Product Reviews

Sony's DSC-N1 is one of the first cameras we've seen with a 3" screen (along with Sanyo's Xacti E6 on page 32). Its 235,000-pixel resolution is twice that of the vast majority of camera screens, but even more unusual is its touch sensitivity.

The camera has barely any buttons, and you access everything but snapping and zooming by prodding the screen. This alone promotes the N1 to the position of cool gadget, and the overall design doesn't let it down in this department. However, the camera's curved sides make it appear slimmer in print than it is in the flesh, and at 185g it isn't particularly light. The 25MB internal memory holds only six photos at maximum quality and upgrading with Memory Stick Pro Duo cards is more expensive than with other cameras' SD cards.

The touch screen comes into its own in spot focus mode: simply touch the area of the image you want to focus on. However, the interface's heavy reliance on menu navigation slows operation down, and the touch-screen isn't as responsive as normal buttons.

Some tasks are particularly convoluted. In manual exposure mode, for example, the shutter speed and aperture settings are accessible only by delving into the menu and they disappear once you have taken a picture, so you need to find them again from the menu if you want to make any further adjustments. Deleting a photo takes four onscreen button presses and there's no delete all function. Otherwise the camera is responsive, taking less than two seconds between shots, although in low light the auto-focus takes an additional second or two to lock on to its subject.

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Album function retains low-resolution versions of deleted pictures, enabling you to browse all shots taken with the camera. This is a nice idea, but it makes permanently deleting pictures even more long-winded and is bound to mean that some people will inadvertently show people pictures they thought were long gone. Fortunately, there's an option deep within the Setup menu for switching it off.

A good range of more conventional features is available, including contrast and saturation, but there are no priority modes for depth of field effects while maintaining automatic exposure. In manual exposure mode, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and flash settings are reflected in the preview image's brightness and an exposure value (EV) readout, although these didn't always relate accurately to the resulting photograph.

Image quality is extremely impressive, as we'd hope from a camera that costs more than £300. The optics live up to the 8.1-megapixel resolution, providing levels of sharpness and detail that resembled those from digital SLR cameras more than other compacts we've seen. Areas of solid colour were smooth, and subtle shades were accurately differentiated. Most pictures had barely any discernable image noise, and even at ISO 400 it wasn't intrusive, although the ISO 800 setting relies on heavy noise reduction, resulting in a sponge-painting effect when viewed up close.

Best of all is the camera's Auto mode, which coped flawlessly with a wide range of lighting conditions. Direct sunlight, artificial light, flash photography and high contrast scenes all produced pictures with exposure and white balance that we simply couldn't fault. It even produced a perfectly exposed shot in almost complete darkness, albeit with a one-second exposure time.

The DSC-N1 captures video in MPEG1 format at VGA resolution, which would be excellent if it weren't for the fact that every third frame was missing, which made playback stutter badly.

We'd usually expect greater, more accessible manual control on a camera at this price, but if you just want a point-and-shoot camera with fantastic image quality and don't mind splashing out, the DSC-N1 fits the bill.