Style Over Substance
Pros:
Solid-feeling, super-compact, decent pics in bright light
Cons:
Poor in low-light situations; really bad red-eye; disappointing movie mode
The Bottom Line:
Pass on this if you plan to take a lot of pictures indoors or at night, or if you want a good movie mode.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
The T10 has a great design and fees very well built. It is tiny but feels quite solid in the hand. The on-off mechanism (you flip the built in lens cover down and up) is undeniably cool, and the camera is very speedy both when you turn it on and from pic to pic. On paper it sounds like a great social situation/party ultracompact camera. Small enough to always have with you, ISO to 1000, optical image stabilization for shaky hands. Unfortunately the specs don't tell the whole story. In situations where there is plenty of light I think the T10 takes nice sharp pictures. However indoors you have 2 options: turn off the flash and increase the ISO - this often results in blurry, grainy pics above ISO 400 (the 800 and 1000 ISO settings are not very useful), OR use the flash and get washed-out faces with glowing demon eyes despite using the red-eye reduction mode. The red-eye is a real problem as it is in every pic of a person or pet and very pronounced and hard to get rid of in post-processing. Another negative is the movie mode. It works OK in bright light, although I wasn't super impressed with the picture quality. However in dim light the camera doesn't increase increase its ISO and you can't use the flash during a movie, so many of my movies came out really grainy and dark-looking. You might think it a plus to be able to zoom during movie mode - but when you do this the camera keeps changing its focus, even on objects that are fairly still, so you get a disconcerting intermittent blurriness in your movies. Finally, I thought the battery life was MUCH shorter than Sony claims it to be.
Since so many of my pictures are taken at night/indoors, I returned the camera and got a Fuji F31fd, which I am very happy with. The Fuji has very useful functions for me: face detection, which optimizes focus and exposure for faces even if they are not in the middle of the picture; usable high ISO settings; "Intelligent Flash" (the flash alters its output so you don't get the washed-out faces); and "Natural plus Flash" setting which takes 2 pictures in a row, one with and one without flash so you can choose which you like better.
BTW avoid buying dbuys.com even if they have the best price - see my review if you are considering ordering from them.
