Taken from the Sony Australia press release -
Sony debuts its most daring digital cameras to date
Sydney – 13 August, 2008 – Sony Australia has today announced two new daring additions to its T series range of Cyber-shot digital cameras. Continuing to up the ante when it comes to form and function, the new Album T (DSC-T700) and T Slim (DSC-T77) are even more sophisticated than their predecessors, with advances in image capture, storage, search and sharing capabilities.
Both models showcase 10.1 megapixels, 4 x optical zoom, Optical Steady Shot, Carl Zeiss lens and the popular Face Detection and Smile Shutter functionalities. However, as their names suggest, it is the innovative album function and slimline body that put them in a class of their own.
“Sony continues to take the lead in developing intelligent cameras that not only take great pictures, but make you stand out in a crowd,” said Kieran Gallagher, Cyber-shot Senior Product Manager for Sony Australia. “The new Album T and T Slim do just that, packing bigger features into smaller, sleeker designs.”
Album T (DSC-T700)
Boasting a 4GB internal memory, the Album T serves as a portable photo album, allowing you to capture and carry up to 40,000 photos with you. Its unique album function boasts a calendar playback menu that remembers pictures according to the date that they were taken and can also stores pictures in favourite folders. With instant search capabilities, users can quickly find a certain image by face type, be it a child’s face or smiling friend.The Album T packs all of these features into four slimline metallic finishes of grey, red, silver and gold, each with a 3.5″ LCD touch screen.
New and improved shooting features
These two new T series models feature advancements to the highly popular Smile Shutter function. A Smile Shutter icon has been added to the touch screen allowing the function to be activated with a single press and enabling continuous shooting when smiling faces are detected.Enhanced Intelligent Scene Recognition, which automatically determines the optimum camera setting for every scene, provides easier operation and higher-quality results. The Auto mode takes a single shot with optimised automatic settings, while the Advanced mode takes two shots at different settings, allowing the user to select the preferred shot. This provides greater protection against mistakes when shooting in difficult conditions, such as at night or in backlit scenes.
Similarly, the brand new ‘Anti-blink’ technology cuts the risk of closed eyes spoiling portraits of friends and family, while Portrait mode shoots two images in quick succession, automatically throwing away pictures where the subject’s eyes are closed.
A retractable Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens enables close-up shooting and zooming during photography up to 1cm from the subject in Magnifying Glass mode and the improved Dynamic Range Optimiser (DRO) determines the best exposure and contrast settings in almost any shooting environment.
In-camera retouching is a feature also included within the Album T and T Slim, with ten editing functions available to ensure no red eye goes un-missed. This function also allows the addition of effects such as cross filters and radial blurs.
Advanced sharing capabilities
The Scrapbook function is a unique way to showcase your collection of photos, which automatically creates a handmade looking album from pictures in the memory. With 16 backgrounds to choose from, images can be displayed based on information such as creation date, subject frequency, or sequentially in a slide show. The scrapbook can store nearly 1,000 high resolution (three megabytes) or 40,000 low resolution (VGA quality) photos and can be printed or displayed on an HDTV.Share photos in stunningly clear High Definition by connecting an Album T or T Slim to a Full HD BRAVIA LCD TV with a component cable. When a Cyber-shot digital camera is connected to a HD BRAVIA LCD TV, the camera can be controlled with the TV’s remote control, thanks to BRAVIA Sync compatibility.
HD Slide Show with Music “Photo Music” is an inbuilt application that combines images with music to produce showstopping slide shows. Five standard effects (Simple, Basic, Nostalgic, Active and Stylish) are now supplemented with three Face Priority effects (Face Priority 1: Basic, Face Priority 2: Nostalgic and Face Priority 3: Stylish) and can be played back with one of eight music tracks stored in the camera’s memory.
Users can watch a slide show of all recorded images or limit the playback by simply selecting a face type or date on the screen. More personalised slide shows are also possible by transferring favourite tunes from a PC to the Cyber-shot digital camera.
The new additions to the Cyber-shot T series range of digital cameras from Sony are available in Australia from September 2008.
Now, the review. Sony has never been renown for it’s digital photography. But they sure have improved on the image quality substantially. Sony clamours for recognition by convincing Carl Zeiss to provide the camera’s internal lens and going for the hardware aesthetics.
This they win hands down. In debuting one of the slimmest digital cameras and the flagship product in their T line, the T700 is in fine form with it’s brushed metal appearance and astounding 3.5″ touch screen. Removing most of the physical buttons (saved for the power, playback and zoom buttons), the user must rely on touching the screen’s menus and preferences.
The touch screen looks gorgeous, saved for the rather stretched out (pixelated) menu options. It looks like the exact menu buttons and GUI layout from previous T models, but to be displayed on a 3″ screen instead. This could be deem as poor foresight, or just lazy engineering. Another fact is, the touch screen is prone to fingerprints, smudging and poor response from the users touch.
The huge internal 4GB memory is another clear winner. No longer do you need to carry multiple memory cards or purchase the expensive proprietary Memory Stick Duo PRO (this camera does not support Sony’s original Memory Stick). Instead, digital images and movies can be stored internally. This makes it convenient, and allows the T700 to double as a photo album or be used to display images on a HDTV (through their HD output connector).
Actual photography and samples will be scrutinised and published at a later date. The T700 comes in an array of colours – grey, silver, champagne, pink and red. It was an obvious choice that grey would be the one for me (for those who know, I am adversed to colours).
But DigitalCameraReview.com succinctly reviews the camera -
CONCLUSIONS
Hands down, the T700 is certainly the best looking, most solidly built small camera we’ve had the pleasure of shooting with this year. Sony usually earns serious points for style and build quality in our evaluations, but the general opinion around here is that they’ve even outdone themselves with this model. We shoot with a lot of cameras, and in my experience it’s rare that random people will approach you to ask about your camera – especially if it’s a point-and-shoot. But it happened with the T700. More than once. It really does look that good.With all of its strengths on the style front and some solid performance marks besides, we’re tempted to let the T700 off the hook for its generally lackluster showing in our image quality analysis. Certainly, if you’re not hoping for more than a camera for taking pictures of friends and family to post online or make regular-sized prints from, the T700’s image quality is generally very livable. But there’s no denying the presence of some objectively serious flaws – from color fringing, to excessive saturation, to blown-out highlights, to shaggy high-ISO images – in the T700’s sample shots.
So how to rate this Cyber-shot on balance? Like so many things, that all depends on user expectations and preferences. In our view, you can’t get anything with more aesthetic appeal at the moment, and so long as you have realistic expectations for the T700’s images, this alone may be reason enough to justify the purchase. If you’re the type who likes to spend time dissecting the details of your shots, however, the T700 will give you plenty to agonize over.
Pros:
- Possibly the most stylish camera on the market
- Huge internal memory is easy to access with supplied software
- Auto focus speed among the best available from a point-and-shoot
- Auto options galore: face detection, smile detection, blink detection
- Touch screen idea is still neat after several generations
Cons:
- Menus are dense, confusing, and sometimes redundant
- Terrible fringing issues in boundary areas can ruin shots
- Erratic metering and white balance
- Noise beyond ISO 200 hasn’t improved much over older T cameras
- Average flash performance, battery life
- Premium price may limit appeal
