Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T300 review

A suite of onboard photo-editing and retouching tools take full advantage of the huge touch panel and included lanyard-tethered stylus. A rudimentary paint program lets you draw on your pictures, and cropping and resizing tools can trim them to fit 16:9 wide-screen displays, scale down to VGA (640x480 pixels) for emailing, or simply crop out bits you don't want to keep.

The "Cyber-shot" accent on the left side of the camera's front slides along with the lens cover; the T200's accent sat immobile against the camera's body, and made opening and closing the shutter slightly awkward

A variety of effects offer even more options, including digital red-eye removal, radial blur, soft focus and fisheye lens tools that can focus on a single spot in a picture with a tap of the stylus.

Finally, the T300 includes a Happy Faces feature that automatically turns frowns upside-down. When you take a portrait and the subject doesn't smile, Happy Faces distorts the subject's mouth to give them a smile. The end results range from surprisingly realistic to Joker-esque. All of the T300's editing tools automatically create copies of pictures you edit; the original shot is preserved, while changes are saved to new files.

After you edit your pictures, you can use the T300's various slide-show and sorting features to organise and share them with your friends. You can use the touchscreen to sort pictures into different folders, and even tag your favorite shots so you can view them separately. A built-in slide-show mode displays your photos with a customisable MP3 soundtrack and a variety of slide transition effects.

The camera comes with a composite video cable for displaying pictures on a television, though HDTV owners should consider the optional component video cable if they want to fully take advantage of the feature.

Performance
Once you get past the awkward menus and copious options, the camera performs quite fast. In our tests, the T300 snapped its first shot 1.9 seconds after powering on, and took another picture every 1.7 seconds thereafter. With the onboard flash enabled, that wait increased to 2.2 seconds. The shutter felt responsive, lagging just a hair under half a second in our high-contrast environment and a full second in our low-contrast lighting. In burst mode, the camera delivered a respectable 1.9 frames per second.