Sony DSC-F505V "CyberShot"

A typical Playback screen, the last image is brought up fullscreen when you switch the mode dial to Play. The menu can be popped up by pressing the 4-way jog switch.

The Index mode shows six thumbnails to let you quickly search through stored images and select one for fullscreen playback.

Playback zoom with up to 5x magnification. Once enlarged you can pan around inside the image using the 4-way jog switch.

Movie playback screen with progress bar display

The Play mode Menu options:

• INDEX:   6 thumbnail mode
• DELETE:   Erase images
• FILE:  Format the memory card, Rotate portrait images, Slide show (start, stop, set interval), Print Mark (embed DPOF printing information), Protect images from deletion
• TOOL:  Copy or Resize images
• SETUP:  Video output (NTSC or PAL), menu language (Japanese or English), set the time and date and turn, turn button beeper on or off or adjust the LCD backlight.

Steve's Conclusion

If you're looking for an inconspicuous camera the F505V isn't for you. I often had people staring at me when they saw me holding it out like a raygun from the Star Wars movies. It is sure to attract major attention whenever you pull it out of your camera case. No matter how hard you try there's just no way to hide that big, fat, long lens. The "fit and finish" of the F505V is excellent, the body and lens is metal construction and seems very durable. The back of the camera is all but consumed by the large 2" color LCD leaving very little room for controls so you'll find some on top and on the side of the lens too.

The F505 takes great pictures but even with its hybrid LCD viewfinder it is not that easy to use this camera outdoors. If the sun is shining directly on the LCD it works great but in most cases you are usually somewhere between bright sunlight and shade. When are the designers going to learn that cameras must have optical viewfinders? LCD-only digicams require you to hold them out in front of you to frame the shot and this just isn't natural. A camera is easier to use when it is pressed up against your eye. There's no problem with sunlight washing out the display and it's a lot easier to follow rapid moving action subjects.

The F505V's 5x zoom lens is excellent, it's a Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonar and nobody knows how to make lenses better than Zeiss. I did find the zoom action to be a bit fast for my taste and would have prefered a slower mechanism. The macro closeup capability is awesome and lets you get as close as 2cm but at that extreme range the lens can actually block the light falling on the subject. Autofocus is faster than average and highly accurate under most normal lighting conditions. Manual focus is available via the use of a ring on the end of the lens. It is "fly by wire" electronic focusing with considerable fine adjustment. The display on the LCD screen is magnified 2x while you are turning the ring.

The F505V is equipped with a USB port and it is very fast. There is no need to buy an optional card reader if your computer has a USB port. The download speed is quite impressive but the included "Lite" software leaves a lot to be desired. To read in the images from the F505V I used the MSAC-PC2 PC card adapter that came with my D770. Sony also now has a USB reader for Memory Sticks and a floppy disk adapter. It's been a year since we reviewed the F505 and the Memory Stick has shown up in a lot of other Sony cameras and it's now available in sizes up to 64MB with 128MB and 256MB sticks due in 2001.

The built-in flash is mounted out on the top/front of the lens. It's really the only place they could have put it but it's way to close to the lens as such is very prone to redeye. The F505 did not include a red-eye mode but I'm happy to report that they have put it on the new F505V. They included a dedicated connector so you can use the external Sony HV-FL1000 flash if you need more flash coverage and the ability to get the flash "up and away" from the lens to further reduce redeye problems.

Battery life is good with the NP-FS11 3.6v InfoLITHIUM rechargable pack and is rated at 60-70 minutes and can be extended by switching off the LCD backlight as often as possible. Recharging takes about 2 hours and the charger can also function as an AC power supply. As with all of Sony's InfoLITHIUM cameras the F505V displays remaining battery time in minutes on the LCD screen.

The menu system is often confusing because there are a lot of options and image sizes and modes available. It's generally a minimum of three or four button pushes just to change a simple setting. I find the small 4-way jog switch convenient but somewhat difficult to operate with my large fingers and clumsy thumb. To OK your selection requires that you push the 4-way switch directly in the center and for some reason that only works 1 out of 3 times for me. And let's not forget that all menu operations as everything else with this camera, is dependant on being able to see the color LCD.

Exposure options range from a fully automatic mode to pre-programmed modes for landscape, panfocus, twilight or twilight+ as well as shutter speed priority and aperture priority modes with 1/3 step increments. Metering is normally center-weighted averaging but you can switch to spot metering when necessary. White balance is usually spot on when set to automatic but can be manually set to accomodate the existing light conditions or you can use one of the presets for outdoor (sunny) or indoor.

So now we get down to the nitty-gritty, image quality. Sony has done something rather unusual with the F505V and that is to only use a portion of the imager's total resolution to create the finished image. We're not figuring in the pre-JPEG interpolated 2240 x 1680 image here, just the native 1856 x 1392 image. The story basically is that they put the higher resolution imager in the same package that was originally designed for the 2.11-megapixel imager. The A/D converter is now 12-bits which gives you a higher level of dynamic range and that combined with using the "sweet spot" of the imager yields excellent images.

Sony used too much compression on even the highest quality JPEG images in the F505 but a year ago it was a problem of low capacity Memory Sticks being the only storage medium. The high res JPEGs from the F505V are marvelous, well saturated and properly white balanced with very little (almost no) chromatic abberations and they are sharp as a tack thanks to that Zeiss lens. Many people asked for it so now the F505V has an uncompressed TIFF mode for the ultimate print-quality image. But you better have a 64MB Memory Stick as each of those TIFF images is 8 megabytes.

If you can live with the limitations of an LCD-only camera then you'll probably be quite satisfied with the F505V. If not then I suggest that you look at one of the other cameras that offers both an LCD and an optical viewfinder.