Sony CyberShot W170 Digital Camera – Silver (10.1MP, 5x Optical Zoom) 2.7″ LCD matches point-and-shoot ease-of-use with advanced features to pack a powerful punch. The sophisticated, compact body features an enviable 10.1 megapixel resolution, Carl Zeiss® 5x optical zoom lens, and Sony’s Double Anti-Blur solution for crisp, clear images. For easy viewing and sharing, the large 2.7″ LCD displays your shots in vibrant colour. In addition, Face Detection technology, Smile Shutter, and Intelligent Scene Recognition elicit stunning detail from special moments.
Helpful consumer’s review
I’ve already got an alpha 100 D-SLR, but there are occasions when its just not the time to lug a great big camera round with all the different bits that go with it. So I thought that this would be a good everyday sort of camera. I was wrong.
It’s a fantasic camera! I could end up using it more than my D-SLR as the pictures are of the same quality, but in such a small case!
The last compact digital camera I had was another Cyber-Shot, the P-10, but its 5 years old now, and how its all changed. Everything is so fast, from turning it on, to focusing, to zooming, to taking as many pictures you want in a row, its all instant!
However, I really think the best points of this camera are the functions that do it all themselves. Face detection and the Smile Shutter. No longer is face detection a gimmick, everything is adjusted to make those faces look the best they can, focus, exposure, white balance, and flash are all adjusted. And it plays a role in the Smile Shutter, the most fantastic thing you will use for a long while.
Just focus the camera, press the shutter, and smile! It really works, and is so fun to use, you can also set the camera to child priority, so that the camera will only fire when the children in the photo are smiling, I hear sighs of relief from parents everywhere!
But using the Smile Shutter you will always get great people pictures, as i’ve found, after the first smiling picture, the subject laughs so much at the camera that it just keeps going!
All of this, and a lot more, in something you can fit in any trouser pocket, what an age we live in.
Ok, a couple of tiny gripes. The camera is slower to focus when zoomed in to the max 5x’s, but only by about a second. The other is that in my 5 year old camera, the infoLITHIUM battery used would tell you down to minute how long you had till it ran out, all of my Handycam’s do this too. This camera CAN do this, but you have to purchase an infoLITHIUM battery seperatly, would have been nice to include it in the box.
Overall though, its a supurb piece of kit, and i’m sure it will capture many moments, probably 95% with smiling happy people due to the Smile Shutter, to come.
