Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W1

There's a lot to like about the compact Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W1: It's well-designed, with a beautiful, bright 2.5-inch LCD; it has a good button layout and simple menus; and it offers high-end features. Unfortunately, the camera's one real weakness was in the sharpness of its images, which keep it from being an Editors' Choice. If you're looking for a Sony camera, you'd do better to pick up the 5.1-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-P100, which delivers crisp pictures for about the same price. Of course, you should also consider our Editors' Choice Kodak EasyShare LS743.

The W1 has an f/2.8 to f/5.2, 7.9- to 23.7-mm (38- to 114-mm, 35-mm equivalent) 3X optical zoom Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens and a reasonable number of buttons conveniently laid-out to the side of the large LCD. Even if the display wasn't big and bright, you'd want to use it for framing shots, as the tiny optical viewfinder suffers from annoying barrel distortion. The camera has a rich set of features, all easily reached via either the mode dial or the four-way button controller. Menus are simple, though mostly icon-based, but the simplicity belies the camera's fairly advanced features, which include a real-time histogram, manual modes, white-balance adjustments, and exposure compensation settings.

In the labs, the camera's results were a bit uneven. It scored a fairly good 2.51-second boot time and a mediocre 4.03-second recycle time. More surprising, however, were the camera's results on resolution tests, where it scored a very disappointing (for a 5MP camera) 1,025 lines of resolution, with an average pixel-transition ratio of 2.35 percent. Our simulated-daylight still-life shot was surprisingly sharp, however, and not nearly as soft as the resolution scores might lead you to expect. This may be due to some clever edge-enhancement sharpening in the processing stage. This was borne out in field testing, where some images had forced edges: People and objects sometimes had unnaturally dark outlines or faint halos.

In general, however, the pictures were quite good. In addition to crispness, the colors—a bit on the warm side—really popped, though we noticed some minor posterization in some highlights. In our flash-invoked shots, illumination was very strong and well balanced, and the image was sharp with excellent color reproduction.

Though the DSC-W1 is fun to use, thanks to the huge 2.5-inch LCD, some image issues may lead you to look elsewhere for a 5MP camera.

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