Personal Sony Cybershot DSC-W1 Review.

A cracking little camera this one! My friend showed me some pictures that he took with his one when he went to Australia for his holiday and I must say I was very impressed.

We had an old Kodak APS camera that broke so we decided to go digital and this was the camera we bought to replace it.

It has a great 2.5 inch screen for viewing and reviewing pictures and the controls are quite logically laid out. It fires up from off to ready for use in no time at all. The optics are a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens which carry a reputation of being a good quality lens and has a 3 times optical zoom much like most zoom cameras.

Using this camera is easy as it is a point and shoot camera but it also carries enough adjustable settings to allow the user to customise how the picture is taken should one not be happy with the standard settings results, there are also numerous preset mode settings selectable from the top dial for various conditions.

Using the different modes gives reasonable results as well. The close up feature is superb and the image quality and colour reproduction is very good. General photography is also very good. The main failing is the use of flash photography in dark conditions, although acceptable it is probably the cameras worst point. The movie clips are very good as well although a camcorder it is not, maximum film clip size is 640 x 480 MPEG1 which is reasonable again, the good thing here is it plays in Windows Media Player or similar software and does not require it's own software to be loaded to view it.

The camera body is made mainly out of metal with the odd bit of plastic here and there, (compartment doors) and gives a nice solid well made feel to the camera, being metal obviously adds to the weight but it is not exactly heavy because of this.

The batteries supplied, (2 Ni-MH 2100 mAh rechargeable batteries) almost seem to last forever on a single charge but if you are constantly zooming in and out the usage time drops to about half. All said and done though the usage time is still pretty impressive.

Of all the compact digital cameras I have owned this has got to be the best one of the lot so far. The only downside is the cost of the accessories. For some reason Sony equipment seems to be that bit more expensive than all the others although prices are coming down all the time. You can now get a sony pro duo 1 gigabyte memory card for less than £20 which is reasonable compared to what they cost a couple of years ago.

Don't bother with the lens attachment kit or the underwater body kit for this camera unless you are a real enthusiast with lots of money to burn. The kits cost just as much as the camera and are pretty much an afterthought extra!