Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T70

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49294101,00.htm

Reviewed 12 November 2007

Reviewed by Rich Trenholm

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T70 is an 8.1-megapixel snapper that looks every penny worth of its £170 pricetag, but there are still plenty of people unconvinced about touchscreens. We put the T70 through its paces.

Design
The T70 looks stunning. It feels even more svelte than it actually is, and our black model complemented the silver trim beatifully. It also comes in silver, white and pink finishes. Like other cameras in the T-series, the T70 features a sliding faceplate. It's a very slender plate, with a precision fit far removed from some of the other chunky faceplates we've seen recently.

The main concern we have about faceplate cameras is that they generally have the lens placed right in the top left-hand corner, and it's all too easy for fingers to stray into the picture. The lens is a non-protruding 5x optical zoom.

There is a danger with faceplate-activated cameras that have the lens in the top corner for fingers to stay into frame. Fortunately, the lens itself shows no trace of distortion

We like the gigantic 76mm (3-inch) 16:9 touchscreen. As well as controlling the menus, the touchscreen interface allows you to focus on any point on the screen with a double tap. Tapping the screen in playback mode zooms into recorded images. There are no buttons on the back, with the shutter release, a redundant power button, playback toggle and a truly horrible tiny zoom slider all on top of the camera.

Features
Features include face detection, optical image stabilisation and ISO 3,200 maximum speed. There are three exposure bracketing modes. There are ten scene modes, including a high ISO mode, soft snap for blurring backgrounds and 'smile shutter'.

The new smile shutter feature has garnered a lot of attention. We tested it and it just about works, but that doesn't mean we like it. It's designed to find faces, detect when everybody is smiling and then capture that moment. You can specify what degree of jollity your subjects must be displaying to trigger the shutter -- low, medium or high -- although on all but the low setting it was tough enough convincing the camera that one person was smiling, let alone an entire unruly brood.

We did like the various postproduction effects available, including the fun -- if crude -- option to scribble on your pictures. Also available are a more interesting range of frames and effects than the usual gimmicky nonsense, including a silent movie-style vignetting effect.

Performance
Smaller lenses, like the non-protruding kind typical in faceplate-activated cameras, can tend to barrel distortion. Happily, we didn't see any evidence of this with our test shots. The automatic white balance is another strong point, coping with different conditions inside and outdoors.

The maximum ISO speed, ISO 3,200 (right) is unusable when compared to ISO 800 (left), ironically because of the impressionist noise reduction rather than the noise itself

The lack of an actual portrait mode -- you're stuck with smile shutter -- is a bit annoying, but the automatic mode provides decent portraits with smooth, warm flesh tones. Changing the colour mode to saturated rather than normal can be extreme for portraits, but if used in conjunction with some tinkering with the flash intensity yielded some nice results.

Shutter lag is non-existent. In our tests we beat the stopwatch every time. The T70's continuous mode was willing to continue for around 1 minute 45 seconds, at 1.5 frames initially but under protest for most of the way. Although this isn't anything to write home about, the single shot mode impresses by being nearly as fast as burst mode, the lack of shutter lag meaning the T70 will snap as fast as you can hit the shutter button.

The most commonly-voiced concern with touchscreens is that they leach battery power. We didn't find that the case here, managing to fill a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo twice over before the battery died.

Image quality
Speckly image noise is an issue, as always on compacts. However, it's only at the ISO 800 setting that noise itself is the problem. Above that, the camera's noise reduction software throws the baby out with the bathwater, eliminating noise by blurring all detail. Still, the lower ISO speeds are crisp and detailed. In low light, the adjustable flash intensity proved invaluable to produce some decent shots.

Conclusion
The touchscreen is probably the make or break feature of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T70. If you don't get on with the touchscreen but still value refined styling, the Canon Digital IXUS 860 IS has a similar-sized screen but is fairly more expensive.

More vanilla looks but marginally superior images are available at a similar price in the Fujifilm FinePix F50fd. Nonetheless we enjoyed the touchscreen experience and were pleased with the pictures we got from this classy compact.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday