Sony DSC-T900

With its new Cyber-shot T900, Sony has crammed a 720p HD video mode into one of the thinnest digital cameras on the market.  Its 3.5'' screen has a resolution of 920, 000 pixels, making it great way of showing off your photos.

Handling

The T range of cameras are the most stylish in Sony's collection, and the new T900 is no exception to this rule with its discreet, stripped back style that is both refined and elegant.  To say that the controls are minimalist is just the start of it, as, the shutter release included, there are just five different buttons on the whole camera.  Even then, the power switch could be seen as a superfluous extra as you can turn the T900 on and off by sliding open the lens cover.

The 3.5'' LCD screen is very impressive and takes up almost all of the back of the camera, but it also disappoints with its changes in resolution (see inset).

Using the T900 is fun and stress-free: it switches on quickly and the autofocus is generally very responsive.  There's not much room to zoom, but when you do it's quick and easy, but of little interest in wide-angle mode.  Positively, the switch to toggle between photo and video mode is very easy to access directly behind the shutter release button. 

You control the camera's settings using the touch screen, and it's very easy to get used to the different menus, but they could make a lot more use of the extra options provided by a tactile interface.  The screen itself isn't too sensitive, meaning you can easily let your fingers slip over it while aiming the camera without accidentally changing the settings.

There's a price to pay for having a camera as thin as the T900, and that's a very restricted set of connectivity options.  Underneath the camera is a single proprietary port allowing you to connect the T900 to a dedicated docking station, which, fortunately, has a few more options, including a USB port, a HDMI port and a power supply.  This means that you'll need to carry the docking station with you to charge up the T900 and download photos from it, which is harder than you think because it only uses Memory Stick cards.


Image Quality

If the image quality lived up to the flashy good looks, then Sony would have an exceptional camera in the T900.  At low sensitivities like 80 and 100 ISO, the images we took were good with plenty of detail, lively colours and well-handled highlights.  The exposure is just right and the Dynamic Range Optimiser mode produces good contrast in auto mode.  The white balancing is sometimes a little cold, but generally adequate--even indoors.  In wide-angle mode, the result is pretty even, with details clear all the way across the frame.  That's a strength that seems to slip in telephoto mode, where the edges become a little blurry.  Chromatic aberration is mostly kept under control.


Our biggest gripe is still the handling of sensor noise.  Blurriness is a significant problem even at 200 ISO, with details lost but few coloured pixels.  As long as you don't look too closely, a 13 x 18 print of an 800 ISO photo taken on the T900 will still be fairly striking.

The 720p video mode is a big advantage, with sound recorded in stereo to make for more realistic playback.  We were even more impressed to learn that the 4x optical zoom continued to work without a fault during video recording.