zoom controls, plus buttons for playback mode and switching between still and movie modes. All of these buttons are rather small, and the zoom control is right on the corner of the camera body, so you have to move your finger to reach it, which contributes to it slipping from the grip.

All of the other controls on this camera are accessed through the touch screen interface, which has a few issues, such as occasional missed touches and slow response. The screen also ignores you if you touch the screen in more than one location, and that’s easy to do if your thumb ends up resting on the top right of the screen by accident. Using the included paint pen (a small piece of plastic that fits onto the wrist strap) improves the situation slightly, but you shouldn’t need to use that to hit a button on the screen.

Menus (5.50)

Because the TX5 relies on the touch screen for all of its operations, the on-screen menu is very important. We found that, once again, that using this was a mixed experience. The touch screen works well enough when you are pressing buttons on the screen (such as pressing the button to start capturing a movie), but it is kind of awkward when you have to scroll around to access a menu option; the scroll buttons are small and easy to miss. We also found that the touch screen didn’t recognize some screen touches: we sometimes had to tap twice to select an option on menus, which was rather irritating.

If a user is uncomfortable with the menu, it might be worth putting the camera into easy mode, which offers simpler menus with larger text and fewer options.

The main menu of the TX5	The TX5 in Easy mode

Manual & Learning (5.50)

The TX5 comes with a handbook which covers the use of the camera in detail. This is generally well written and easy to use, but it does gloss over some of the details on how the features of this camera work. The Hand-held twilight mode, for instance, is described thus: ‘Although night scenes tend to blur by camera shake, this mode allows you to shoot night scenes with less noise without using a tripod.’ While that is true, it is not helpful in explaining what the mode does or how to get the best results out of it.