Above Average Style Delivers Average Pictures

A good friend of mine needed a new digital camera. She had been using a 2 megapixel Kodak she had purchased over three years ago. The camera was rather bulky and she hated taking a separate camera bag out with her. She actually missed a lot of pictures because she didn't have her camera with her. She decided it was time to upgrade and wanted something small enough to slip in her purse when she left the house. She went to the store and came home with the Sony DSC-T10. She said her main reason for selecting this model was because it was "cute" (her words, not mine). Unfortunately, as one could tell, ease of use wasn't a consideration in her purchase and after several days of lessons from me and a vacation where I was the one stuck using it, I have arrived at this review.

Look and Feel
This T 10 is very sleek. It has a piece in the front that slides down to reveal the lens. My friend purchased the silver model, but it is also available in black, white, and pink. It is tiny and lightweight, weighing in at only 5.8 ounces. I've seen images of this camera in ads that show it with an upright key next to it, to demonstrate that it is no taller than your house key in height. The screen is relatively large for such a small camera (2.5 inches). I found it to be a perfect size for framing shots and reviewing the pictures. The screen is sharp and clear. Even though it did get harder to see outdoors, it wasn't terrible. The T10 does not have a viewfinder, which I consider an absolute must on any camera I buy for myself. I like having the option to turn off the screen to preserve battery life.

The buttons are well placed, but very small. I found operating it to be a little difficult and I have small hands. As far as operating this camera, it is a bit confusing. I'm more of a tech geek than my friend, and even I had to peek at the manual to look up a few symbols. I think the average user will be able to pick up its operations well with a little help from the manual. If you have an inherent fear of technology, you may want to avoid this model. Lucky for my friend, this camera still looks "cute" despite her inability to operate it.

Cameras Take Pictures...

And although my friend didn't consider this in her decision, this camera takes decent pictures. Outdoor pictures look great on this camera. Indoor pictures were a bit grainy. On the default automatic mode, the pictures are under exposed quite often. The camera may be selecting slower shutter speeds than it should. When I adjusted the shooting modes, the pictures fared much better. As with many cameras, the pictures were noisy in low lights (especially at ISO 1000). I thought the colors were very good on this camera. True to life and not over saturated.

CCD:
Originally when she purchased this camera, my friend thought the 7.2 megapixel CCD was more than she needed but found it very useful when she decided to crop the pictures into a scrapbook. She was able to blow up areas that weren't even focal points of an image into a good quality 4x6 inch print. The largest size print she made from the pictures she has taken thus far was 11 x 14 inches, and it was very good quality.

Flash:
The flash is decent. It is pretty powerful considering how small it is. I wasn't thrilled with the placement of the flash, though, because red eye was appearing in almost every picture if red eye reduction was turned off, but there aren't many places to put a flash on such a small camera. It can be easily fixed with even the most basic photo editing programs on the market. Available flash modes are Auto, forced on, forced off, and slow synchro. For the most part, I used the auto feature but switched it to forced off when I was noticing some photos that were very dark in a hotel room. This did the trick but required the use of my table top tripod.

Shooting and Focus Modes:
The Shooting modes on this camera include high sensitivity, soft snap, beach, fireworks, high speed shutter, landscape, snow, twilight portrait and twilight. I found the landscape mode to work great when I had a tripod handy, but not so useful without one. Most of the shots were blurry. The twilight modes served their purpose, producing average quality pictures at night. There was a lot of noise in some of the pictures in the form of what looked like rainbow confetti appearing in the dark colors in the picture. The high speed shutter mode was sort of hit or miss. It worked in some situations (I was able to effectively capture a few birds flying away in a park) and in other situations it captured very artistic streaks across the frame (I wasn't able to catch my two dogs playing). We used the fireworks mode a few times while on vacation and while it took great photos of the fireworks, it was useless without a tripod. Again in the edges of the photos, where the sky was dark, the multicolored confetti appeared. I haven't been able to use most of the other modes for their intended purposes, instead just playing around with them.

The included focus modes are Auto focus, macro, focus preset, and magnifying glass mode. I mostly used the auto focus and macro modes. The auto focus does a good job a focusing on the subject. I really enjoyed the macro mode on this camera. I took a few close ups of an engagement ring and we got a few really great shots.

Zoom:
This camera has a Carl Zeiss lens. The 3x optical zoom was adequate for my friend's needs, but probably wouldn't be for someone who has children and may need to capture sports games or other events where you don't have the best seats in the house. This camera also has a 2x digital zoom, which I recommend not using. Digital zoom actually stretches the image rather than zooming in on it, degrading the quality. The name is deceiving; making many people think it is an extra bit of zoom. I have found almost no use for this feature despite it being a feature on almost every digital camera I’ve seen.

Shutter, Aperture, and Other Options
The shutter on this camera has a program auto mode and ranges in speed from 1 second to 1/1000 seconds. The available aperture settings are f3.5-10.0. Exposure compensation can be set + or – 2.0 EV in 1/3 EV steps. The ISO can be set to Auto, 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1000. There was very little noise in the images at ISO 400 and below. I saw a little noise at ISO 800 and the rainbow confetti appears at ISO 1000. The available white balance options are auto, daylight, cloudy, fluorescent, incandescent, and flash. The automatic mode did a good job of setting the white balance. I found the flash mode to be helpful in preventing photos where the light from the flash appeared too harsh. I was happy to see this mode as I haven’t seen it in many other small models. I wish it would have been included on my Canon SD 600.

Burst Mode and Self Timer:
The burst mode on this camera snaps at 1.1 frames per second. I found this mode to be lacking. I've seen many other small cameras with over 2 frames per second. It wasn't adequate for capturing pictures in any of the situations I tried to use it in (taking pictures of two pets playing, capturing my friend's little cousin dancing around the room). I was also disappointed that the burst mode was limited to 5 shots at a time, instead of snapping up to the capacity of the memory card. This burst mode is another reason I would not recommend this camera for someone with young children. The self timer was

The self timer can be set for 10 or two seconds. I would have liked at least an option for 30 seconds. I found 10 seconds to be a little bit too short to get across the room and positioned correctly in a photo without looking like you entered the photo after an Olympic run.

Video:
The video quality was good for a digital camera. This camera has audio with the video. The highest volume for sound playback is a bit low, but it sounded fine on the computer. The available video resolutions are MPEG Movie Mode: MPEG VX Fine 640 X 480, 30 frames per second (fps), MPEG VX Standard 640 X 480, 16.6 fps, Video Mail 160 x 112, 8.3fps. The highest quality setting, MPEG VX Fine, requires Pro duo media. This is the only mode I used since I didn’t feel the need to conserve memory.

Power and Picture Storage
The T10 takes an infolithium T battery (rechargeable lithium ion). I prefer this type of battery, as it typically last about 300 images as opposed to an average of about 50 pictures with AA batteries. Sony's infolithium batteries even allow your camera to tell you how much shooting time you have left. My friend only needs to charge the camera once every few weeks. She takes an average of 100-200 pictures per month. She charged it once during a week long vacation. The battery takes a little over an hour to charge.

The camera comes with 56 megabytes of internal memory (about 19 pictures) and takes Memory stick duo and pro duo memory cards. My friend bought a 1 gigabyte pro duo card and found it to be sufficient for her needs. I dislike the Memory Stick duo formats because they tend to be one of the most expensive formats and the hardest to find in high speed options. Also, many memory card readers require a pro duo to pro adaptor to read these cards.

Connecting It
The camera connects to the computer using a USB cable. My friend has Windows XP and we found it easy to connect without using the supplied software. The camera also has A/V output to go from the camera to the television for viewing images or video. We only connected it to the television to see how it worked, but didn't really have any use for this feature. This camera is compatible with Windows 2000 Professional, ME, XP Home and Professional Macintosh OS X (v10.3 - v10.4) (must be factory installed).

In the Box
Rechargeable InfoLithium T Battery (NPFT1)
Battery charger
A/V cable
USB cable
DC-in Multi-connector cable
Wrist strap
Software CD-ROM (Picture Motion Browser for Sony version 1.1 for Windows, USB Driver for Windows, Picture Package Music Transfer for Windows + Music Transfer for Macintosh)
1 year limited warranty: parts and labor

Price
My friend paid $399.99. I’ve seen it on sale before for $379.99. It is still relatively new so they price may go down. It was a decent buy for the price.

Overall, I would say this is a decent quality camera with an ultra-stylish design that is good for most average users. If you're a tech-allergic beginner, I would look for something that is a bit easier to operate. Someone with children or someone who is interested in digital photography may want to look into something with a faster burst mode and better overall picture quality.