Great Camera, My Wife Still Loves It

I just love this great camera from Sony. The Mavica MVC-CD400 was a great buy for me four years ago, although a 4 megapixel camera doesn't cost quite this much anymore. I spent 600 dollars for the camera at Best Buy, getting a deal because it was an open item.

The MVC-CD400 is extremely user friendly in all modes of operation (still picture, movie, or review). In my four years of taking pictures with this camera, I have only used the fully automatic still picture mode and the simple movie mode. I've yet to have a bad shot. Part of what makes shooting pictures with this camera so easy is the fact that it has the large viewing window to let the user see just about exactly what the picture will look like.

This camera has a fairly quick auto-focus feature that is highly reliable except in extreme low-light conditions, and even then it can usually compensate for the lack of light by using the built-in diamond pattern lamp used for helping the camera focus. Where this tool starts to fail is for objects more than six feet away, depending on lighting.

Although the camera has a note that it displays on power-up any time it detects a non-Sony Mavica CD installed in the storage bay, I've never had any problem using other discs. Typically I use the Memorex 210 MB CD-R's.

With these discs, I can store 95 pictures at the highest JPEG resolution, or 954 pictures at the lowest resolution. For the movie mode, the same disc will yield 8 minutes and 31 seconds at the highest resolution (which isn't that great at 320 HQX) or 100 minutes at 160 by 112 resolution, which is actually pretty crappy video. But if you want a camcorder, this is not the toy for you.

The camera can also store images in TIFF format, but be prepared to wait a while for the images to save to the disc, and to change the discs often. Only 13 images will fit on a 210 MB disc in this format. For anyone who isn't interested in professionally working with their photos, the JPEG format is fine. I've printed out many of those prints at 8x10 with remarkable detail.

Some of the extra features of this camera include the photo effects, such as black and white or negative (can't quite figure out what I might want to do with that one, but it's there nonetheless) and a red-eye reduction flash. The red-eye reduction takes a little bit more work than I would like to turn on and off (rotating the selector knob to "SET UP" and navigating a couple of options then back again), but it isn't that much of a pain and can be done in about 5 seconds. Also the user can select a "confirm before write" option, to avoid wasting space on the disc for those who have a habit of taking a picture with their thumb over the lens or something.

Another feature of the camera is to stamp the image with a date/time stamp. I don't know why anyone would really want to do this, since the time and date are also embedded in the file (along with other data such as ISO speed, focal length, flash, and exposure time) and can be retrieved by loading the disc into a computer CD-ROM drive.

Battery life is usually quite good. I can typically use mine for an entire event (football game, wedding, etc.) without worrying about the battery, although the internal monitor might be telling me that it's low toward the end if I've been doing a lot of reviewing.

One of the drawbacks I've read in another review of this product is that sometimes using the camera to review the images stored on the disc can be painfully slow. While it is slower than using a memory stick model, it isn't that bad. Add the advantage of accessing all of the images very quickly using a PC (even before the disc is finalized by the camera) and the usefulness of this method becomes clear. Transfers from a CD are substantially faster than transfers via USB or Firewire.

I have a Canon EOS Digital Rebel now which I use most of the time and love, but I'm not getting rid of this great little Sony. Partly because my wife loves it and it's really her camera now (she's laid claim to it), but also because it is still so useful and so good that I see no reason to.