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July 12, 2006

Sony Cybershot DSC-T9

I have a new camera, finally.

My reasons for buying it were not as scientific as they might have been, but as usual I just gave up trying to find the perfect beastie, and went with my instincts. A personal recommendation from Leon Brocard also helped.

My first digital camera was a Cybershot DSC-F55 2MPixel - a fairly early model I bought in 2000. It's still going strong, though I appear to have misplaced it a few weeks ago. It cost over £500 at that time and was pretty cutting edge. I have taken some great photos with it. Here is one I like:

This model has 6Mpixels, and a much better quality movie mode. It's a lot smaller too, and comes with 56Mb memory on board for photos. I got it on Amazon for £201 and bought a case (£11) and 1Gb Sandisk memory card (£44) from Jessops.

I like it of course, it has a nice 3X optical zoom and a really fast startup time. The battery meter, being Sony, tells you how long you've got before a recharge which is great. Being really small though, makes it an awkward camera to handle, and easy to drop. The lens cover slides up, which looks and feels really cool, but means you have to be careful not to touch the lens. There is already a fingerprint on it actually which I've tried to carefully remove.

The memory card is Memory Stick Pro Duo, the same as the PSP, and I've tested and you can look at the photos on the PSP screen if you swap the card over. This isn't really necessary, as the T9 has quite a nice screen anyway, and it comes with a cable to connect to the TV. There is a built in funky slideshow feature, with music, which is fun.

It has a burst mode feature to take several photos in a short period, which I haven't tried, but sounds useful for sporting events like triathlons. The main thing I'm missing is manual exposure times - my dream of using a tripod to take long exposures in the dark will have to wait until I can afford the Canon EOS-350D.

I've enjoyed taking recent photos on my Nokia 6230i mobile phone (1.3MPixel), but am feeling the limitations, and hope to take a few much better photos now, especially when the lighting is poor. Red-eye is still a problem though with this camera.

I've got the T9 reduced to 3MPixel mode for now, but will have a play and see just what difference 6MPixels makes. Here's one I took earlier, I used the zoom to frame the shot.

Posted by se71 at July 12, 2006 03:48 PM

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