Review 1 of 1
Price Paid:
$179.00
from Fred Meyer Summary:
Beyond excelling at snapshots of office parties and other social functions for which I purchased the camera, the P41 has worked well for me as a shirt-pocketable, go-anywhere companion whenever picture taking is a possible adjunct to other activities. It's great for "grab shots" because of its fast operation: pushing its power button as I pull it from my shirt pocket, it's always ready to go before I can get it to my eye for framing. The fixed focal length lens means no waiting for a zoom to extend and no loss of lens speed when zooming (digitally) to frame an image. The 5mm lens gives great depth of field even at f/2.8 and makes possible sharp, hand-held, low-light pictures even at the auto mode's 1/8 second maximum "shutter" speed. And Sony's Smart Zoom feature really does provide excellent digital-zoom picture quality.
I must admit to not looking seriously at brands other than Sony when shopping for a small camera. I already had a Sony Mavica FD200 and wanted to maintain compatibility of recording media; it's nice being able to pop the memory stick out of the P41 and into the FD200 to make floppy disk copies of images to share with others on the spot, with no computer required, and my television has a memory stick reader that gives great "slide shows" with either camera. The P41 has even doubled as an external computer drive as files of any kind can be copied to and retrieved from the memory stick via a usb cable.
Depending on your needs, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a person's only camera. I've got other models that will focus closer (though not by much!), zoom farther, provide manual exposure control, or make it easier to use auxiliary flash, but the P41 has easily exceeded my expectations as a pocketable, "just-have-it-with-you" photographic device. Strengths:
Fast operation in terms of start-up and shot-to-shot time as well as minimal shutter lag.
Fixed focal length lens of reasonably fast f/2.8 aperture and exposure times that can be limited to 1/8 second in auto mode (for hand-held shots) or allow up to 1 or 2 seconds (in program and twilight modes respectively) give great flexibility for low-light, flash-free photography.
Smart Zoom really does as advertised in providing high quality digitally-zoomed pictures. Shooting at VGA resolution, I get a 3.6X zoom with no loss of lens speed (like you get with most optical zooms) and none of the image deterioration of standard digital zoom.
Color balance under flourescent and mixed lighting conditions using automatic white balance has been excellent.
Facility to manually preset focus comes in handy at times, such as when the auto-focus illuminator light would be annoying, and speeds up operation (no waiting for focus to lock on).
Rechargeable batteries give long service life, and, in an emergency, I can get AA's anywhere. Weaknesses:
Optical viewfinder does not change framing as you zoom, so must use the LCD screen to frame zoomed pictures. Curious choice of limitations for some program settings; for example, you can't choose standard JPEG compression in auto mode(limited to fine) and twilight mode only allows a focus preset at infinity. Similar Products Used:
Canon A70, Leica Digilux 1, Sony FD200, Minox 35GT, Olympus Stylus Customer Service:
not needed as yet
| 
Link to this page
5 of 5
4 of 5
