Sony created the W-series to be its budget line of snapshot cameras. Without the sleek designs of the T-series or the high-powered zoom lenses of the H-series, the W-cameras distinguish themselves only through their modest price tags. Despite their lackluster features, the W-cameras have proven themselves with solid performance and good image quality. This trend follows in the Cyber-shot DSC-W80, Sony's high-end Cyber-shot W-camera. Like all current W-cameras, the W80 might not look like much more than a simple, shiny, blocky camera with a standard 7-megapixel sensor and 3X zoom lens. Once you start shooting, though, the W80 quickly proves itself.
Design and features
The DSC-W80 boasts a newer, prettier interface than the other W-series Cyber-shots. The camera's tweaked system is much more colourful than those of the W35 and W55, and resembles the Playstation Portable's menu system more than any camera's. The home button activates this new design in a secondary menu that separates media and camera settings from more commonly used settings such as white balance, ISO sensitivity, and exposure compensation. The enhanced menu includes more media-friendly features than any other W-series camera, like high-definition slide shows with MP3 music support and in-camera image retouching. All of these features are nice, but the buttons that access them are irritatingly tiny and spaced around a slightly-too-sensitive control pad; it's far too easy to tap the wrong command when navigating the menus. The W80 also includes more useful features like optical image stabilisation, ISO 3200 maximum sensitivity, and face-detecting autofocus and autoexposure.
Performance
The W80 uses Sony's new Bionz image processor, another first for the W-series. Despite its unfortunate name, Bionz seems to work very well. In CNET Labs' tests, the W80 shot much faster than its little brother's, lagging only 1.2 seconds between pictures. In burst mode, the camera captured 19 full-size photos in just 7.1 seconds for a fantastic 2.7 frames per second (FPS), far better than the W35 and W55's 4-shot bursts of 1.4 fps.
(Smaller bars indicate better performance.)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance.)
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Typical continuous-shooting speed |
Image quality
The photos themselves looked great, with sharp details and accurate colours. Noise stayed relatively low up to ISO 800, when a noticeable grain developed. Predictably, shots taken at ISO 1600 appeared noisy and blurry, and the ISO 3200 setting produced pictures that looked more like impressionist paintings than photographs. Still, if you keep to ISO 800 or lower, you can pretty much count on solid pictures.
The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W80 reigns as the current king of the Cyber-shot W-series. While the most expensive, it also packs in the most features and polish of any W-camera to date. Its solid picture quality and fast speed make it a great choice for a small, reliable snapshot camera.
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swengw
02/03/2008, 12:24 PM
rating
6/10
While a very attractive camera with a solid brand name, it is unable to shoot acceptable quality pictures in many of the modes.
Pros: Automatic mode produces some solid pictures.
Features (stabilization, face detection) work very well.
Nice finish.
Somewhat cheap.
Cons: Ugly LCD.
Some modes produce bad pictures.
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mamooli
13/12/2007, 09:39 AM
rating
3/10
I bought it today, thought it would be the good one, tried it indoors, noluck too many purple fringing . the picture quality is not good,
Pros: good menu
Cons: purple fringing
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hellosony
06/07/2007, 01:08 PM
rating
5/10
I hardly recommend this camera if you are looking for good pictures. I was quite disappointed with the noise level in the pictures. I seriously regret buying it.
Pros: Small, lightweight
Cons: Picture quality is not that great.
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tigerpm7
09/06/2007, 06:21 PM
rating
9/10
This camera is unreal. I was looking at many different models and have been searching for quite a while but when I was introduced to this camera I fell in love with it right away. Make no mistake, this camera is perfect in every way.
Pros: Fast and very user friendly.
Cons: NIL
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mourad
25/05/2007, 03:03 PM
rating
6/10
i used to have w55 and now the pictures are darker even in the automatic settings whereas in w55 the images are top in quality
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theartist
06/05/2007, 05:14 PM
rating
8/10
bought this camera last week. bionz engine is faster than i expected. it has a new menu interface that is nice to look at, however, can be a little bit slow because of the animations. the in-camera photo editing tools are fun enough to keep you entertained. some of them are really helpful, like the blur effect which you almost can't achieve with a point-and-shoot, and the fish-eye effect which would cost you a lot of money to buy the actual fish-eye lens. i experienced almost no blown-out (overexposed) or underexposed pictures even with a subject in front of a bright background. thanks to its dynamic range optimizer. optical image stabilization is of little help since i can still get blurry pictures when shooting with minimal hand shake.
Pros: - new faster and better sony engine
- fun and helpful in-camera editing tools
- dynamic range optimizer eliminates over and underexposed pics
- as thin as dsc-t100 (23 mm vs 22 mm; only 1mm difference)
Cons: - 2.5 lcd only 115,000 pixels compared to the T series' 200,000 plus pixels
- relatively slow menu
- battery door feels cheap and is flimsy
- for those who owns hdtv: you have to purchase separate hd cables
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