The good news is the camera held up through all that shooting (around 2000 pics over a month’s time) very well and overall I’m pretty pleased with it especially for the price we paid. Its biggest weakness I’ve found is it’s anemic flash. This makes it nothing special when shooting a moving subject more then 6 feet away indoors. I noticed this right away when shooting with it at Christmas time around family and friends opening gifts. I was always disappointed with the quality when shooting people across the room opening gifts and ended up switching back to my older Sony Mavica CD500 camera to get some better results. That’s not to say that the shots I took with the Sony Cybershot w80 weren’t usable for us. We still could print 4x6s off which for us is the main goal but even these small prints were marginal looking. As a rule of thumb I’ve told my wife that not to use the zoom indoors if she can help it as just walking closer makes the shot 100 times better.
F-5.2(max), S-1/50, ISO-800, FocalLength-17mm (Zoomed In) Closer up shots always came out great though and if a subject is fairly stationary, like at my dad’s wedding, you can just turn off the flash and get pretty good results as well. And of course my favorite aspect of the camera is its size. On our cruise vacation I had it with me in my pocket almost the entire time and got so many wonderful shots that I would have missed if I only had my bigger camera along.
Another thing that was really handy on the camera was the fact that it give you a live histogram which was useful for getting the correct exposure on the beach at times. The battery life is also outstanding and other then the underpowered flash the only real nock against it I had was that in low light candid situations (like at night on the deck of the ship) it takes it a while to lock the focus. I did find that in times like this you’re better off turning the face detection off which speeds it up a bit. Overall I’m pretty happy with it.
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