Personal Sony Cybershot DSC-W170s (Silver) Review.

I was having a discussion with a friend on what camera he should get and after going through various contenders we came up with a couple of Sony cameras, this one and a similar "touch screen" version.
Not being a fan of touch screen cameras, (you are forever cleaning the screen) I hinted that the Sony Cyber-shot DCS-W170 would probably be my choice were I in the market for a new compact camera.

My friend bought the suggested camera and after he showed me what it could do and how neat it was I just had to have one for myself so I treated myself to one.
Costing a few pence under £190 from Play.com, (Sony Style wanted £220) I thought it was reasonably priced for a Sony as they always tend to be more expensive than other manufacturers.

I was quite pleased with the styling of the camera as it seems to be nicely made and actually has some metal components as opposed to plastic ones. I think metal makes for a better look as well as a better quality feel especially for a silver coloured camera, (this camera is also available in other colours). It is quite neatly compact in size to which is another feature I like, (93.7 x 58 x 24 mm).

There are however a couple of disappointments, the first one is the layout of the navigation controls, they are easy to get to but in some instances a bit to easy! Somehow or other I keep catching the button that controls the flash settings and end up on a mode that I do not require, maybe my hands are to big for a small camera!

I was a bit surprised at the file size of each image as well, I was expecting the file size to be double that of a 5 megapixel camera, (taking it that this is a 10.1 Megapixel camera) but that does not seem to be the case. Full resolution images range from between 3MB and 4MB depending on the intensity of the image where I was expecting file sizes around the 6MB size..
The other Sony camera, (Sony Cybershot DSC-W1) which is a 5 Million Pixel camera ranges between 2.3MB and 3MB for full resolution images.

My friend did explain however that a larger image is not necessarily better for image quality as a lot of that is down to the camera lens.
Should a 10 million pixel image be compressed using a .jpeg compression it would not necessarily be half the file size of a 5 million pixel image depending on the amount of colours used in the image.

For my own piece of mind I conducted a few image size experiments, see the new section on the Techno page.

This camera comes with some technical touches that are quite impressive, the face and smile recognition feature is really quite clever and once you get used to how the custom settings for each feature works it is rather handy to have. For example you can set the smile detection sensitivity so that the camera will not take a photograph until the subject smiles so you need never have a sad looking picture again.

Main technical touches include the following with their respective setting options:-

Face Detection:- Automatic focus, Child face focus priority, Adult face focus priority.
Smile Recognition:- Automatic, Childrens smile, Adults smile.
Smile Detection Sensitivity:- Low, Medium, High.
Scene Recognition:- Optimum settings in twilight or backlight, Automatically take one more shot in twilight or backlight.
Shooting Mode:- Single shot, Continuos shooting as long as shutter release is held down.
Redeye Reduction:- Automatic redeye removal, Flash pre burst to reduce redeye.
EV Adjustment:- Brightness +, Brightness -.
File sizes:- 10M, 5M, 3M, VGA, 3:2 aspect ratio, 16:9+ (for HDTV and A4 print), 16:9 (HDTV only).