Form, Function, and Good Ways Toward Perfection

My girlfriend just got the Sony T100 and so I, of course, stole it from her and have been playing with it for about a week now. I never thought that I would so quickly want to upgrade my camera so quickly, but the T100 is probably the best all around snapshot camera I have ever used.

As with any Sony product, the styling is fantastic. The camera is very thin and has almost no profile. What it does have looks great. The slider to expose the camera lens and turn on the camera makes for the most subtle of lines along the front of the camera. On all sides, the restrained metallic accents add more style than all the grille work on the latest Escalade. And to make everyone happy, this camera comes in three great colors: black, silver, and red.

Important in any point-and-shoot camera is your ability to have it with you when you want to do that shooting. Since you never know when you will have that urge or suddenly see something that you need to snap, you need to carry your camera at all times. The weight and size of this camera are just right to do that. The slimness of the camera means that it fits in your pocket without making a strange bulge. Even when my girlfriend has the camera in the pocket of her short shorts, I don’t even notice the camera unless I am specifically looking for it. Despite the lack of refinement of my arm’s calibration, I can tell you this camera is one of the lightest I have ever held. I compared it with my old Sony P200 and I believe that the T100 is less than half of the weight of the P200. I have carried the camera all day without even once having to do that pants lifting maneuver so popular among my generation.

One of the small problems I have with this camera and I imagine other owners do as well is that the buttons are a tad on the small side. I would assume that this was somewhat necessary to get them to fit on such a small camera, but they are small to the point that I have some trouble pressing them. While my hands are probably average size and I can ultimately hit the correct button, I can see anyone having larger hands than mine having significant trouble. Since this camera is actually my girlfriend’s I asked her opinion of the buttons. She says that she and her small hands have no trouble at all with the buttons and that” anything larger and the camera wouldn’t be as beautiful as it is.”

One of the best things about this camera is the screen. It is a big, beautiful, 3 inches. It is among the bigger of those on the market. Most cameras in this price range or slightly lower have a 2.5 inch screen. The difference is a lot more real estate on which to frame and review your pictures. The clarity of the screen is brilliant, as you would expect from a Sony product. The screen is also one of the brightest that I have seen. Even while using the camera in full sunlight at a recent softball game, I was able to easily see the screen. Also, after capturing a particularly funny video (of the most awkward running I have ever seen as performed by one of my teammates after a ball grazed his “cup”), I was able to have most of the team gather around to watch the video. Nine of us were able to stand around the camera and everyone could clearly see – even those on the periphery of the camera.

The photographs taken by this camera are exceptional. I have a number of cameras over the years including both film and digital and this one absolutely takes the best pictures of anything I have ever owned. The 8.1 megapixels make for superb quality and the fantastically large size makes endless cropping available. The pictures are all sharp and when zoomed in as much as possible on the computer screen, there is no obvious distortion or noise in the picture. Even the pictures I took at dusk were clear and true to natural color on this camera. One of the best parts of the camera is the steady shot feature built in. This has largely eliminated camera shake for me. Even while taking pictures from less than ideal locations like from inside a moving car, the images have come out clear and razor-sharp. That is one of my preferred methods for capturing true candid pictures and the improvement in quality over my P200 is phenomenal. It makes my P200 pictures look as if they were chiseled by a cave dweller from the same moving car.

Another vast improvement over my old camera, and indeed over much of the Sony line, is the upgrade to a lens with a 5x zoom. Sony has chosen to stick with the excellent Zeiss lens and the quality of course remains. This has been another boon for my candid photography as I was often limited by my need to get closer to my subjects. I have, of late, been able to capture those subjects that I would have never been able to get close enough to properly frame and capture. This feature combined with 8.1 megapixels means that I can really get close to an object without losing detail or including parts of the picture I don’t want.

The opposite end of this great zoom spectrum is the ability to take a picture of an object up close to the camera. Not only does this camera include a macro picture mode as many other cameras do, it also includes a super macro mode. This mode has allowed me to be closer to objects than I have ever seen with any other camera. I have been able to focus on an object as close as ant while down on the ground and single leaf while up in a tree. Again, this feature combined with the 8.1 available megapixels of the camera has given me the opportunity to take pictures that I could not take before. Just like I have never been able to snap my shots from so far away before, so too, I have never taken a picture this up close before.

For those people that take pictures at a moment’s notice and often have to have go from pocket to ready with the camera in an instant, this camera sports the fastest startup time I have ever seen. Barring however long it takes to get the camera out of your pocket and out of its case, from power button to ready is just over 1 second. This is far better than the approximately 2 seconds it takes to start my P200 and much better than the 4-5 second start time on the older Sony cameras. This has been especially helpful to me as I often do not take pictures continuously when I am at an event and I like to turn off the camera after each shot to conserve the battery. The extremely fast start time has allowed me to capture some shots I may well have not with an older camera and a longer start time.

For the occasions that I do want to take pictures in rapid succession, this camera also has me covered. This is often the case when I see an interesting subject walk toward me. I like to take as many pictures as possible in a row so that I might capture them at multiple distances that can later be strung together for a kind of still image story. By my rough measurement, I have found that I can get about 2 pictures taken every three seconds when I do not have the flash on. This time is, of course, lengthened when I do have the flash on as it takes time for the capacitor to charge.

Overall, this is a fantastic camera and I really wish it was mine. It looks good, performs great, and fits into my pocket so easily and with such feathery weight that I have carried it with me almost nonstop in the days that I have had it. While it is not a professional SLR camera, it will make the average user much more than happy and will take great pictures while doing it. I believe that this camera can perform well enough to be the snapshot camera even for a professional user and I know it looks good enough to be the snapshot camera for everyone!