A point and shoot perfect for vacations

I had the opportunity to test out the Sony Mavica 200 a year or two ago and really loved the design of it. I loved the idea of using a CD for the storage and found it really well made. I was of course very curious about the evolution of the mavica line after that review and am happy to have gotten the opportunity to play with the newer Sony Mavica CD350.

Now onto the review.

Picture Quality: A
As with all my camera reviews, I consider picture quality to be the highest category in importance. As with previous Mavica Cameras the Sony does a just fine job of picture quality, nothing that will confuse this camera with a SLR camera or a high end digital camera but enough that it'll take nice pictures with few problems. Hmm where to elaborate?

Being that the 350 is a point and shoot, it doesn't give you many options for ISO settings. Basically you have three settings available to you, ISO 100, 200 and 400. These settings are not manual but instead are preset guidelines for expsosure for the camera. I'll elaborate on the whole point and shoot vs manual settings later. One thing with the ISO settings is the noise you get in the picture, the lower the setting the less the noise, so at 100 you'll get barely seeable noise, but at 400 you will notice it.

One final comment on the picture quality is the expsoure of the pictures. I found that in dimmed light or low light the 350 underexposes the pictures it takes. You can often correct this using photoshop or the software that comes with the 350 but in my mind you shouldn't have to.

So as a point and shoot in good lighting the 350 would get a A+ but with the low light limitations thrown in I have to drop it to a weak A, not quite a A- but a weak A.

Picture Storage: A
The absolute reason to consider the Mavica line of cameras is the storage media. I actually find the storage media quite appealing. The 350 uses a mini re-writable cd that is about half the size of a normal cd-rom. At the highest setting you can fit about 150 photo's on each CD, of course using this form of media causes a slight delay after taking a photo because it is actually writing the photo to the disk.

A big plus to this form of media is that you can view the pictures from just about any computer with a CD-Rom drive that isn't more than a few years old. Another big benefit is that since each CD only costs about .70 cents you can store a enormous amount of pictures on cheap and redily available format. This lets the 350 become the ultimate vacation camera.

When using the CD's if you are done with one you must finalize the cd before you can look at it on your computer. One problem with this is that the finalizing takes a little space and I have read that if you use up the entire CD, when you finalize it, the process has a chance of deleting some of your pictures in order to make room for the finalizing.

Of course the biggest drawback to using a mini CD for recording the pictures is that it increase the minimum size of the camera by a good margin. The 350 has accomplished reducing its size from it's big brother by a good 20 percent, which is very much noticeable, but compared to other 3 megapixel cameras like the canon s230, it is huge!

Ease of Use: A
Because of the size of the 350, the buttons can be laid out very nicely with lots of room between each button. In addition the buttons all feel very solid. The bad part of the larger size is that the camera is a bit on the heavy size, weighing in at just a ounce or two over 1 pound, this camera heavily outweighs its competition.

One really nice thing about the 350 is the size of its LCD screen. The LCD screen is a good 2.5 inches square. The LCD screen also is easily viewable in both Darkness and Brightness. This makes the LCD really stand out in the crowd of sometimes hard to see LCD screens. Of course this is quite necessary because the mavica doesn't come with a viewfinder. You can buy one as an attachment but with a LCD that works well that is almost as smart as having a icemaker machine at the North Pole.

One final note on ease of use is its size. Hate to say it but the mavica is BIG. Because it is built around the CD burner, it can't be much smaller than the diameter of the mini CD. This makes it impossibly too big to fit in a pocket.

Speed: B+
One of the biggest flaws that the 350 shows is the speed in which it can take a picture, write a picture and shutter lag. Normally I don't include speed as a main category but I feel I would be failing my job if I didn't with the 350. Autofocus speed is average at best, but as the lighting condition go away, it gets sub-average. From the time you push the shutter button it takes about a second and a half to two seconds before it takes the picture. Needless to say capturing quickshots isn't a option with the 350. You'll see a good 3-4 second lag between shots as well. Although you can take photo's in TIFF mode, for gods sake don't or you'll see almost a minute wait between shots for it to write them to disk.

Now all of those are complaints but bottom line is that the speed aspects of this camera are mostly just average. B+ is a good score but nothing bringing this camera to the forefront.

Battery: A
The battery life of the 350 is pretty good, especially when you look at the size of the LCD screen, the necessary spinning of the CD and the larger size of the camera. You can get about 300-350 shots per battery in my experience. This is a bit better than some cameras out there that can only get 200 or so shots with the LCD screen on.

Attachments: A+
Next to last is the attachments, along with the CD storage system, the attachments for the mavica 350 are very nice. It has standard hotshoe ability but also has lense attachments including a 2x lense attachment that makes the 3x lense turn into a 6x lense, which makes the 350 have a higher zoom than most any other point and shoot out there witht one exception of a olympus camera with a 8x zoom. Remember you only look at the optical zoom. There are wide shot attachements and a lot of others. I'm really impressed by the selection.

Value: A-
While I think the 350 is a good camera, the going price is more than 300, while you save on storage, your paying extra for the cd setup. If you were to get a S230 by canon, your looking at about $250 but with a larger flashcard maybe a bit over 300. Its hard to tell but I think the 350 is a bit light in the value department. Perhaps it would shine if your going on a 5 week grand vacation where you simply couldn't afford to take enough flashcards to satisfy the amount of pictures you'd take.

CONCLUSION
While this camera has some amazingly high points for a vacation camera, it scores some low ones for a everday camera. Due to its size I wouldn't be very inclined to bring it on everyday journeys where you might or might not need a camera. My canon s230 is small enough to just throw it in the diaper bag, the Mavica 350 is totally innappropriate for this task.

Botom line is if you don't mind the size, the camera has some great features but on the whole is a average camera. Of course I still love that CD!