Sony released the Cyber-shot DSC-T100 early in 2007, few months later its younger T200 hit the shelves, and now we another model at our disposal, T300.
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Cyber-shot DSC-T300 is a small digital camera weighting just 149 grams (5.3 oz), with dimension 94 x 59.3 x 21.4 mm (3.7 x 2.3 x 0.8 in). In small body there is a small sensor 1/2.3" with 5x zoom and resolution of 10.1 megapixel. The biggest picture that small sensor can give is 3648 x 2736 pixels, and there are seven smaller resolution, all the way down to 640 x 480 pixels. You can shot some moving pictures in 640 x 480 pixels and 320 x 240 pixels with 30 frames per second. Stills will be saved in natural jpeg format, and movies in mpeg 1.
DSC-T300 is packed with additional functionalities. It has image stabilization, contrast detection, and face detection. Sony is proud of its "Intelligent Scene Recognition" (iSCN) which camera use to analyse the conditions and after that it automatically selects the optimal setting. DSC-T300 can recognize up to five scenes and then choose the best one for given situation. You can use manual settings, but DSC-T300 can not be tricked: It will step in and shoot another picture with setting optimised for which it thinks that they are better. Although DSC-T300 will discard the picture if thinks that your setting are better, I personally don't like such behaviour. The hardware shouldn't be too smart, I like to learn on my mistakes.
For viewing the pictures there is a 3.5-inch touch screen (it is wide, but just in proportions 16:9). The built-in lens if from Carl Zeiss, so it should guarantee a nice pictures. An interesting technology is camera's ability to know do you take pictures of adults or children. When you select one of those two modes, the camera will select focus, exposure, white balance and flash for that subject. Working as a pre-press operator and designer for two decades, I honestly don't know what are the differences between kid's and adult's face that justify that technology. DSC-T300 can also recognize who's smiling, kid or parent; regarding to this, see the previous sentence.
A picture can be saved on Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick PRO Duo memory cards, and there is obligatory USB 2.0 connection. There is 15 MB of internal memory, and it is powered by Lithium-Ion battery. The case of DSC-T300 is black, silver or red and the price in the USA will be 400 dollars, give or take few bucks.
For the end, the most important thing. I'm not sure that this is the best picture quality you can get for that money. When shooting in not so perfect conditions picture may have a strange side effects, from washed look to dark areas in the corners. At low sensitivity there may be some noise, and overall it seems that T200 gives better pictures. But, you should check for yourself and decide are all those built-in technologies worth the money. ■