Sony CyberShot DSC-W300 Reviews: Digital Compact Camera

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Also known as: CyberShot DSC-W300, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W300, Sony Cyber-shot DSC W300, Sony DSC-W300, Cyber-shot DSC-W300

Digital Cameras Buyers' Guide  

Photos taken with this camera

This point and shoot has it all – and then some. The DSC-W300 includes a wide range of convenient features, including Smile Shutter Mode which captures smiles the moment they happen. The compact and scratch-resistant titanium-coated body features an astounding 13.6 megapixel resolution, 2.7" Clear Photo LCD™ display, Carl Zeiss® 3x optical zoom lens, and Sony’s Double Anti-Blur solution for crisp, clear images. In addition, it has Face Detection technology that optimizes flash, focus, exposure and color for up to eight faces, as well as Intelligent Scene Recognition that automatically detects five different types of scenes and takes a picture with the optimal camera settings.

13.6 MP Super HAD™ CCD

More megapixels give you greater image definition so you can make big prints and tight crops without losing detail. The advanced Sony® Super HAD™ (Hole Accumulated Diode) CCD design allows more light to pass to each pixel, increasing sensitivity and reducing noise.

Carl Zeiss® 3X Optical Zoom Lens

Professional Carl Zeiss® lens with 3x optical zoom (35mm-105mm4) brings distant subjects closer for great outdoor, sports, and travel photos.

2.7” Clear Photo LCD Display

A large, bright 2.7” Clear Photo LCD™ display includes an anti-reflective coating that provides for excellent visibility to help you compose, view, and share photos with superb clarity and color reproduction, even in bright sunlight.

Anti-scratch Premium Titanium body

The titanium coating on the body is approximately five times harder than anodized aluminium-treated camera bodies, offers excellent protection from scratches while offering a premium look.

Face Detection

Face Detection technology recognizes up to 8 faces and automatically controls focus, exposure, white balance, and flash to help reveal faces in shadows, make skin tones look more natural, reduce red-eye, and eliminate harsh facial glare, so your photos bring out every expression on every face in every shot.
Smile Shutter

Smile Shutter™ technology captures smiles the moment they happen – without the need to press the shutter. The mode can be set to capture when your subject laughs, smiles or even grins, and like Face Detection is able to differentiate children and adults to set priority.

Sony Double Anti-Blur Solution

The combination of Super SteadyShot® optical image stabilization and high ISO sensitivity helps compensate for shaky hands, minimizes blur, and allow flash-free shooting to preserve the mood.

Super SteadyShot® optical image stabilization

Super SteadyShot® optical image stabilization compensates for shaky hands and minimizes blur with a built-in gyro sensor that detects camera movement and sends correcting signals to a stabilization lens — so there’s no need to crop in on your shot to reduce blur.

EXTRA High Sensitivity (ISO 3200) Mode

EXTRA High Sensitivity Mode (ISO 64006) helps reduce blur when shooting indoors or at twilight, even without flash, so you can capture great-looking images even in less-than-ideal lighting.

Intelligent Scene Recognition Mode

Intelligent Scene Recognition mode automatically detects 5 different types of scenes and selects the appropriate camera setting: Backlight, Backlight Portrait, Twilight, Twilight Portrait, and Twilight using aTripod. Intelligent Scene Recognition has two different modes, advanced and auto. Advanced mode takes two shots, one with the standard automatic settings and the other with optimized settings. Auto mode takes a single shot, using the camera’s intelligence to decide proper settings.

Dynamic Range Optimization Standard & Plus

Powered by the exclusive Sony BIONZ™ high-speed processing engine, Dynamic Range Optimization preserves image data in bright highlights and reveals more detail in shadows or backlit areas — for great results even in difficult lighting conditions.

Variable Noise Reduction

Variable Noise Reduction allows greater control over image characteristics with High, Low and Standard settings that let you select the optimal setting depending on the scene and your personal tastes.

Convenient Photo Modes

To adjust quickly for specific shooting situations, you can choose from several convenient photo modes, including Auto, Program Auto, Manual Exposure, and Scene Selections such as Twilight, Twilight Portrait, Fireworks, Smile Shutter, Underwater, Landscape, Soft Snap, Snow, High Sensitivity, Extra High Sensitivity (only 3 megapixel image), Extra High Speed Burst (only 3 megapixel image) and Beach environments.

MPEG Movie VX Fine Mode

Capture VGA (640 × 480) audio/video clips at a high frame rate (up to 30 frames per second7). The maximum length of time you can shoot continuously is about 10 minutes.

Automatic Macro Shooting

Standard Auto Focus now covers the macro focus range, eliminating the need to manually change focus modes for close-up photography. The Macro mode has not been eliminated, and enabling it accelerates Auto Focus when shooting at point-blank range.

9-Point Auto Focus

Because an off-center subject can make your shot more interesting, a 9-point auto focus measures auto-focus at 9 precision points instead of 5 — giving you greater creative freedom to compose your image.

Smart Zoom® Feature

The Sony Smart Zoom® feature intelligently “crops into” the central portion of interest in your photo, helping avoid the image degradation of other digital zooms.

EXTRA High-Speed Burst Mode

EXTRA High-Speed Burst Mode allows high-speed shooting of up to 5 fps, an especially useful feature useful for capturing fast action photographs of sports scenes, kids’ activities, and animals.

Color Mode “Real”

Color Mode “Real” helps enable faithful color reproduction by minimizing in-camera image processing — perfect for users who want to retouch their images after shooting.

Simple Setup Controls

A quick press of the Home button opens your user-friendly graphical interface — and you can select functions by simply moving a cursor vertically or horizontally to the appropriate icon. Function names and the on-screen Function Guide display make it easier to learn camera setup operations.

Easy Shooting Mode

A simplified camera environment especially attractive to beginners or digital camera users who want to keep things simple, Easy Shooting provides easy-to-read, on-screen instructions and limits the number of camera settings to help prevent misuse of the camera while still providing excellent results.

Function Guide

This beginner-friendly function helps manage various functions and settings by displaying the description of chosen functions or settings on the LCD screen. The Function Guide can also be switched off.

Optical Viewfinder

In addition to the LCD display, a built-in optical viewfinder lets you compose your photos in traditional rangefinder camera style, and also helps save battery power by turning off your LCD display.

15 MB Internal Memory

Even if you forget your flash memory card, you can get the shot because 15MB internal memory lets you capture a limited number of shots with in-camera convenience, then easily transfer your shots to a PC or optional Memory Stick Duo™ media, or Memory Stick PRO Duo ™.

Memory Stick Duo™ Media Convenience

A built-in slot accepts optional Memory Stick Duo™ media or Memory Stick PRO Duo™ media – the compact, high-capacity storage media that make it easily to upload photos to your PC and are compatible with millions of devices worldwide.

Stamina® Battery Power

Provides extended battery life and shooting capacity when using a fully charged Lithium Ion battery – enough to cover a long weekend or a whole vacation.

Easy Image Management

To help you find the right image among many, Date View and Favorites have been added to the standard Folder View. Date View displays a calendar view, while Favorites shows only user-selected images. Furthermore, you can filter photos by face types such as portrait, child, baby, and smile.

HDTV Compatibility

PhotoTV HD compatibility allows the camera to be connected to a PhotoTV HDcapable Sony BRAVIA™ HDTV via the optional HD output adaptor, for highly detailed, high-definition color images displayed in unprecedented realism and full HD quality. (All sold separately)

“PhotoTV HD”

PhotoTV HD compatibility allows the camera to be connected to a PhotoTV HD-capable Sony BRAVIA® HDTV via the optional HD output adaptor, for highly detailed, high-definition color images displayed in unprecedented realism and full HD quality. (All sold separately.)

16:9 High-Resolution Mode

In addition to the standard 2-megapixel size, the convenient 16:9 aspect ratio shooting mode for HDTV2 display can now be shot in 10-megapixels, making it possible to obtain beautiful, high-definition prints with the same aspect ratio as HDTV2.

Wide Zoom Display

To use the entire image area of the compatible HDTV3 screens, Wide Zoom automatically expands standard 4:3 and 3:2 images to 16:9.

PHOTOMUSIC

Expanding the HD Slide Show with Music feature3, PHOTOMUSIC combines images with music to produce fun and entertaining slide shows. The five standard visual effects (Simple, Basic, Nostalgic, Active and Stylish) have been supplemented with Face1: Basic, Face2: Nostalgic and Face3: Stylish for a total of eight effects. Additionally, the number of music tracks stored in the camera memory has been doubled from four to eight, and music playback time has been extended from three to five minutes per track. More personalized slide shows are also possible by transferring music from a PC to the camera.

In-Camera Retouching

Add creative effects to photos after you shoot using any of 10 retouching functions, including: Trimming, Red-Eye correction, Soft Focus filter, Unsharp Mask, Cross filter, Partial Color filter, Fish-eye filter, Retro, Radial Blur and Happy Face. The Happy Face effect uses photo retouching to put a smile on faces, with smile levels adjustable from 1 to 5.

In-Camera Red-Eye Correction

Irritating “glowing eyes” can ruin even the most creative photos, but in-camera red eye reduction corrects your photos at the touch of a button to reduce lingering red-eye effect that other systems might miss.

Multi-Resizing Function

Resize your photos in-camera for virtually any purpose! Any size picture images can be resized to widescreen 16:9 and 2 MP resolution for display on an HDTV. Conversely, high resolution, widescreen 16:9 images or any size picture can be resized to 4:3 size with VGA (640×480) resolution — perfect for sharing with friends and family via e-mail (internet connection required).

Picture Motion Browser Software

Supplied software makes it easier to upload, organize, and search photos on your PC. When shooting photos using your camera and an optional GPS unit, the software even provides a convenient map view function that lets you sort photos by location and display their origin on a world map.

BIONZ™

BIONZ™ image processor delivers speed and precision.

• More info at Sony's website
• User manual