Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T99

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T99 is a good looking camera having an excellent feature set. But the small land slippery body might come in the way of comfortable shooting and while testing, I found that the touch screen interface was a bit laggy. That said, Sony has packed in a lot of features here in an ultracompact chassis and I would recommend you to buy this camera only if you want a touch screen. If you can do without touch screen interface, there are better options available.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T99 photos look soft and they lack in fine detail when you view it at full size except for the ones that are taken in macro. A camera having 14 megapixel resolution should have good room for cutting down the images. If you like cropping a lot of subjects and then want to print 13×19 photos, I would recommend you to look elsewhere. There are other cameras in the sub $250 category.

The overall photo quality on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T99 was brought down by the lens distortion. Sony has kept the barrel distortion in check for most parts. On left side, I saw some asymmetrical distortion. There isn’t any sign of pin cushioning on the zoom’s long end but there is distortion in corners which pulls the subjects up and in. Lens isn’t really sharp; the quality is OK in center but in the corners and sides, it drops off. This makes the subjects look smeary and soft. There is some fringing in the photos’ high contrast areas. All this distracts a lot when the photos are seen at full size or if they are cropped heavily. If you are not going to do either of these, there are chances that you will like results of this camera.

Video quality of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T99 was good and it was on par with a mini camcorder. There is 4x zoom available while video recording. But if you wish to see the HD movies and the photos from the camera to a large HDTV, you will have to use a proprietary component cable which connects to multiuse terminal on the bottom of the camera.

If you consider the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T99 to be better than a typical camera phone and if you use the pics mostly for sharing on the Web, this camera is a good choice. It is not good for printing though. The photo quality and performance is nowhere close to what you get on the higher end touch screen cameras from Sony.