I like my sony 505 digicam, and am looking at the 505V. I know imaging resource is working on a review, and I hoped they would look at some specific problems on the 505, to see how well they have been addressed. So here are some areas to look at.

1) Low light framing & image quality. Tough to frame low light images with LCD even after adjusting LCD brightness. Low light image quality problematic even after adjusting appropriately with manual controls.

2) Framing action shots: Shutter lag makes framing shots a matter of some luck and practice. See whether shutter lag has improved. (Time between pressing button and when picture is actually taken).

3) red eye. I gather 505v has tried to address this. 4) manual focus: The continuous manual focus feature is fantastic in theory, but unfortunately questionably usable due to the LCD. It's hard to see if something is in focus with the LCD. They magnify the image during manual focus with the 505V, but I'm still skeptical this is very usable for sharp images.

I hope people don't get the impression from these questions that I think the camera is bad, I think it is wonderful but with some specific limitations.

Just a comment -- If sony is only using 2.6 of the 3.3 megapixels on the CCD, I wish they would have used the extra unused pixels for image stabilization somehow. With the 5x zoom lens it'd be a fantastic feature.

-- benoit (nospam@bar.com), April 30, 2000

Answers

Hi Benoit!

Sorry I've been so scarce on the forums lately. - Great suggestions.

1) Low light is definitely tough, given that the LCD is your only viewfinder. The camera itself does better than the 505 in this respect though.

2) We always measure the shutter lag timing - I'll explicitly compare with the 505 in our review though.

3) We don't have an explicit test for red eye, but I think any camera with the flash that close to the lens is going to have problems, "red eye reduction" aside.

4) Focus is definitely easier with the magnified LCD view. You still have to interpret it a bit though. Look for objects with fine detail/ sharp edges, and twiddle till you start to see either moire on the LCD or a hint of jaggies. Works much better than most, still a long way down from looking through an optical SLR viewfinder though!

(5) - The CCD issue is that the masking for the CCD apparently was built into the 505 body, so they couldn't widen it any. Thus, the unused pixels are actually covered up by a metal mask...

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), May 04, 2000.