My wife and I recently upgraded from our Sony DSC-P8 to a Sony DSC-W130. So far we are extremely happy. We shopped around quite a bit before settling on the new cybershot, and spent a good deal of time trying out other brands. In the end, the Smile Shutter brought us back to Sony. It sounds like there is no way it would work, but it really does. We have two young children that are remarkably hard to catch smiling. With the new Sony, all we have to do is turn on the smile shutter and the camera does the rest. So far, we haven't missed a smile with the 3 year (with teeth) and have caught a few of the 4 month old (no teeth). It makes a difference.The other feature that has been great so far is the burst mode. With my old camera, the missing time between shot resulted in a lot of blurring. The new camera manages to focus each shot much better. We played around with some moving targets, and the pictures came out great. One major drawback of burst mode, however, is that you can't use flash. I took a bunch of pictures indoors and the quality was ok, but not great. The flash just turns off when you switch to burst mode.
The video recording is great on this camera. Obviously not camcorder quality or anything, but very good for what you'd expect from a point and shoot. The sound quality still isn't that great, but much much better from my older camera. It seems like it balances the audio in the first few seconds. If the first few seconds are loud, the whole video will be softer. If you start out soft, however, you bury the needle when it gets lounder leading to some distortion. You also can't zoom while in video mode something they don't tell you.
The flash recharges after about 1-2 seconds, which is great. It also is pretty effective for long distances.
I like the menu configurations, especially now that I've had some time to play with them.
Picture quality is great, but I'm upgrading from a 2MP camera, so it probably wouldn't take too much to wow me. We took a ton of shots and were impressed at the level of detail when we zoomed in on our computer.
Overall, we are very happy with this camera. It has some limitations and problems, but for the money (and for being a point and shoot) it is great.
One or two "bugs" I'm aware of:
1. If you shoot using burst mode, you'll find that you can't turn the flash back on in any mode but Easy mode. You have to reset the camera back to factory defaults to shoot using the flash again. Even knowing this I would still buy the camera, but I'm hoping that enough people would alert Sony to this error to release a firmware update to fix it. Otherwise I would have given it five stars.
2. When you plug in the camera with the USB cable and turn it on the lens will open and then close, so be sure not to leave it face down before transferring data.
3. This camera (unlike some) does not receive power through the USB cable so it needs to have a battery with charge in order to transfer pictures. Don't leave it on too long while it's plugged in or it'll drain the battery.It's just about perfect, for me. Of course, I'd like the quality and control of an SLR in a tiny package, but for something this portable it does a fine job. The onscreen descriptions of the settings are just fantastic, the ISO (low light) mode has to be seen to be believed...very little noise, even without flash. Pictures are mostly sharp, though without flash you still have to maintain a steady hand, as with any camera. Very balanced and realistic color. It's a very intuitive camera that lets you concentrate on your composition and not worry too much about exposure, which I think is what a small point and shoot should give you. I also love the 16x9 modes for stills, haven't done any video with it. I'd recommend getting a clear shield to stick on the screen, like I did...seems very scratchable otherwise. If I lost it I'd probably get the same camera again. I'm pretty conservative with my reviews, I'm sure many people would give this an unabashed 5 stars, and I almost did, but you still get the occasional surprise when you shoot something that should have turned out fine but didn't for some reason....I think it's just where the tech is at right now, but this camera rocks, no doubt.I also own a Sony A700 but it is a big camera to lug around all the time. I wanted something small that I could throw in my purse to carry all the time. This camera is wonderful. I get great shots in all kinds of light, the pictures are clear, close-ups are amazing, it's fast and the battery lasts a long time. The only thing that I would change to make it even better, is more optical zoom.I was looking for a smaller camera that would take good quality pictures, especially on trips. I take college students abroad for a month in Costa Rica and wanted to be able to do a blog with lots of pictures to record their experiences. This camera far exceeded my expectations! It is extremely simple to operate. I have been able to figure out features that are new to me on the fly without having to refer to the manual. Particularly impressive to me are the video capabilities and the high sensitivity / low light with no flash setting. I have been able to take excellent shots in dark museums where no flash is allowed and have been able to upload good-quality videos to the blog. The software that comes with the camera works well and is very user-friendly. The 4X optical zoom is not powerful enough to take fine nature photographs from great distances, but it is good enough to zoom in to compose a picture for most general purposes. All in all, I highly recommend this camera, especially for travel.
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