Sony presents its digital compact autumn range

With its autumn collection in mind, Sony has shown us three new cameras: the Cyber-Shot T99, TX9 and WX5. A light refreshment of the range which, notably, removes the last cameras without SD card support. With the exception of the venerable HX1!

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Cyber-Shot WX5 and Cyber-Shot TX9

The two high-end models naturally have a back-illuminated CMOS sensor, now 12 Mpx - scarcely did we notice the welcome pause in the pixel race than we're off again!

Still limited to 1/2,4" in size, this means already well-known lenses can be used: for the TX9, the 25-100 mm f/3,5-4,6 used on the TX5s and TX7s, and for the WX5, the 24-120 mm f/2,4-5,9 used on the WX1.

The TX9 is in fact very close to the TX7 as it also has the same 8.8 cm, 921 000 pixel touch screen as well as the same entire casing: the dimensions are the same to each tenth of a millimetre, the weight identical.

The WX5 breaks a bit more with the WX1 with a rounder style and a slightly bigger screen (7cm against 6.9 cm) that has a much better resolution: up to 460,000 pixels.

Shared innovations

In terms of functionality, the two cameras are very similar with the same innovations on both.

Sony has added an the Superior Auto mode, which combines standard scene recognition and the two image fusion modes: HDR (two different exposures to retrieve detail in shadow and under bright lighting) and low shutter speed without tripod (addition of photos from under-exposed burst to limit blurriness).

Note that the Alphas already came with this choice between normal auto and auto+ in their exposure modes and that this complicates slightly something that was initially introduced to simplify the life of users in scene modes, which themselves complicated what was supposed to be simplifying the lives of the non-techies!

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Another innovation, the Backgroud defocus mode, makes your image deliberately unfocussed in addition to the focussed area, assembling an image with a focussed subject and defocussed background, a feature which mimics reduced depth of field. There's also a "beauty" mode that gives a better tone to faces by saturating light tones and smoothing abusively - Casio already has such a mode with catastrophic results on unshaven men.

Less crucially, you'll be able to chose menu colours from a selection.

Me too, me too. I want 3D!

It's all the rage and no one's going to escape it: Sony is also launching its 3D mode, already announced on the NEX series. It's a development of the auto panorama mode and uses the camera's movement during a panoramic shot to reconstitute two images to make up a stereoscopic pairing. They're recorded in an MPF file, now a fairly standard format for this type of image, and a JPG file (monoscopic) is also saved.

Of course, the movement of the camera mustn't be the same as for a normal panoramic for which you want to avoid any apparent displacement in the position of the subject (parallax): instead of the camera rotating on itself, you rotate it around the photographer, creating different views of the same object which are then combined for 3D.

The Sweep Multi Angle mode allows you to shoot a burst of your subject by moving around it; the camera can then play this back to you moving the screen from left to right and choosing different angles from the burst, with internal gyroscopes handling the choice of the best angles of vision. Thus in spite of the absence of a stereoscopic screen (like the one on the Fuji W1), you can give the impression of relief. A quick look at the feature on the TX9 at the Sony preview, showed us that it works pretty well.

The cameras have an HDMI 1.4 out so you can make the most of your stereoscopic panoramas and view them directly on compatible 3D TVs. PMB, the software that comes with the cameras, also allows you to play them back on computer, but as yet we don't have enough information on compatibility with systems such as NVIDIA's 3D Vision.

The WX5 will cost around £265 and the TX9 around £335.

Sony Cyber-Shot T99 MARCHANDS €     Conforama  279.30  Amazon.fr m...  304.00  Amazon.fr  449.00  Rue du comm...  548.89  Pixmania.com  579.00  Surcouf  599.99  Compare prices

Cyber-Shot T99: the poor relation

To complete its range, Sony hasn't chosen to replace the TX1 but to resuscitate the T90, an entry-level touch-screen model that was phased out in 2009 and hasn't been missed by anyone. The good news: it has a wide-angle and the same 25-100 mm lens as on the rest of the T range.

The bad news: the T99 (as the lack of X indicates) has a CCD sensor, the in-fashion 1/2,3" 14 megapixel. This does have an impact: functionality is limited as CCD speed can't be compared to what you get with a CMOS.

Scrub that and start again: you don't get Full HD video (just 720p for the T99) or any of the other innovations described above (only standard panoramic mode). Oh, but actually, you do get the beauty mode...

The touch screen is limited to 230,000 pixels (like on the TX1). Overall the T99 is a stylish but basic model. It should cost around the £200 mark.



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