Sony W80 Camera - Avoid the Zoom

I wanted to post some additional information about the new Sony w80 camera that my wife and I got back around Thanksgiving. It made it through my dad’s wedding, multiple Christmas celebrations, and a week long trip on a cruise ship so I now have a lot better feel for what it can and can’t do.

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-2.8(max), S-1/40, ISO-800, FocalLength-6mm (Zoomed Out)

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.

Sony w80 vs cd500 Low Light Comparison

I’ve been shooting with a Sony Mavica cd500 for the last few years and recently picked up a Sony Cyber-Shot DCS-w80 for my wife. She wanted something smaller that she could carry in her purse or pocket and would be simple to use. Now that we have the two cameras I’m curious which one is the better lowlight performer. The following is a comparison of meter readings taken in lowlight with the flash turned off, of the same subject with both cameras. I kept the framing consistent throughout the readings so 3x and 1x zoom shots appeared the same. In other words to get the same shot I just moved the camera closer or further away to compensate for the zoom.

From this we can derive the following statements:

• Zoomed out all the way to 1x the w80 shoots slightly faster then the cd500
  
• Zoomed in all the way to 3x the cd500 is 1 whole stop faster then the w80
  
• When comparing similar apertures and ISOs the w80 appears to become faster as the aperture numbers increase and is faster overall (not sure why this is…different physical sized sensors perhaps?)

With this in mind the w80 can give the fastest shutter time in low light but the cd500 makes up for that when using the zoom so in a realistic situation (like shooting candids at a birthday party) the cd500 is faster. This is thanks to being able to still use a 2.5 aperture when fully zoomed in. When using the flash the cd500 performs better again as the w80’s flash is underpowered and must use ISO 800 at times to get a usable shot that the cd500 can take with ISO 100.

Of course shooting a motionless subject is a different story. The w80 has images stabilization so if your subject isn’t moving you can probably handhold a couple stops more then what you could handhold with the cd500 which easily makes up for cd500’s faster lens. One other trick the w80 has is the ability too use 3 higher ISO settings to let you handhold a shot that the cd500 couldn’t come close to, though in my opinion the quality of these high ISO images shows a substantial drop off from the cd500’s ISO 400 so I would avoid it if possible. It’s also worth mentioning that the w80 longest available shutter is 1 second (I did notice that using the Night Scene setting on the w80 can increase the shutter to 2 seconds. It defaults to ISO 125 though so you don’t really gain anything additional) while the cd500 can take an up to 8 second exposure which is about 3 stops better. You might think that the w80’s three higher ISO settings would compensate for this but the quality with them in that little light is horrendous.

In conclusion I would have to say that the cd500 is better for taking candids in flash situations or extreme low light pictures. If your subject is stationary though and you have the option to walk closer to it, then the w80 would be the better camera. Of course image quality is a whole other topic and more subjective to test. It’s probably six of one half and a dozen of the other as the w80 uses a newer processor which should give it a better dynamic range, but the cd500 uses less noise reduction so it holds on to details better. The final consideration for low light shooting would be focusing speed. I haven’t measured this but both cameras had to hunt a bit in low light probably close to a second at times. The w80 has face detection though which should makes it a bit more reliable at obtaining correct focus in candid situations. I guess neither camera can totally replace the other as they both have their advantages. This Christmas I’ll be using the cd500 and my wife will shoot with the w80 so we should get the best of both worlds. We’ll have to wait and see if one is the clear winner.