Digital Camera Review : Sony Cyber-shot T2 - 2

Gadget Review - Wednesday December 12, 2007

Digital Camera Review : Sony Cyber-shot T2

The built-in 4GB capacity is both a curse and a blessing. While it's liberating to forgo storage cards, it's also infuriating when the only way you can transfer out the pictures is though a special Sony cable. Of which there is only one in the box.

Losing it in the middle of a three-week vacation would spell the end of your photo-taking adventure. You would need one to transfer out old pictures to make way for new ones. Good luck if you are vacationing in Timor-Leste.

The T2 is not all doom and gloom though the Cyber-shot T2 packs along Sony's new Smile Shutter feature. When it's in the mode, there's no need to hit the shutter button as the camera will snap a picture the moment it detects a smile.

In order for the T2 to adapt to different types of grins (coy, inane, brazen, lip-splitting, teeth-showing), there are three degrees of smile detection. Sony claims you will never miss a smile again. So it's cause for celebration.

That is up till you start using it.

You see, people want to look good in pictures. So they like to be prepared. For most, there's a certain smile for a certain occasion. Your role is to make sure that they do look good. Using an automated system means the camera may capture the wrong degree of a smile while your subject is still trying to work up a truly rictal grin.
We love the innovation that went behind it, but we don't particularly feel mushy about it. In real-life tests, it is exasperating that what the Smile Shutter considers as medium sensitivity is subjectively different from what your subject thinks. And the misunderstanding compounds when you have more than one subject in the frame. Imagine the camera firing off before both of them have presented their best smiles.

On the other hand, the face-detection autofocus works a treat at multiple face spotting. In a quirk that beats out non-touchscreen cameras, you can set the primary face by simply touching the face on the screen.

The T2 provides a number of ways to present your pictures. It can be in albums, share tags or scrapbook. The last is a slideshow that is reminiscent of paper-based ones. You can also "paint" over your pictures with a built-in paint program, though without pressure level detection it's really more gimmicky than anything else.

All these fancy tricks only go to prove that the T2 is primarily a fun camera. That the T2 doesn't include aperture- and shutter-priority modes is a given at the price. But no custom white balance setting?

Oddly, despite the T2's status as a bundle of fun, it's speedy when it comes to performance. From start to first image capture, it took 2.95 seconds which is a little quicker than the T200's 3.8 seconds.

Noise at ISO 800, 1,600 and 3,200

But when it came down to shot-to-shot times, the T2 and T200 were almost the same; 1.41 seconds (without flash) and 2.2 seconds (with flash) versus 1.58 seconds (without flash) 2.06 seconds (with flash).

For its class, the T2 scores fine on macro shots and has decent dynamic range, though it tends to lose out a bit on shadow details as we can see in the shots of the limes, peppers and the rope. The subtle tones in the green channel are captured well and details are nice and crisp.

Decent dynamic range with good subtle tones in green channel

But the T2 has some problems with highlights, with chromatic aberration occurring in the three pictures, though it's not painfully evident unless the image is subjected to scrutiny.

Exposure is well-balanced, but while the automatic white balance works most of the time, there are occasions when pictures tend to be slightly reddish under florescent lighting. As for tungsten lighting, the performance is not worth mentioning at all.

Like most compact cameras, at ISO 400 and 800, we began to detect slight noise and speckles. Beyond that at ISO 1,600 and 3,200, details were muffled and noise was very much evident.

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