Product Reviews

Sony has built a formidable reputation on the back of its F-series cameras, the current F717 being a prosumer favourite. The F717's big drawback, however, is size. With the V1, Sony has acknowledged the needs of those who prefer a little more discretion in their picture taking, essentially cramming most of the features of an unwieldy F-series into a compact case in order to compete more directly with Canon's PowerShot G5 and Nikon's Coolpix 5400. The result is a camera that's smaller than either.

The basic specification is equal to the PowerShot and the Coolpix, with a 5-megapixel 1/1.8in CCD allied to a Carl Zeiss lens that offers a 4x optical zoom. The magnesium alloy body feels exceptionally solid, and the near-silent lens motors almost make it worth the asking price alone.

The V1 is certainly no point-and-shoot compact. Most of the advanced controls you could want are here, including automatic exposure bracketing and sensitivity selectable up to a fast ISO 800. The top-mounted rotary selector offers quick selection of manual, aperture or shutter priority and program modes, as well as full auto and a scene mode offering various scenario presets. The V1 also features Sony's excellent MPEG-VX movie capture, allowing you to shoot 640 x 480 movies limited in length only by the capacity of

A thumb switch next to the rotary selector allows you to select the Nightshot mode, a carryover from the F717 that invisibly illuminates the scene via an infrared LED, allowing you to take shots in total darkness. The illumination range is only a few metres, though, and the results are in green monochrome.

Unlike the Coolpix 5400, the V1 has no problems focusing in low light thanks to its Hologram AF, which projects a red laser matrix onto the subject to help it calculate distance. It works superbly, but isn't too good for discreet portrait shots, as people tend to notice when they're criss-crossed with laser beams.

Out in the field, Sony's skill with laying out camera controls for minimum distraction is evident, although we miss the F-series' dedicated metering button that allows you to quickly cycle through multisegment, centre-weighted and spot-metering modes. Information on the 1.5in TFT monitor includes a real-time histogram, and Sony's InfoLithium battery system gives you a good estimate of remaining charge in minutes.

Image quality is impressive. Our test shots were free of the standard digital trademark effects: chromatic aberrations were minimal and noise performance was superb. Even at ISO 800, noise levels were better than we'd have expected.

It's difficult to level much criticism at the V1. Macro ability is disappointing, though, with a minimum focus distance of about 10cm, and there's not much in the way of contouring on the body so it tends to feel awkward in the hand.

In the inevitable comparison between the V1, PowerShot G5 and Coolpix 5400, it's hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that Sony has the edge. The V1 is more compact, quality is on a par with both competitors and it has that Sony chic to boot.