Sony CD-RW digital camera

A fantastic package for the serious photographer.

Sony has a new twist on its Mavica range of digital cameras, which have traditionally stored their images on floppies. The new model has a built-in CD-RW recorder, and will record shots to 156MB mini-8cm CD-RWs or CD-Rs.

The CD-300 is endowed with a 3.3megapixel CCD, 2.5in LCD monitor and a Carl Zeiss f2-f2.5 zoom lens, with a 35mm equivalent range of 39-117mm. There's a proper hot shoe for a flashgun, as well as the integrated pop-up flash.

As is Sony policy these days, there's no optical viewfinder, but the CD-300 has battery life to spare. There's enough for a full day's shooting, even if you're being fussy over your composition and using the LCD to review the results, as we were during testing.

We took 70 shots and the camera still estimated that we had around 40 minutes left before we'd need to plug it in to recharge. To conserve juice even more, you can switch off the LCD's backlight and use ambient light instead, although you need bright conditions for it to work.

Transferring pictures to a PC can be done by putting the disc in a CD-ROM drive - there's an adaptor included if your drive spits out 8cm discs - or via the camera's USB interface. The disc needs to be 'finalised' before it can be read by a normal drive, which takes a minute or so.

For USB transfer you need to install the supplied copy of Adaptec DirectCD, after which you can access the camera as a drag-and-drop CD-RW drive.

The CD-300 is flexible enough to keep enthusiasts happy. There are aperture and shutter priority modes, or you can choose full manual exposure. You can also select manual focusing, then use the LCD to zoom in and pan around a shot once it's been taken to make sure it's sharp. Crucially, you can change exposure modes on the spur of the moment without faffing with on-screen menus.

As with an SLR, mode selection is done with the top-mounted rotary control, and dedicated buttons above the LCD select manual focus, spot metering, exposure lock and exposure nudging.

This is great stuff, since having 156MB to play with allows carefree experimentation without the fear of running low on memory. Even at the highest-quality setting, 2048 x 1536 resolution and low compression, the CD-300 will accommodate about 80 shots per disc. If you can live with 1600 x 1200, you'll get over 130. And if you want to get silly, set it to 640 x 480, then head on out and take 1300 photos.

The storage bonanza means you can record audio annotations with your images, or shoot short MPEG clips, but the camera's RAM buffer limits the maximum length per clip to a minute at 320 x 240.

With the lower compression mode selected, the CD-300's quality is very high. It's still not quite up to the standard of Nikon's Coolpix 990 in terms of sharpness and colour balance, but it's not far off, although greens were a little over-saturated. With standard compression at 1280 x 1024, things are still very good and compression artefacts are minimal.

There is a lossless tiff recording mode, but the difference in quality between that and the low compression mode is tiny.

Faults with this camera are minor: the most obvious is its size. It weighs 640g and, despite the use of 8cm discs, it's not svelte: those with smaller hands will probably have some difficulty using it one-handed. An irritation with CD-RWs is that deleting a file doesn't free up space on the disc - you need to reformat to recover the lost capacity. The camera can do this for you, but it takes about five minutes and you need to put it down on a level, vibration-free surface for the duration.

The delay when writing an image file to disc is a little more than some solid-state cameras at a couple of seconds, but it's less of an issue than we thought it might be.

The CD-300 is a great camera, especially for the serious amateur. And if you can live with its bulk, you won't be disappointed with its performance.

Contact
Sony: 08705 111 999 www.sony.co.uk