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Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G3

Product Rating: 8.6

By Dave Dornlas, Phototoday.net 

This month I had the opportunity to take Sony's new 10.1 megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-G3 for a spin. The G3 out of the box is a handsome and richly crafted camera. It's very small and its black brushed metal body features beveled edges. Overall the look is clean and sophisticated without the clutter of dials and  navigation devices. 

A smooth streamlined body 

With the camera's body closed the only controls you see along the top edge are a small button to review the shots you've taken and a larger shutter release button. Continuing along the right side when viewed from the back you'll find two more flush buttons. The first is the power button and the second connects the camera directly to a Wi-Fi network, a special feature of this camera.

One of the largest and highest definition LCD screens available

On the back side is a large 3.5" very high resolution(921,000 pixels) LCD touch screen that unlocks a vast selection of tools in this little gem of a camera.

When you slide the front side of the camera to the right the camera expands. On the front side you find a very nice Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 4x zoom lens(35-140mm "35mm" equivalent).

Flip the camera over and you'll now see that the wide and telephoto zoom control buttons have been revealed just below the shutter release on top.

All the basic features you'd expect

This camera features all the basic features you'll probably want; auto program modes, scene selection modes, optical stabilization, movie capability, red-eye reduction, face detection, intelligent scene recognition and a self-timer. It also allows for some things that you may not have even expected like "Smile Shutter".

Built-in Wi-Fi

One of the features that caught my eye when this camera was first announced in January was its built-in Wi-Fi. Here's what they said at the time:

“By collaborating with Sony to launch the first digital still camera with a built in Web browser and embedded access across the entire AT&T Wi-Fi service network, we’re enabling consumers to gain quick and convenient access to Sony’s Easy Upload Homepage through thousands of AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots across the country,” said Glenn Lurie, president of AT&T’s emerging device organization. “The wireless capabilities and cutting-edge features of the G3 camera with the reliable coverage of AT&T’s Wi-Fi network offers a unique consumer experience.”

And it's true. You can either try to use the built-in browser to go to a site of your choice or you can use one of the sites that have been optimized for the camera. Those sites are Shutterfly, YouTube, Picasa, Photobucket, and Dailymotion at this writing.

The Paint Pen 

At this point let me talk about the LCD screen. It is high definition(921,000 pixels) and it gets used a lot. It's where all the selections are made and the information for network connections is input for instance.

To input the information Sony has provided a "paint pen" stylus to tap out the selections. The instructions say to attach it to the carrying strap and keep it with you when you're using the camera and they aren't kidding. Adult fingers making selections on this touch screen just don't work well.

My first try from home

I decided to try the G3 out first with my home Wi-Fi network. You can start up the browser and connect to the access point by pressing the button on the side or going through the menu system.

I went through the menu system for my first try. The G3 searched for my access point and found it. I then confirmed the SSID and input the WEP settings I use. Then it connected. It took me to a special page, "Sony's Easy Upload Homepage".

I decided to upload three full size photos that I had made. I selected "Shutterfly" from the offerings. It took me to a special login page and presented me with a spot for my username and password. When I selected the username box I was taken to a miniature keyboard to input my account information. This is one place you need to use the paint pen.

Once logged in I was taken to a simple page that asked me to select the photos I wanted to upload. I selected the three files and then selected "upload".

It took 10 minutes to upload the three images and about a 1/4 of the battery charge. I was then asked if I wanted to notify anyone that I had added new photos to my Shutterly account. I put in one of my email addresses and let it send out a notice to me. 

A few minutes later the notification showed up in my inbox and the text read, "Below find the link to see images (photos and/or videos) sent via a Sony Cyber-shot® Digital Still Camera DSC-G3". I followed the link and found the shots in a folder for that day on Shutterfly. I could have put in multiple email addresses if I'd wanted to.

The whole process went very well and was relatively easy. The only thing that I noted was the battery consumption needed.

Uploading from a AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot

The next thing to try was the complimentary uploading from one of the thousand's of public AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots. This offer is good until Jan. 31, 2012.

The Starbucks Coffee down the hill from my home has an AT&T hotspot so I headed on down. I bought a donut and coffee then made two quick shots of them with the G3 and started up the Wi-Fi. I again let the camera discover the access point, which it did.

The AT&T access points weren't covered in the supplied manual so I assumed that all the information needed to connect was in the camera and followed the menu prompts to connect, which it did without a hitch.

I again inputted my Shutterfly information and started to upload the two full sized photos. The two images took 19 minutes to upload from this location.

A portable photo album with 4GB of memory included in the camera

All of the above would give you a camera that should make anyone happy right there, but this camera goes way beyond that. One feature that sets this camera apart is its 4 gigabytes of internal memory.

That's an unheard of amount of storage for a little digital camera. Sony's brochure likes to put it this way, "This is not just a camera, but a portable photo album...".

In fact, the internal memory will hold approximately 988 images shot at the camera's highest setting of 10 megapixels. With that type of memory on board you might never need to buy an optional Memory Stick Duo card for extra capacity.

If you drop down to 5 megapixel files, you can handle about 1566 images. According to the G3 manual that's easily good for prints a little over 8x10 inches. My guess is that's a bit conservative. Anyway, most folks still make a lot of 4x6 prints and from my experience 5 megapixel files work very well in photobooks too.

Internal Scrapbook feature

The idea of albums is taken even further in the G3 with the ability to let the camera format the images as scrapbook pages. By selecting the photos you want to use and then selecting a scrapbook page style, the camera will take those photos and place them in a variety of template pages. You can also manually select the photos for the different backgrounds. Three of the styles you can select from are shown above using shots I made with the G3.

The scrapbook pages can be viewed on the camera's LCD viewfinder, shown when the camera is hooked up to a TV, and saved to your computer to be printed or uploaded.

Slide shows

I used the supplied "cable for multi-use terminal" to hook the camera up to my 42" LCD TV to give the slide show feature a try.

The cable is one of the features that I enjoyed seeing used. Instead of supplying one cable to hook up to your TV and a separate USB cable to use to hook up to your computer they've combined both cable types into one. That means you have fewer cables to keep track of or misplace as I often do.

Once I got the camera hooked up to my set I found the slide show of the photos in the camera fun to watch and they looked great.

Especially impressive was the fact that they were accompanied by music and the photos were not simply static, but moved from side to side and zoomed in and out.

The slide show feature gives you many options. You can show all the images on the camera, you can show them by date, event, folder or just your favorites. It all depends on how you've used the camera's file system to store photos.

Another option filters your photos for a slide show by "face". You can select "all people", "children", "infants" and "smiles".

In all there are eight different "styles" of slide shows you can select to view the photos on the G3. 

Music to accompany those slide shows

One of the clever things about the G3 is that the camera stores music. There are 8 built-in music tracks that can be selected to accompany slide shows played by the camera. The output is monoral, but that's a lot better than nothing.

Sony goes even a step further and allows you to use supplied software called "Music Transfer" that helps you to change the internal music supplied with the camera. The manual says you can use MP3 and music from CDs.

Additional notes and comments 

• I loaded Sony's included software PMB or Picture Motion Browser. It worked well and was easy to figure out. I expected that relying on the internal memory might mean it would take longer to transfer images from the camera to my computer. In fact it worked quite quickly.
• One reason I use the manufacturer's supplied software is to give me full access to the meta information for each image file. As I expected, by using the Media File Information I was shown a wealth of information about how each image was made by the camera.
• One of the things I discovered is that the camera I tested thinks it is actually a Sony DSC-700. This leads me to believe that the guts of this camera come from the highly regarded DSC-700 in a different case with additional features like Wi-Fi capabilty added.
• If you have big hands as I do, you may find that more images will be lost because your fingers end up in front of the lens. The design of the G3 features the lens in the upper right corner of the camera when looking at it from the front. There is very little space between the edges of the camera and the lens. With the previously mentioned bevelled edges the camera can be hard to hang on to comfortably. My inclination was to hold onto the back of the camera but that doesn't really work because doing so activates controls on the touch screen.
• The camera's small size and angled edges means that you really should use the supplied wrist strap to hold on to the camera safely. If you don't like the idea of using a wrist strap, this may not be the camera for you.
• The LCD screen is one of the nicest I've seen. It's bright and sharp. It even works well outdoors under bright sunlit conditions.
• The photos that the camera makes are sharp and clear and should satisfy most folks.
• The Wi-Fi is an interesting addition to digital cameras, but the speed to actually upload images means you'd only want to upload at most a handful of full sized images at any one time. You could shoot much smaller files, but that defeats the quality and the reason to buy a 10 megapixel camera. Also, the battery consumption required might interfere with using this camera to take a lot of photos on a given outing. If you get this camera and plan to use the Wi-Fi on a regular basis, you should plan to keep at least one extra battery around.
• The browser is again interesting, but the fonts on most sites that haven't been optimized for the G3 will look very very small and make connecting to those sites difficult as I found when I tried to get to my Facebook account.
• There may be more value if additional social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are optimized for this camera.
• An additional feature that I didn't find would be the ability to produce an additional copy that's been for web use that could be uploaded from the camera.
• As mentioned before, this camera relies heavily on its touch screen and the system of menus presented on it. I found the menus to be some of the clearest and simplest to use with clean icons and logical layouts.
• For the most part I'm like most men and don't read instructions, or so my wife would claim. I found the paper copy of the manual for the G3 to be very clear and nicely put together. What was really nice though was to find an expanded well written PDF version, and had even more detail along with good practical advice for making great photos.

Conclusions

The Sony DSC-G3 is a very sharp camera in both its styling and the images it produces. Anyone who selects this camera will be pleased with the numerous features and options it has on board like scrapbooking and music for slide shows.

Those who actually need the abilty to be able to make high quality images and then to quickly transfer them to sites where they can be quickly viewed will be pleased with the built-in Wi-Fi capabilty of the G3 that allows it to be used at thosand's of public AT&T access points.

For those who might consider buying this camera with the thought of uploading a lot of images to, say, their Shutterly account while on vacation, they will probably be disappointed with the time it takes for the Wi-Fi to upload those images and the amount of battery power that is sucked up in the process.

While this camera will easily take care of the needs of a family, at nearly $500 it probably isn't the camera that mom and dad will invite the kids to use on a regular basis.

This camera is certainly a great pick for the right user, particularly one who can see its advantages for business use or for one who wants the highest level of technology out there in a very small package.

April 2009

Sony DSC-G3 Samples and Specifications 

 

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