Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T9 review

Despite housing a 3x optical zoom and a 6-megapixel CCD, the Sony T9 has the height and width dimensions of a credit card. It's only 20mm deep, too, making it perfect for slipping into a pocket.

The lens has a range of 38 to 114mm, and there's a luxurious 2.5in LCD TFT on the back. There's no optical viewfinder, so the fact that the screen is bright and has a high resolution (230,000 pixels) is a definite bonus.

The T9 is a real point-and-shoot camera: those wanting manual controls should look elsewhere. The longest exposure offered is just two seconds, and even then you can't select the exposure yourself - all you can do is switch to night mode and the camera will decide how long the shutter should be open. There's a good range of preset modes, though, including Landscape and Twilight, as well as High-speed Shutter for brightly-lit, fast-moving subjects.

The T9 takes just under three seconds to start up, and we were pleased with the speed of operation once it was running. The time between taking a photo and the camera being ready to take another is a little more than a second, and in Burst mode the T9 will fire off seven exposures before pausing for breath.

Picture quality is good and, even at relatively high ISOs, noise is kept to a minimum. Purple fringing was a slight problem in some of our outdoor shots, but it won't be overly noticeable until you start printing your images at A4 or larger. But, as we've seen before from the T series, the level of JPEG compression occasionally left detailed textures looking dull, thanks to colour averaging. But, these minor problems aside, saturation was near-perfect, and colours were faithfully reproduced.

The Sony is powered by a tiny removable battery that will last for an entire day's shooting, and the screen helpfully tells you how many minutes you have left. Unlike most cameras, the T9 has more than the standard 16MB or 32MB of memory - 58MB of internal memory means you can use the camera straight out of the box (no Memory Stick Duo is supplied). However, at the highest quality setting you'll be able to store only 20 images before needing a Memory Stick.

The T9 is perfectly weighted for single-handed operation, while Sony's Super SteadyShot Optical Image Stabilisation compensates for much of the unsteadiness produced from using a camera at arm's length.

So the only real sticking point is the price. It isn't significantly smaller than the Canon Digital IXUS 55, offers comparable image quality, yet costs £51 more - you could get the IXUS 55 and still have enough cash left for a 512MB SD card. So, unless you're desperate for the sleekest camera around, the IXUS 55 remains our compact camera of choice.

Author: Dave Stevenson