Photography News - The latest digital photography hardware and software news, reviews, articles, tips, techniques and more!

Sony is adding high-definition movie recording to its digital camera line with the introduction of the Cyber-shot® DSC-T500 model. This 10-megapixel camera features wide and full-screen 720p movie recording at 30 frames per second in fine, standard and VGA recording modes. This resolution is three times higher than standard-definition movies.

“Bottom line - Sony’s ‘top of the line’ entry-level Alpha 350 or DSLR-A350 is an outstanding camera. In this saturated market, consumers really have a lot of great cameras to choose from, all at competitive pricing. At about US$899 or less as tested, I feel the A350 offers a great value for such a well balanced camera. The Live View performance offered by the A350 is way ahead of its competitors. Another feature that helps make this model more appealing is the fact that you have an effective form of Image Stabilization built right in. This will allow you to save some money when buying lenses, where with other models you’ll have to spend a nice chunk of change to acquire a stabilized lens to achieve the same level of low-light performance.”

Sponsored Links

• Photostore by KTools

  Professional, user friendly, web based software package that enables you to publish and sell your photographs, images, artwork, prints and products online.

• Dreamstime

  Immediately download from our huge collection of royalty free images. Thousands of stock photos added weekly!

• LightboxPhoto

  PHP Software for digital image hosting and asset management. Provides photographers, artists and artisans an affordable solution to displaying and selling their work online.

“The H3 is essentially a long-zoom point and shoot camera that performs well as long as you let it do its thing in Auto mode. Once you develop an ambition to set your own shooting parameters things get a bit more tricky. This is partly because some manual settings are simply not available, but also due to the fact that changing the settings that are actually there can be a fairly time-consuming process. This is owed to the slightly counter-intuitive menus and user interface in general. The lack of a manual White Balance option is particularly unusual on a modern digital camera. It is even more painful if the white balance presets are not particularly reliable (as we experienced in our studio tests). The H3 does not offer Aperture or Shutter Speed Priority modes although there is a fully manual ‘M’ mode. But, with only 2 possible aperture settings at a given focal length, its use is seriously limited.”

Sony has announced the HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album for shutterbugs who want to archive, organize and enjoy slideshows of their digital photos. This compact device features an 80GB hard drive, connects to a high definition television via HDMI and showcases up to 50,000 high resolution photos.

The new digital photo album offers several methods for importing photos, including multiple flash memory card formats, CD, DVD, USB or Ethernet. Once imported, photo collections can be managed with the supplied remote control and the device’s intuitive interface.

Photos can be organized by date, special occasions such as birthdays and travel (using pre-selected icons), or into as many as 3,000 different photo albums– enough for every major family milestone. The digital photo album also provides the ability to review, edit, rotate, delete and arrange photos for a slideshow or digital scrapbooking with Sony’s x-Application® features.

So then, the W80 is a camera that is capable of producing surprisingly good results in good light at ISO 100 and is perfectly usable at ISO 400-800 in low light if you don’t want big prints (the church interiors in the samples gallery, for example, are better than I expected), but a camera that falls down in what I consider to be one of the most important areas for a camera such as this; pictures of people indoors in low light - with or without flash. If you’re after a ‘walk around’ camera for scenery then it’s not a bad buy for $200-ish, but if you actually have friends and family, and are still awake taking pictures after sunset it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it when there are so many better alternatives out there.