Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W290

Manual Controls

This isn't a good camera to choose if manual controls are important to you; there is no full manual mode and no way to get in and directly control features like the shutter speed or aperture. There is not even the halfway solution of a shutter or aperture priority mode; all you get is a number of scene modes that do similar things (such as the Hi-speed shutter mode, which goes for the highest shutter speed possible to freeze the action).
 

Focus

There are 9 focus points and three different focus modes: center weighted, spot and a semi-manual mode where the user sets the approximate focus distance and the camera refines it from there. There is no full manual focus mode on offer.
 

ISO

The ISO range is from 80 up to 3200; a decent range that allows for shooting in everything from bright daylight to dark rooms. We'll have to see how the noise increases as the ISO goes up until we get the W290 in for review.
 

White Balance

The usual suspects are on offer for setting white balance, with a full auto mode and 11 presets. Unusually, there are three different white balance settings for use underwater; Sony obviously expects this camera to be used a lot by underwater shooters.
 

Metering

The W290 uses a muti-pattern measuring system to judge the appropriate settings for shooting a scene, but does not include the usual center weighted and spot metering modes.
 

Shutter Speed

The shutter speed ranges from 2 seconds down to 1/1600 of a second in the full auto mode, but the longest exposure gets slightly reduced to 1 second in the other modes. We doubt this will be an issue for most users; who typically don't need exposure times longer than a second on a point and shoot camera.
 

Aperture

Canon quotes the aperture range as being f/3.8 to f/8.0 at the widest zoom point, but did not specify how the range changes at the other end of the zoom range.
 

Image Stabilization

The W290 has the ubiquitous SteadyShot optical image stabilization, but Sony also claims that the wide ISO range of the camera will help take sharper photos, and the modes are apparently designed to take this into effect. 

Picture Quality & Size Options

Five different options are on offer for image size, ranging from the maximum 12 megapixel size down to 2 megapixels. There are no options for different image compression levels, but there are fine and standard quality settings for video recordings.
 

Picture Effects

Several image editing tools are on offer, including the ability to turn images to black and white, a fisheye filter and an unsharp mask filter that can help sharpen fuzzy images.