Product Reviews

Now that £100 cameras take excellent pictures, why would anyone consider spending £250 on a compact camera? It's a question we often struggle to answer, but Sony's latest ultra-compact T-series model offers some compelling arguments.

First, it's possibly the best-looking camera we have ever seen, with its gentle curves, enormous 3in screen and brushed-aluminium finish in a choice of black, silver or red. Next, it has some impressive specifications, including a 5x zoom with optical image stabilisation and a maximum ISO speed of 3200. The 3in screen has practical as well as aesthetic advantages, although its 230,000-pixel resolution is no more than those of many 2in screens. Big screens use more power, but battery life remains decent at 428 shots. One feature we haven't seen before is high-definition output to HD TVs, although it's for photos only - it can't record HD video - and the proprietary component cable you'll need is a £30 optional extra.

We're delighted to see that Sony has finally fixed two annoying traits we have moaned about for many months.

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One is that the T100 has a Delete All option - in other Sony cameras it's necessary to format the card or delete it using a card reader. The other is that the continuous mode carries on indefinitely rather than taking just four or five shots. It's fast, too, capturing two frames per second (fps) for the first 26 shots, and then slowing to around 1.5fps when our memory card created a bottleneck. Performance in other areas is just as impressive, and the menu layout is fast and efficient.

We expect fantastic image quality from a £245 camera, and in most of our tests the T100 didn't disappoint, with sumptuous colours and well-balanced exposures in tricky lighting conditions. Detail was often as good as that of Olympus's 10-megapixel E-410 (opposite), although the T100's higher noise (and subsequent noise-reduction processing) reduced detail in low-light shots. ISO 400 gave passable results, but ISO 800 was questionable, and higher settings were useful only at lower resolutions. Still, with optical image stabilisation, high ISO speeds were necessary less often than with other cameras, as longer shutter speeds were possible without blur. Macro photography was amazing, with the lens focusing on subjects just 1cm away. However, our biggest concern is that sunlit shots often suffered from lens reflections and blooming, two separate problems that both resulted in fog-like patches in pictures.

The T100 is great fun to use, and if it cost £50 less we might be more forgiving about its image quality niggles. Fujifilm's F40fd isn't as fast or as stylish and its lens is a non-stabilised 3x zoom model, but it takes better pictures and costs around £80 less.