Sony has been a bit quiet recently, and with all the negative press around about the PS3 I don't blame them for keeping their head down. Thankfully when you put the gaming market and laptop battery issues aside, the camera side of things is doing quite well - the Sony A100 was well received and their compacts aren't bad either, although they are better known for their style than their capability.
These aren't two concepts that usually go together. I don't need to mention some examples, but I will anyway - the Millenium Dome, the “Galacticos” at Read Madrid and any recent so-called camera phone - all things that can be considered stylish but in practice have no use or ability. Sony is aiming to change all this with updates to two of its compact ranges, with the N2 and T50.
Sony Cyber-shot N2
The N range is Sony's high performance range. The N1 was amongst the first 7MP + compacts so its no surprise that Sony has joined the over 10MP brigade with the N2 - its 10.1MP. The N2 also features a high sensitivity mode of IS0 1600, 3x optical / 6x digital zoom and a 3 inch touch-screen LCD for really simple menu navigation, and a paint function! This is relatively nothing new in the world of compacts, but the N2 has a few more tricks.
One is the Photo Album, a separate memory that holds up to 500 VGA thumbnails to make browsing quicker and can act as a photo diary. The album holds thumbnails of photos that have been moved off the camera which seems a bit redundant - one thing we'll check in a review is to see how it works with the included Sony software and whether or not it's a good feature in the end (hint hint Jonathan!)
Its other two interesting quirks is a full manual mode for photographers who want total control over settings and a brushed gold-tinted aluminium body. This last thing won't change the world but it may usher in a new era of camera styling… is brushed gold the new brushed steel?
Available in October for around £240. More details are on the product page...
Sony Cyber-shot T50
The T series is slightly harder to pigeon-hole, its cameras are stylish and compact as you'd expect, but are reasonably equipped cameras in their own right, and Sony seems to be using the range as a testbed for its two anti-blurring technologies. The T30 introduced SuperSteadyShot and the T10 introduced the ClearRAW NR and high-ISO 1000 modes for noise free images at high sensitivity. The T50 now brings these together with a touch sensitive 3 inch LCD like the N2.
An indicator that the camera has something more than just its looks is in the size of the sensor, as mega-pixels (it has 7.2) is one characteristic of the sensor but so is its size. The T50 has a relatively large sensor at 1 x 2.5 inches which gives the benefit of a higher dynamic range and makes washed out over-exposed images less common. The camera still uses MS Duo, which may annoy some people with its proprietory nature, but the camera has 56mb of internal memory so you may not need it.
It's available in Silver, Black and Red from October for around £260. Full camera details are on the product page...
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