Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T30

Imagine the Cyber-shot T7 running on a treadmill followed by the Cyber-shot T9 missing regular gym sessions. It won't be too hard then to visualise Sony's latest Cyber-shot T30 gorging on a Big Mac meal. Unlike its predecessors, the T30 has a noticeable bulge on the front. Wheat happened to the ultraslim look of the previous models?

Overall, the T30 didn't impress a great deal since it retains most of its predecessor's features, including a flimsy battery and memory stick compartment cover. At least Sony claims the T30 has a longer battery life of 420 shots on a single charge. So unless you fancy a larger three-inch LCD and don't mind a bigger body, you shouldn't retire the T9.

Design
We're not sure if it's just us, but we find having a camera with a silver chassis and a black-coloured rear baffling -- a new design trend perhaps. Just take a look at Canon's Digital IXUS 65 and this Cyber-shot T30.

Will we see more two-coloured digital cameras?
(Click for larger image)

The three-inch LCD monitor inevitably took up two-thirds of the camera's rear estate. However, unlike Fujifilm's FinePix V10, which also has a three-inch screen but with the controls relegated to just a strip of space beneath it, the T30 still has sufficient accommodation for the various buttons on the unit. You get the typical Menu, Display, Resolution/delete, Slideshow, zoom lever and directional keys with a central Set button. The only gripe we have with the screen is that it's a magnet for fingerprints. Oddly enough, the microphone is found along the top edge of the T30 while the speaker is all the way south, at the bottom of the camera, between the tripod receptacle and multi-connector slot.

There's a tiny Power button on the top of the T30, but otherwise sliding down the front cover of the unit doubles as a power switch. We like how "firm" it feels when we slide it down and back up. And if you wish to know, the lens, focus-assist lamp and built-in flash are all hidden behind this lid.

Just beside the shutter on the right sits another tiny hand symbol which represents the unit's optical image stabilisation properties. However, when you are in the Auto mode, the stabilisation feature can only be turned on via the menu.

Features
Features-wise, it's nothing spectacular: A 7.2-megapixel CCD, SteadyShot with high sensitivity (maximum ISO 1,000) setting and a large three-inch LCD monitor. Depending on individual preferences, fashion aficionados may prefer the slimmer T7 and T9, while users looking to share pictures would inch toward the larger screen on the T30 instead.

With the T30, Sony claims that minimised power consumption from the image stabilisation system and LCD monitor allow the camera to take up to 420 shots on a single charge. That's slightly twice as many compared with the Cyber-shot T9 which has a battery lifespan of 240 images. As a comparison, the T30 uses a 1,220mAh (4.4Wh) battery while the earlier T9 runs on a 680mAh (2.4Wh) cell. Like the T9 before it, we find the maximum aperture of F3.5 to F4.3 to be lacking, especially for confined or landscape shots. Optical zoom (3x) is the usual fare between 38mm-to-114mm (35mm equivalent). In addition, the 58MB of built-in memory allows you to take about 16 full-resolution shots or 2 minutes 39 seconds of video.

If you have shaky hands, Sony's Steady Shot system uses gyro sensors to detect the angles and speed of camera shake and moves the internal shift lens to compensate for the movement. Even then, without using proper photo-taking techniques, chances are you'll still end up with a bunch of discarded shots taken in low-light situations.

What's new, however, is a bunch of interface enhancements which we feel are nice to have, but not exceptional. The same features were also introduced on the Cyber-shot H5 and these include a Menu Guide that advises the user on the number of pictures that can be shot on a selected image size based on the available memory; a one-touch display button to increase the brightness of the screen for viewing under strong light and; a dedicated button for the slideshow with music playback, which we like. We also found two additional colour modes on the T30: Natural and Vivid.

Performance
Powering up the T30 took 1.6 seconds which wasn't too bad, though it isn't the fastest boot-up time we've seen. Panasonic's Lumix DMC-FX9 was a hair faster at 1.5 seconds. Shutting down the unit was near instantaneous and we liked the solid feel of watching the screen turn off when you slide the lens cover up. As with its previous incarnations, there are two ways to turn on/off the T30: One is with the dedicated Power button, the other using the sliding lens cover.

Time to first shot was two seconds (2.2 seconds with flash). We managed to shoot thereafter without flash every 1.7 seconds. Flash recharge cycle was a little slow and shot-to-shot with flash averaged 5.8 seconds. The Cyber-shot DSC-T9 performed slightly better at this aspect by shooting every four seconds with flash.

While it took us 2.3 seconds to reach the telephoto (3x optical zoom) end, it became an issue only when we wanted to capture further subjects spontaneously. On the battery, we manage to take 180 shots with approximately 95 minutes of juice remaining -- that's about 3/4 of battery life left.

Burst mode wasn't impressive, but it didn't kill us, either. Like the Cyber-shot H5, we could take five 7-megapixels, Fine-quality shots in 4.7 seconds (approximately 1.1fps). Dropping the resolution would allow you to take more pictures. In multi-burst mode, the T30 captured 16 frames in a second which was saved as a single 1280 x 960-pixel image file.

Image Quality
There's nothing much to complain about the image quality on this Cyber-shot. Skin tones were reproduced correctly and colours were vivid. The auto white balance worked fine most of the time, and if it didn't, then tough luck because there are no custom white balance settings on this unit. You can only select Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent and Flash in the menus. One thing to note, though -- not all options are available in various settings. For example, in Program mode, you get only two choices: Auto and Flash. In addition, we foresee colour cast to be an issue when shooting in unusual lighting conditions.

There were slight purple fringing in some of our high-contrast shots, but that shouldn't be too much of a concern. While you can select sensitivity levels which range from ISO 80 to ISO 1,000, you probably won't be shooting above ISO 400 very often because noise starts to kick in more visibly especially at ISO 800 and ISO 1,000. That said, we also noticed blotches in our pictures at 100 percent magnification even at a low sensitivity level of ISO 125, which we didn't quite fancy.

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