Sony Cyber-shot DSC T77 and DSC T700 review

The most important upgrades over its predecessor, Sony's boosted the T77's optical range from the 38 -114mm 3x range to a new 4x range equivalent to 35 -140mm - which is a great step for such a slim camera. Sony dsc T77 allowes you to tap a face to give it priority in a group shot. During playback, we can tap to zoom-in on particular areas of an image, then drag the magnified view with your finger or even draw on it with a paintbrush. Admittedly it's still a novelty, but quite fun in practice. While in playback you can also apply a number of filters, including sharpening, blurring or fisheye effects wherever you tap the screen, along with one which adjusts glum faces into smiles with surprisingly convincing results. The T77 allows us to view a brightness histogram during playback, and like most Sony compacts we can have slideshows with stylish transitions and your choice of background music uploaded to the camera in MP3 format.

The Sony dsc T77 has access to shutter speeds from two seconds to 1/1000 along with four aperture settings, and happily displays what settings it's going to use in most of its modes, but annoyingly there's no means for you to manually adjust them. The closest you'll come to manual controls is in the dsc T77's program mode, which lets us adjust the metering, exposure compensation, sensitivity and focusing, the latter with a choice of four preset distances in addition to three AF options. The fully automatic mode hides the controls mentioned above, but offers the Sony dsc T77's Smile Shutter and new Intelligent Scene Recognition options. The latter switches the camera between eight scene presets depending on their content. In practice this worked well, recognising landscapes, portraits, macro shots or twilight scenes and automatically switching to the corresponding preset. Face detection was also very effective and Sony even lets you prioritise children's faces over adults if desired.

Sony dsc T700 is almost the same as T77 in terms of features. Both cameras posses updated intelligent scene recognition technology that can now select up to eight different scene modes, including macro, portrait and landscape modes. It also includes new function "anti-blink". In portrait mode it will prevent you from making closed-eyed photos (camera will automatically take two shots and then determine whether the subject have closed eyes or not, and will only record images with open-eyed subjects).

T700 has slightly differed profile (a little more thicker), 3.5-inch LCD (3.0-inch at T77) and 4GB internal memory (against 15MB found in the T77). With this features dsc T700 can be used as an ideal pocket photo-album. Of course, we can buy 4Gb memory card ($25) ourselves and spare 75$. Though, because of the screen it won't be an ideal pocket photo-album.

Some other reviews: dsc w150 and w170, w120 and w130