Thread: Sony DSC W120 Digital Camera

THE W SERIES of digital cameras from Sony has proved its mettle consistently and their newest addition, the W120, also lived up to our expectations. The 7.2MP sensor might make it look weak when you consider that there are 12MP compact models out there, but as we have said on numerous occasions, mega pixel count is not everything. A 4x optical zoom ensures that the wider 32mm lens does not become a handicap when trying to shoot farther objects. The camera is quick to focus, both on near as well as far objects. In nonmacro (Auto mode), we could focus on an object closer than four inches from the lens.

The camera becomes ready for shooting in about two seconds after pressing the power button. The controls are intuitive for some one who has used digital cameras earlier, getting accustomed to the W120 won't be a problem. The mode dial gives quick access to shooting modes and a five way D pad lets you set flash, macro mode, self timer and LCD display options.

The W120 produced the second best results in our resolution chart test. This is a chart containing lines with very fine spacing and we check to what guish between the lines. Low light shooting without flash is a weak area for the W12, but with auto mode (with the flash fires automatically) the results in low light are perfectly accept-able. Though the camera boasts of a ISO 3200 for low light shooting, at this setting the images are extremely noisy and border on unusable (as to be expected from a camera in this category).



Anything above ISO 400 is a no-no for most practical applications. When shooting pictures containing very bright as well as dark areas, there is only a slight hint of over exposure, and the images turn out pretty well balanced. The camera shoots video at 640 x 480 resolution at 30fps which is a standard these days. Thanks to compression, a minute's video at this setting takes 75MB, but then the quality is not as good as that of the Canons that use the uncompressed MJPEG AVI format.