Sony Cyber-shot® DSC-W80 Digital Camera

I recently bought this camera as a present for my girlfriend. We used it A LOT on our trip to Florida over the holiday break...and were quite pleased with it. We forgot the battery charger at home, and still used it throughout our entire trip (almost).

Features

This is a 7.2 Megapixel camera that takes high resolution pictures up to 3072 x 2304 pixels. It's an "HD" camera...meaning you can set it to take "HD" (High Definition) quality pictures, save them to your SD memory card, and then view them on a high definition TV. The memory gets used up quick when you have the camera in this mode. There are several other "quality" modes that you can set the camera to take pictures in. The lower quality, the more pictures you can fit on your memory card. Aside from memory cards...this camera comes with 31Mb of internal memory. This is not a whole lot, so you'll want to pick up at 1 gig memory card before going to any family get-together, or on any trip where you'll be taking a lot of pictures.

It has a 3x optical/2x digital zoom on the Carl Zeiss lens, with a 2.5" color LCD display. The display is plenty big, compared to other digital cameras in teh same price range.

"Steady Shot" is built in, and automatically in use every time you use the camera. It helps take clear pictures, even when you are moving or in a bumpy car. We went on a safari ride, and took a bunch of pictures. The road was dirt, and there were a lot of bumps, yet most of the pictures came out free from blurring. Some were quite blurry...I don't know exactly how this feature works...most of the time it did, sometimes the pictures came out blurry. For the most part I was pleased.

High Sensativity mode, meaning the camera will take great pictures (or better pictures) even in very low lighting. The one thing with this mode, is that the lens stays open longer, so you have to keep your hands very steady when taking pictures in this mode...otherwise they come out blurry.

Face detection, which basically auto-focuses the lens so that the faces are crisp and clear.

It's got all the different "scene" modes (landscape, beach, twilight, snow..etc) that help you take great pictures given your surroundings.

Burst shooting is kinda cool, it let's you take up to 100 pictures at a time, at 2.8 frames per second, all in a row...for fast action shots. Then you can go through them and pick out the exact moment you wanted to capture...get rid of the rest...or keep them all and make some sort of flipbook and watch the action come alive as you flip the pages of a photo album (i wonder if anyone's done this...I haven't).

There are a few other neat features on this camera, but these are the most important/coolest ones that I wanted to talk about.

Durability

The camera itself seems very durable. Aside from the LCD display, you could probably drop it and not damage anything on the camera. I haven't dropped it to test this theory, but nonetheless it seems very well put together. It's 2.3" high x 3.6" wide, and weighs 4.4oz with the LiIon battery inside. It's not waterproof.

Battery Life

A NP-BG1 Lithium Ion battery is included with the camera. Like I said earlier, we charged the camera, but forgot the charger before going on vacation...so we tested the battery life. It lasted for about 170 pictures, in 4 days. I thought this was pretty good. We took pictures mostly in the day, but used the flash for some of them during the night.

Final Thoughts, Comments

The pictures we had developed at CVS were quite nice. Clear, colorful, the quality was pretty darn good. Not amazing (we didn't have the camera on a really high resolution setting), but pretty impressive.

It can take MPEG videos with audio at 30 frames per second, and it has a 10 second timer on it so that you can hop into the picture before it's taken. It'll do anything and everything you probably need from a point and shoot digital camera for under $200. I really like this camera, and I am glad I bought it. It's a great bang for your buck.