Strengths: Super sharp photos and ease of use from full auto to manual no different than a high grade 35MM.
Weaknesses: Needs to be handled very carefully, damages easily and is expensive to repair. Nowhere does Sony explain why an adapter is needed for filter and is impossible to find even on sales data. Sony is useless when called, they don't know either. Wide angle lens will shadow bullt in flash so use a 3rd party hot shoe flash to over come this.
Bottom Line:
Excellent camera for pro or beginner. Excellent storage on CD, easy to take anwhere. Lots of functions for custom shots of any kind in any light. Many accessories available from Sony and 3rd parties. Lens actually moves in and out about 5/8" and is very delicate, is why no filter threads are on the lens but are on the camera body itself and requires an adapter to mount either a filter or an accessory lens. This adapter needs to be part of the camera or supplied with it as OEM parts. Is a bit pricy but one gets what they pay for. Do not depend on On Line support to have questions answered by Sony, they will only point to accessory parts, never answering even a simple question. Yet over all is a top shelf camera and I recommend this to anyone. Do need the wide angle lens and hot shoe flash for indoors shooting, wide angle or telephoto lens will shadow the built in flash so auxilliary flash on the hot shoe is needed. Pixel size is adjustable prior to shoot and is an excellent tool with many other controlable features both in manual and full auto. Can even take pictures outside in starlight with out flash and get great shots, camera will adjust but need tripod for long exposures.
Strengths: Virtually unlimied amount of storage space with cost for mini disks in the pennies. I can take 50 super high quality pictures at 5 megapix and a couple short movies without filling the disk. Picture quality is great.
Weaknesses: Slow write time for movies and burst setting pictures (three pictures right after the other.)
Bottom Line:
I love my Sony Camera. While the write time can be a little slow at times, having 210 meg of storage for each mini cd is wonderful. I also love the fact that I can take a handful of moni disks and just pump them in instead of worring about a the expense of a new chip, or having to download my pics each time I want to take more pictures.
Strengths: f2.0 to f2.5 lens, "difficult" to take a bad macro shot - even using internal flash, "inexpensive" memory, plenty of manual controls (for me), works well with my external (standard mode) flash - even in bounce mode, relatively lightweight, decent movie mode, auto white balance seems to work well most of the time.
Weaknesses: Fragile, slow, bulky, more noise in low light shots than expected, goofy voice append (.mpg file!), slow upload of pics, OK but not outstanding pic quality,
Bottom Line:
I've been looking at digital cameras on the web for months and decided upon this one as it was an "open box" special and met most of my hunting criteria.
My (modest) looking criteria were: 4+ MP, external flash, plenty of controls, decent movie mode, wide(ish) aperature - even at max zoom, compact(ish) - pocketable if possible, 3x zoom min, good battery usage (AA desired), largish LED viewer, better than average flash performance, tripod mount in-line with lens.
The Nikon 5400 really looked best overall but I was turned off by the price and the somewhat difficult usage of the Nikon.
Similar Products Used: Nikon 5000 and SONY DSC-75(at work), Olympus C2100UZ, Minolta F100(short time borrow), others
Overall Rating:
Value Rating:
Submitted by
Glen B23
a Casual
Date Reviewed: September 12, 2003
Strengths: Sharp, vivid photos with minimal effort. Laser hologram autofocus. Tremendous capacity of mini-CDs. Unlimited movie mode.
Weaknesses: A bit expensive compared to other 5MP cameras. Slow image writing time. Battery seems to go fairly quickly. My former camera was the MVC-CD250 which uses the same battery. In that camera the battery lasted longer between charges.
Bottom Line:
Excellent, professional quality photos. Although this camera has manual settings, I just set it on "auto" mode and let the camera optimize the settings. I also purchased the HVL-F32X flash and find it to be a huge plus when used instead of the CD500's integrated flash. Pictures I took with the outboard flash were more well exposed. I especially like the movie mode, which is not as good as a real camcorder but still quite decent. I upgraded from a MVC-CD250 and find the CD-500's movie quality to be sharper.
