In the ongoing quest for a decent point-and-shoot camera, to replace a Sony 5MP camera that offered great fill-flash and indoor flash tone and color balance, I’ve been all over the map.
I really wanted to get away from Sony’s proprietary MemoryStick flash memory (and MemoryStick Duo, the name for the pint-sized flash memory that’s used in Sony’s newer point-and-shoot still cameras). So I tried cameras from a variety of manufacturers, such as Casio’s Exilim and Canon’s SureShot SD900.
Neither of those cameras, which use the industry-standard Secure Digital (SD) chip, have done such a good job with indoor and fill-flash, either washing out a bit too much or not being powerful enough.
So, thinking through the idea of how to look at how to use a Sony without the proprietary chip, I did some research and found that I could use a TransFlash (also known as a MicroSD chip) in a MemoryStick Duo adapter. The MicroSD also works with my cell phone and can be used in a full-size SD chip for PDAs and integrated readers for desktop PCs.
So I picked up a Sony DSC-W90 to try out. While I still HATE the fact that Sony has limited its movie shooting capabilities to disallow zoom-while-recording, unlike so many other digital still camera manufacturers have had that capability for several years, Sony still does the best still image point-and-shoot that I’ve been able to find. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I also briefly tried a DSC-S700 - a $99 entry-level camera that uses AA batteries but shoots with a 7.2MP chip. Sure enough, that Sony also handled color, fill-flash and indoor flash like the newer (and previous) Sony still cameras.
Apparently, as Sony is trying to sell some of its point-and-shoots for the HDTV crowd, they've made two things possible on the DSC-W90 that I haven’t seen on earlier cameras:
First, the ability to shoot at HDTV (16:9 @ 1920x1080).
With the DSC-W90, the options are 8M, 5MP, 2MP, HDTV and VGA. VGA (4:3 @ 640x480) has, of course, been around for quite some time - at one point it was even considered high quality - but HDTV formatted images are a novelty, as few cameras shoot still images natively in the 16:9 aspect ratio.
HDTV level shooting is a good way file to keep file sizes low if they're just going to be used for HDTV viewing or in an HD-DVD or BluRay disk. Files are less than one-third the size of the 8MP setting on the DSC-W90 (900KB for HDTV versus 2.4MB JPEGs on the 8MP setting).
For those in digital media production, think of this HDTV setting as a way to do location scouting. Framing in 16:9 is always good for location scouts to see particular views.
Second, the ability to connect the camera to a dock and a component cable to hook up the camera to an HDTV. The cable will pump out 1920x1080 (or full HD resolution) to an HDTV monitor.
Downside is that it requires a special dock that runs another $80 or so. From that standpoint, I agree with my business partner at Braintrust Digital, Paul Schmutzler, who posits:
“Sony has the advantage of being component therefore greater definition than normal digicams (plus 16:9). But how many people will be using their camera to view their pictures on their TVs?
My 2 year old Sony DVD player will read CDs with photos burned to it and display them with slideshow options. Use that for hooking to the TV or a set of pics burned to disk.
So some sort of card reader device might be of some value [or a standalone player showing still images from a MemoryStick Duo slot in the base]. But there have been other options for that for quite a while. Some people will go for this Sony since it's all spelled out for them. The price of that would likely deter people from it also.”
Below are two images that show VGA 4:3 and HTDV 16:9, respectively.
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