Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P200 review

The flash unit is rated only for distances 3.5m or less in wide angle mode with ISO set to Auto, or out to around 2.5m at the telephoto setting. Auto, off, fill and slow-sync modes are available.

Using a Memory Stick Pro, you can crank out movies at 640x480-pixel resolution with sound at 30fps for as long as your memory card holds out. With the 32MB Memory Stick supplied with the camera, we had to settle for 640x480 at 15fps and about 90 seconds of shooting. However, the ability to trim sequences in the camera made the most of the card's capacity.

Performance
Excellent battery life and generally quick response -- the camera performs almost identically to the P150 -- spice up the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P200's appeal. We got 984 shots per charge of the Sony InfoLithium rechargeable cell, half of them with flash, interspersed with a healthy amount of zooming, card formatting and picture review. If a once-in-a-lifetime photo comes your way, you can whip it out of your pocket, press the power button, be shooting 2 seconds later, and snap follow-up shots every 1.6 seconds (2.8 seconds with flash) until the buffer fills.

Shutter lag may cramp your style with moving objects, however, as the autofocus system took as long as 0.9 seconds to lock in high-contrast subjects and dawdled for 2.2 seconds under more challenging low-contrast lighting, despite a crimson focus-assist lamp that's bright enough to read by. Burst mode yielded 5 full-resolution shots in 4.4 seconds, but snapped off 35 640x480, highly compressed JPEG images in about 40 seconds. If you're brave enough to analyse your tendency to slice on the fairway, 16 low-res thumbnails can be snapped off at intervals ranging from 7.5 to 30 shots a second and tiled into a single full-res frame.

Image quality
This camera offers basic white-balance options plus autoadjustment and a new Custom Manual option that memorises the neutral rendition of any frame-filling object, such as a piece of paper, that you hold in front of the lens while pressing the Set key. Even so, colour problems plagued many photos shot in the field, producing undesired casts both indoors and out, regardless of whether we used automatic white balance, opted for the presets, or set the balance manually. Our outdoor shots were noticeably cool, while indoor available-light photos were often overly warm. Setting white balance to the Incandescent preset didn't always help; images that looked fine on the LCD were distinctly warm when loaded into an image editor.

Flash shots were often yellow, whether the camera was set to automatic white balance or manually adjusted to the flash setting. Red-eye problems cropped up even with red-eye reduction activated, but pupils tended towards a ruby rather than crimson glow. Our test shots weren't as egregiously off balance, but the colour biases were definitely visible.

Colour casts aside, the P200's generally well-exposed images, with almost too-rich colour saturation, looked good at standard viewing distances. Enlargements revealed blooming and chromatic aberration, and though the camera had generally low noise, demosaicing errors exacerbated what noise there was. Test shots weren't terribly sharp, and there was a decided falloff in focus down the left side of the lens.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide