Sony Cyber-shot DSC-N2

Viewfinder
No viewfinder is present on the N2; the live image is shown on the LCD screen.

LCD Screen
The 3-inch LCD screen has 230k pixels, providing a large display and ample resolution. Which is a good thing, as there is no viewfinder; you rely on the LCD screen for everything. However, it’s not perfect; in our tests indoors at the Photokina show in Germany, the screen looked unpleasant, with the florescent lights producing an unpleasant on-screen flickering effect. This didn’t seem to be present in the photos we shot, but it is a little off-putting when you’re trying to compose a shot. The screen also didn’t seem to have particularly fast updates: it only updated a handful of times a second, which could lead to lost shots if you are shooting a fast moving subject (such as small child, kitten or football player). However, this may have been due to the lighting at the show: we won’t know for sure until we get a test unit to try in other lighting situations.

Flash
The small flash above the lens is not particularly powerful: Sony claims a range of 0.6 to 15.7 feet, and this would seem to be about right: we found that objects disappeared into the haze just a few feet away. The flash location right by the lens could cause problems with red-eye, but the camera does include a red-eye reduction mode that uses a pre-flash to contract the iris. However, this would not be as effective as moving the flash further away from the lens, but the small size of the N2 case precludes this.

Zoom Lens
The zoom lens on the N2 is a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar model with a focal length range of 7.9mm to 23.7mm: a 35mm equivalent range of 38 to 114mm. That’s a fairly standard range for a compact camera, but it’s not particularly wide at the bottom end, so squeezing in all of your family for a group shot may be a bit difficult. Again, that’s an acceptable range for this type of camera. The lens telescopes into the case when not in use, fitting almost flush to the front of the case.