Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H3 review

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H3 Review

Reviewed by: Philip Ryan

Reviewed on: 4 October 2007

Caffeine addicts should be pleased to know that the H3 includes Sony's Super Steady Shot optical image stabilisation to help compensate for hand shake. In case the built-in lens isn't wide or long enough for you, Sony offers both a 0.7x wide angle converter and a 1.7x telephoto converter. The necessary adapter ships with the camera and can also accept 58mm screw-on filters.

Shooting time is slowed by large lens extending before you can shoot

The camera also comes with a lens hood that attaches to the front of the adapter. Unfortunately, it's so large that it obscures a large portion of the flash, which makes the use of fill flash almost useless if you use the hood.

However, the adapter itself can likely provide enough shade from the sun when the lens is zoomed to its widest, which means that the hood is only really necessary when shooting telephoto shots, in which the camera's built-in flash probably won't be able to provide fill flash anyway.

Features
As is the rage these days, Sony separates the H3's menu system into two sections. If you press the Menu button, it brings you to the shooting menu, which is home to settings you change often while shooting, such as image size, face detection, exposure and flash compensation, ISO, white balance and more.

If you press the Home button, you go to the setup menus, which let you control less-oft-changed settings, such as whether you have a lens adapter attached, or whether you want the AF assist light on or off.

The menus use a new design that looks very similar to the menus on Sony's PlayStation Portable. They look nice and are pretty intuitive, though it's strange that there's an option for the shooting menu in the home menu, but if you select it, it tells you to press the Menu button instead of just porting you over to that menu.