Sony DSCP92 Cyber-shot 5MP Digital Camera w/ 3x Optical Zoom

I got this camera less than a week ago and I have nothing but good things to say about it. The photos that it takes are amazing. It is wonderful to get the 5MP quality at such a price and with such features. Also, its acceptance of the Memory Stick Pros just makes me giddy. 1GB o' photos at 5MP? Yes please. It is so light and compact. I can carry it easily in my pocket (which already has my cell phone in it). Being able to choose the quality of the movies that one makes is truly a bonus as well, as one does not need to waste quality on MPGs that are simply going to be e-mailed. Very well thought out design. I'd expect nothing less from Sony.

(Still, it does not begin to compare to my Nikon SLR, but at a tiny fraction of the cost of the body and lenses, it seems like quite a nice trade-off. Plus, I don't have to fumble with lenses, filters, and the like in order to catch a shot. This will be a great hanging-out-with-the-friends camera for sure!)

My friends brought it to me from the US (i bought it at AMAZON), in a week i threw away my old film camera, even though i thought before that the pictures i had are excelent! To tell you the truth, i was expecting something really cool, but when i got this baby, and printed several pictures afterwards i was simply blown away by the quality of prints, colors, sharpness and etc.

Words of warning: when you get it, you will suddenly start shooting and shooting and shooting, so buy the second set of batteries and the bigger memory stick! It's a must!

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I've had this product for 4 months now, so I feel I'm ready to write my review.

When I bought this camera, there were two things that compelled me to select this camera over others. the 5-mega-pixels, and the fact that it was made by Sony, a company that I've come to trust.

I'm sure you've probably already heard what's good about this camera, so I'm just going to skip all that and cover what I think the buyer should be aware of, namely... what they can expect to go wrong.

The point-and-shoot architecture is very intuitive, but not for professionals. One thing I was looking forward to with this camera was playing around with the manual camera settings. I quickly lost interest in this because you can't change the shutter speed, which is what I really wanted to play with.

The size of the camera is nice. It's a little smaller than the 1-time use film cameras, although much heavier. maybe about the weight of a small coffee cup.

The 3x optical zoom is great, but going beyond 3x the camera starts to use digital zoom. You can get up to 12x, but the picture quality really, really drops off beyond about 6x.

The camera takes pictures in standard computer screen proportions (although it has one wide-screen option). This is great for computers, but can pose a problem for people wanting to actually develop their pictures, as standard picture sizes are proportionally wider than computer screens. The top and/or bottom of your pictures may get cut off.

For indoor pictures, there is a problem. To function as a hand-held camera, you either have to have ROCK steady hands, or extremely bright lighting. Anything other than this will give you some problems with blurry pictures. After about a month of finding shelves and countertops or books to set my camera on for picture-taking, I bought a 5 dollar tripod that has expanded my options for using the camera and also just made it less troublesome on the whole. Taking pictures in the pre-set "landscape" mode can also result in blurry pictures, even if the lighting is magnificent.

The battery life can be troublesome, but a fully-charged set of batteries can last you an entire, fairly rigorous day of picture taking. I suggest buying an extra set of batteries, but if you can tolerate the thought of needing to take a picture, but having your batteries be in the charger, then it's not necessary.

When you turn on the camera, the lens twists and moves out of the body. This very cool to watch, I think... but compared to other cameras it is a little noisy; perhaps about the decibel level of a person next to you listening to loud music on poor-quality headphones. It's not annoying, because the sound only happens when you turn the camera on or off, or use the zoom feature.

There is a strange sound I discovered that is always going with this camera when it is on though. It's inaudible for the most part, but if you hold your ear directly against the display screen, you hear all sorts of cool mechanical beeps and stuff. it's probably not too healthy to do this... but it can't be worse than talking on a cell-phone all day :-P

The 16mb memory stick has got to be some sort of cosmic joke. You can fit at most 5 high quality pictures on it. I suggest, nay, DEMAND that you get AT LEAST a 128mb memory stick. But, keep the 16mb around as backup (you never know when you will run out of space and need to take one quick picture).

The screen was great, no pixels on mine were burnt out (check for burnt out pixels on your camera if you are buying from a retail store where you actually get to test the camera before buying it). But the screen is missing something. Most Japanese cameras and cell-phones put a clear, hard-plastic cover on these screens, which is very useful for those people who always feel they need to touch and point (those wierd colors that you see when you touch the screen are BAD).

The movie mode is nice for catching moments like kissing your lover, friend's falling off their skateboards, and so on. But don't plan on becoming the next Steven Spielberg with this. The camera will record directly to .mpg format, which is nice because you can play this format on almost any computer without needing to install anything. I say 'almost' only because I'm sure there are some linux distros that don't include a video player.

The cord that hooks your camera up to an AV-in port is great. you can watch your movies in decent quality on the TV screen, and do a slideshow type thing of your pictures. I like to use this in conjunction with my VCR to record movies, this gets MUCH better quality than the built-in video mode and records to a VHS, which can be handy. But the cord is rather short, so I can't record anything outside or in another room.

The USB hook-up to your computer is very handy. And transferring a full load (128mb) of data to my computer never takes more than 2 minutes, which I think is very reasonable considering how easy it is to set up. The camera will pop up in your computer and you can browse it just as you would any regular folder. Your pictures are stored as JPG pictures (of course) and in windows xp, you can switch to 'thumbnail' view and find the picture you are looking for right away. I have had some problems getting my computer to detect the USB connection, but I've always been able to fix this by rebooting.

This is a great camera. Under the right conditions and with a fair amount of awareness, you can take magnificent pictures. But it's not the magical camera that is going to work perfectly all the time and under every possible circumstance. I don't think such a camera exists. If you want 5 megapixels of power and a name like Sony, this is the camera for you.

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If you love photography, if you like digital imaging, if you like making fun MPEGs, and if you enjoy shooting high quality pictures, then you gotta have this camera. I have never seen such an easy-to-use camera. Like with most Sony digital cameras, the DSC-P92's user-friendliness and image and lens quality are what it's all about. Having family living all around the world, it is also great fun to make short MPEGs and send them through e-mail.

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