The other pain is that Sony uses a proprietary AV and computer interface and cable, which combine AV and USB functions. Sony provides the special connecting cable, but the cable does not offer HDMI out. You can’t use a standard mini HDMI cable (price £10), so you have to fork out £33 for a special cable from Sony.
Proprietary interfacing pushes up the overall price
At least with the DSC-HX1, Sony provided an HDMI dongle for use with HDMI cables. It wasn’t elegant, but it did save you a lot of money if you already owned an HDMI cable and wanted to playback movies in HD resolution directly from the camera. Sony’s Picture Motion Browser software is provided, but it only works with Windows PCs. And the full instruction manual is only available as a PDF file on the supplied CD-Rom.
The DSC-WX1 is really dinky – measuring up at 90.5 x 51.8 x 19.8mm and weighing a shade less than 150g with the lithium ion battery and card – it easily slips into your pocket. There are half a dozen shooting modes: Easy has only very limited control; Intelligent Auto combines scene, face and smile detection technologies while Program lets you adjust parameters such as ISO speed, exposure compensation and white balance.
There are eleven Scene modes including, snow, landscape and twilight and then there’s Sweep Panorama, Hand Held Twilight, Anti Motion Blur and Movie. Yet the WX1 offers no manual focus, aperture or shutter speed control. A neat touch is a tiny button that lets you change the drive mode very quickly.
However, you have to navigate the functions menu if you want alter sensitivity, white balance and exposure compensation. We think it would have been more useful to put the exposure compensation control on the multi-controller at the back of the camera and consign the Smile Sensitivity control to the menu.
Pocket-friendly, but those with sausage fingers will find it a fiddle
Considering its price tag, we were a little disappointed to find that the DSC-WX1 has a 2.7in LCD screen composed of 230,000 dots whereas its sister camera, the DSC-TX1, has a 3-inch touch screen. By the way, there is no RAW shooting either. The small black power button is hard to see in low light and the DSX-WX1 is slightly awkward to handle, especially if you have large hands.
Next page: Sample Shots
COMMENTS
i bet
you were one of those who didn't think the Amstrad PCW using wierdo 3.0" flippy disks was so much of a problem, when all the rest of the world was transitioning from 5.25 (let's say... smartmedia) to 3.5" (SD)? Ironically the latter being a Sony invention.
Apart from that, they've got previous, unfortunately. World + dog using cassette, CDR, DAT or DCC, before moving on to HDD/flash-based MP3? Sony thinks, hmm ... let's try Minidisc. Then MDLP. I even fell for that one for a while. Then the PSP discs... oh dear.
Interoperability is key, that's why it's been so hard and taken so long to ALMOST kill 3.5 floppies and tape - and VHS - yet, I still keep a small emergency stock of each, and appropriate kit, as they may turn up useful for communicating stuff to luddites, such is their ubiquity and endurance. I'll probably do the same for SD cards when the time comes that they become supposedly obsolete in the eyes of the Braying Hordes That Be.
(yet, no-one uses 8-track, or Beta, or 3-inch discs, or MD any more, and I won't be bothered about keeping any Memory Stick remnants when I've finally packed on my last old Sony phone)
Re: No SD Card, no Problem.
SD isn't proprietary - anyone can license the spec and use it. Ditto HD DVD while it was still worth doing so.
I have a Sony camera that uses Memory Stick - every other gadget I use has an SD card slot. MS only works if you buy Sony kit and no one else's.
Sony loving is so 1982...
Oh wait, it's made by Sony. Of course.
Yes, of course. Sony made the only MP3 player that didn't play MP3s too. Are you going to tell me I took mine back to the shop because I like bitching about Sony?
No, my friend, I bitch about Sony because they deserve it: they want to bully the world into doing things their way. Well they may have a few gimps who like it, but the rest of us who have a choice in cameras, music players, laptops, PDAs and phones will go with the solution that (and I repeat for emphasis) everyone else uses.
"what reader doesn't have a MS slot?"
That would be the small laptop I carry on trips. It only has a SD slot and it's nice not having to need the extra reader and cable.
Grumble
Bloody Sony keep letting suits shoot them in the feet. Did they not learn anything by losing most of the walkman market share in the era of mp3 players?
Every time you force a special magic Sony format on people, it's a massive turnoff. Memory stick=instant fail. It matters less when there's no alternative (like with the PSP), but there are rather a lot of consumer-grade compact digitals out there, so it's harder to get away with.
Shame, really. It has some good points. I'd prefer manual control and shooting in raw (and before any dillhole chimes in that you don't get that on compacts, both my pocket-sized compacts have manual control and shoot raw). However, even without those, it would be an OK device for a lot of casual users.
However, dearest darling Sony, quit it with the bloody Memory Stick already. I was bored of that on my old Transmeta-based Vaio, years ago, it's getting old now.
