Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W220 review

With Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-T70 having displaced Canon from the A List in issue 171 - and sat there ever since - we had high hopes for the latest Sony range. But we were disappointed by the W220.

First, in comparison to the tiny size, slick looks and gadget factor of the T70, the 12.1-megapixel W220 is no catwalk model. It's relatively dumpy in this company at about 22mm thick, and there's little to make anyone look twice at the design.

The Carl Zeiss-branded lens doesn't quite reach true wide-angle territory at 30mm equivalent: it isn't enough to give a grand sense of scale to architectural shots and big outdoor vistas. Meanwhile, the 4x zoom gives you reasonable magnification but doesn't match the likes of the Panasonic TZ6 or Samsung NV9.

The main picture-quality issue is over-aggressive JPEG compression, leading to pictures with almost all fine detail lost to a mosaic of blocky artefacts. Most other models have two- or three-level control over compression settings, but the W220's is fixed. On the positive side, it does cope well with colour balance and our high-ISO shots were nicely free of distracting colour noise. This comes at the expense of heavy noise-reduction processing smearing out details, though.

The W220 isn't a bad camera, but it simply doesn't offer the quality we'd expect, nor very high specifications or a super-slinky design that might compensate.

Author: David Fearon