Measuring a little more than 0. We tested a brushed silver version, but it's available in gray, red, pink, and gold, too. The camera has an elegant feel with a full metal body up front and sides, and nothing but screen on the back. In fact, the only physical controls are the power and shutter buttons on top and the well-positioned zoom rocker at the right corner. The only other button is a small Playback mode button at the top right of the display. To take a picture you simply slide down the flat, metal lens cover and click away.
You'll want to be careful of errant fingers getting in shots and touching the lens, however, as the lens is positioned at the far left. Sony's high-contrast Xtra Fine display is quite good. At its Normal brightness setting, I had no problem seeing the screen in direct sunlight. Well, no problem after wiping away fingerprints; the T seems to collect more than most. If having to wipe off fingerprints is a deal breaker, you'll want to skip this camera and probably all touch-screen models for that matter--of which there are more and more.
Aside from fingerprints, you might take issue with the touch screen's responsiveness. I found the T's to be fine with fingers, but better with the included stylus or "Paint Pen" as Sony calls it likely because I could be more precise with it.
It clips onto the wrist strap and allows you to quickly poke around the three onscreen menus Home, Menu, and Display along with the in-camera retouching and painting tools you can add stamps, frames, or draw on pictures all while keeping the screen free of fingerprints.
Navigating the camera settings is easy enough. The Home menu gives you access to all the main features and options, while the Menu screen provides context-sensitive options; for instance, if you're taking still pictures, you get all the shooting choices like scene modes and resolutions. The DSC-T offers 10 scene modes--including a new Gourmet option for shooting food--as well as the typical auto features.
Sony has updated its Smile Shutter function so that it continues to automatically shoot pictures of people smiling until you tell it not to, but still lets you take single shots with the shutter button.
There are three smile sensitivity levels as well. The iSCN Intelligent Scene Recognition now selects the best mode from eight scene modes up from five previously, and there's an advanced mode that will take a picture with the current settings plus an additional shot with optimized settings if need be nothing like being second-guessed by your electronics. The company added an antiblink function iSCN, too, which will automatically take a second picture if it senses closed eyes.
All of these worked well. Performance for the DSC-T is about the same as the T, and one of the top performers in its class. Shot-to-shot time ran about the same, while flash bumped that up to 2. In high-contrast conditions it took only 0. It held a rate of 1. Picture quality is also respectable with excellent color and contrast at low ISO sensitivities, though there's some visible lens distortion on the left side, which is common in this class of cameras.
Photos at and below a size of 8x10 were fine quality, though all photos generally look soft. Viewed at percent, we saw some chromatic aberration, and off-subject elements of the scene tended to look smeary and overprocessed, but nothing that was noticeable at traditional print sizes and certainly not on the T's LCD. Noise in the pictures becomes noticeable at ISO and starts to seriously obscure detail at ISO ; we don't suggest using higher settings.
A true point-and-shoot, I was able to slide the lens cover back, take a picture, and close it again with one hand. The ultra slim-and-sleek design gives it a slippery feel in the hand and makes it a bit awkward to handle.
No menu navigation is necessary to begin taking pictures — once the lens is cover is flipped open, the camera powers up in shooting mode. A button on top allows a quick review of the last photo taken. A toggle on the right shoulder operates the zoom action. Even users with relatively slender fingers found it tricky to hit the small on-screen buttons at times.
Using the stylus also eliminates fingerprints on the screen, which accumulate quickly. I found that the screen became easier to negotiate as I became more comfortable with the camera. The touch screen does have advantages. It allows the user to shift the focus within the frame of a shot by touching the display.
Again, this function hinges on how cozy the user is with the touch screen interface. The large LCD also offers a nice way to view photos. Sony has geared the T for this purpose, giving it 4 GB of storage space and a slew of slideshow options with pre-loaded music and transition effects.
Display performance itself is surprisingly hit or miss, given the 3. Ultimately, this means more time switching between shooting and playback modes to check images, and several of us who shot with the camera were so unsatisfied with the post-shot image review results that we disabled post-shot image display altogether. Timings and Shutter Lag Sony has continued to set increasingly high bars for speed and performance with its ultracompacts.
This kind of responsiveness, which is easily on par with much more expensive and full-featured advanced compacts, makes the T a pleasure to use for grabbing snapshots. The only timings-related area where our T had a truly poor showing, in fact, was in the amount of time it takes to cycle between shooting and playback modes. Going from shooting into playback can take upwards of 5 seconds to complete, which only added to our frustration with the grainy post-shot review images as this forced us to spend a lot of time making this cycle.
But the ability to tap a point on the screen and have the camera lock focus on that area without even having to manually change the focusing mode seems no less a brilliant technological integration than when it first debuted. As always, I find an infinity setting, which speeds up press-to-capture times somewhat, an especially useful and versatile inclusion. Lens and Zoom Keeping expectations low is the best way to not be disappointed with the image results that come from compact, internally contained optics like those on the T In the case of the T, no protruding lens means nothing to worry about getting damaged by contact while in use.
The T definitely hits the most commonly needed lengths for taking snapshots, though more wide-angle coverage, more speed, or both might be expected from a camera at this price. Like its forerunners, the T has an excellent close focus setting that ensures consistent lock to well under a quarter of an inch by our measurement.
Flash shots look fine most of the time, with generally even exposure. The system can be disabled for tripod use, or toggled between single-shot only stabilized when the shutter release is pressed or continuous stabilized all the time, but harder on your battery modes. The disruption to this winning streak, however, is once again battery life that struggles to keep up. In one day with lots of image review, we even manage to kill the battery having taken right at shots on the charge.
As a final note, although typical camera power-on times were snappy, users should expect a languorous start-up the first time you attempt to fire up the camera after charging the battery. So just how bad are the pictures? But if more serious picture taking is your cup of tea, the T has a few bad habits that you may want to take into consideration before your hard-earned money changes hands.
Exposure, Processing, and Color Trouble for the T starts with its default multi-area metering, which is simply all over the map: at times, the camera will severely underexpose, but usually highlight clipping is the order of the day in scenes requiring much dynamic range.
As with other Sony cams, DRO on the T provides three levels of adjustment: an auto setting that appears to slightly recurve shadows and mid-tones, a more aggressive post-processing option DRO Plus that pulls out even more separation in darker areas, or an option to disable the system altogether.
DRO disabled. DRO Plus. There is, however, a vivid mode that further boosts saturation and contrast while apparently providing a sharpening bump as well. Overall, casual users may not be bothered by the lack of adjustablity with the T White Balance The majority of cameras we test show auto white balance performance under incandescent light that ranges from poor to extremely poor.
And the T is, unfortunately, toward the lower end of this lower-end scale. Auto White Balance, K incandescent light. White balance presets also proved inconsistent, often shifting hues slightly between shots with the same lighting. We even experienced this phenomenon when shooting with the camera on a tripod to take our studio test samples. Wide Angle. Even without looking for it, strong fringing is hard to miss in the reduced-size sample shot above.
The solution? Sensitivity and Noise Sony has tended to leave a bad taste in my mouth with high-sensitivity performance on its Cyber-shot T models. Nothing here is worse than before.
But looking at ISO shots from the T next to those from previous T cameras suggests that not a lot has improved, either — odd, since Sony has made great strides in getting noise and noise reduction balanced elsewhere in its Cyber-shot group. But it happened with the T More than once.
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