The Sony Cybershot DSC-W7features a Carl Zeiss 3x optical zoom lens, a 7.2 megapixel sensor, and a large 2.5″ screen. The W7 is available from around £235 | $359, making the W7 extremely good value for money. The camera offers full manual controls and is quite compact - the 3x optical zoom lens is equivalent to 38-114mm on a 35mm camera. The camera is enclosed in a silver aluminium body (and is available in black as the W17). It records unlimited 640 x 480 / 30fps videos with sound when you use Memory Stick Pro memory cards. The camera’s quite compact (it will fit in trouser pockets), takes AA batteries and measures: 91 x 60 x 37.1mm (without protruding parts), and weighs 197g (without batteries and memory card)
Image quality is quite good, the images have good colour, saturation, contrast and good detail - however there is some purple fringing, and some images were quite soft. Images tend to come out of the camera looking quite good, however exposure of the clock towere wasn’t excellent, and blown highlights occured in the shops photo. The camera did a good job focusing the majority of the time, only slightly struggling in low light. Noise was fairly well controlled but resulted in loss of detail. I did not notice vignetting in photos. There is a good range of image sizes and a good choice of compression options. The macro mode is good, allowing you to be as close as 6cm away from the subject, this provides good (but soft) detail. Auto white balance and metering seemed to be good, however manually setting the white balance may often help acheive better results, and it could be worth checked the exposure mode. Red-eye was noticable. The movie mode is good, at 640×480 / 30fps with sound when using a Sony Memory Stick Pro card, the framerate is slightly reduced when using a normal Sony memory card.
The 7 megapixel Sony Cybershot W7 is a good digital camera. The easy to use camera is capable of good results, however you may have to work with the image(s) to get the best out of them - for example to produce sharper images, or alter exposure etc. The camera gives you a lot of control through manual settings, but is equally suited to beginners. The macro mode is good. The camera is very good value for money at around £235, and whilst the camera is good, due to the slight image quality issues I had with the W7 (soft, exposure, white balance, blown highlights) I would be much happier recommending the Fuji FinePix F10 to my friends and family over this camera.