Small Size, But Does it Perform?

I am a confessed digital camera addict. It all started a few years ago when I picked up an Olympus 340L, continued with a Canon S20, Nikon 990, and then a Sony DSC-P1. I really enjoyed the 990, but decided I wanted a smaller camera to take everywhere, so I sold the 990 and bought the P1. How did it perform? Well I received this little unit with high expectations (although not expecting it to perform at the level of the 990), but was disappointed. Here’s my feelings on the camera:

The Good

It is immediately obvious upon holding this little unit that it is well made. The case is a very sturdy metal alloy that feels solid, VERY solid. The camera is small enough to fit in your pocket, but is a little thick and so is a tad bulky when in a pocket (not quite as small as the Canon S100). The buttons are arranged well and the camera feels comfortable, if not a little unstable in the hand. The lens has a self-contained retracting cover, which is VERY nice and will prevent you from having to deal with the lens cap like on the Nikon cameras. The LCD is a little small, and smudges easily, but otherwise is quite clear. If you have the over 40 “I can’t read without holding my arms way out without my glasses” syndrome (like my dad), you may want to reconsider because the menu writing is SMALL, REALLY small. Contrary to what I’ve read in many of the online reviews, I thought the power up time and lag time (the time between when you press the shutter button and a picture is actually taken… a problem on all digital cameras) were quite good. The camera’s buffer is a little smaller than what I am used to on a Nikon, so the short delay while writing the picture to the card was noticeable, although not bad. The interface with the PC is good. The camera connects via a proprietary USB cable to your computer and is recognized as a “removable drive” which you can browse like a hard drive… very nice. This beats the crap out of having to use proprietary software to “download” images from the camera and was surprisingly fast. The battery is a small Lithium Ion “Infolithium” rechargeable battery that you can only get from Sony. The battery life seems to be decent, but the real positive of this battery is that it tells you, in minutes on the LCD, how many minutes you have left. Nice touch. The movie feature does work very well, but I didn’t buy this camera for that feature so I will leave it to the other reviewers.

The Bad and The Ugly (The Pictures)

The real problem with this camera for me came when I turned it on and started using it. Coming from a Nikon 990 I was not expecting it to match what I was used to, but the pictures were just horrid. I must have taken 100 low-light pictures and 1, yes ONE was good. And contrary to what I have read about this camera, most of the pictures did not suffer from a weak flash problem as much as they did just horrible exposures by the camera’s metering system. Most of the pictures were blurry and out of focus, including those taken on a Bogen tripod with the camera on time-delay and decent ambient light. The color saturation was good, but very few of the pictures had any hint of sharpness. The other major (THE major problem for me) was the camera’s tendency to overexpose at close distances. When I say close, I don’t mean 4 inches, I mean 4-7 feet. I take most of my shots of family and friends and the Nikon has always done a fabulous job of accurate skin tones and good metering. My poor wife suffered through 50 shots with this camera in various lighting situations (all indoor with good ambient light at night) and NONE of them were up to par in my opinion. The problems (especially the overexposure) were not corrected with manipulation of the P1’s EV and Flash power control. If like me, you take pictures of people, this is a nightmare. Most of these were taken indoors at night with the flash, but in situations that my 990 and even the S20 would have metered and handled well. Not so with the P1. Another area which suffered was macro performance, which was horrible. I wasn’t expecting it to live up to what is arguably the 990’s strongest area, but this camera’s macro was for my purposes, useless. The grand finale was when I took the camera outside and took a few snapshots under a cloudy sky during the daytime. The images were again blurry (especially at full zoom) and not sharp. In my opinion, this is unacceptable performance for a $800 camera, even when you factor in the small size. The user interface on the P1 is decent, but one area is just stupid: the way it reports space on the memory card. Instead of telling you how many pictures you have left, it tells you how many you have taken and gives a graphical representation of the space left on the memory stick. This is inconvenient and irritating. Speaking of memory sticks, I think that the P1's use of the memory stick is another negative of this camera. Sony has taken much criticism for using proprietary memory, and I feel it is justified. Memory sticks are more expensive than Compact Flash and offer no obvious advantage. On another note, the playback menu is decent, but not as good as it could be. In playback mode, the images take a long time to load, although you can scroll through them by number and then have them displayed. This is far inferior to the Nikon system, which generates a small, low quality image as you scroll through the images (so you can see what they are as you scroll through) which resolves into the real image if you pause (much like interlaced GIF images on the internet). It is possible to delete the image you just took by waiting for it write to the card and then pressing the menu pad. This takes longer than the Nikon system of giving you the “trash” option after every shot before it is written to the card.

Conclusion

So I am biased toward Nikon cameras and I hope that you realize that by now. I was expecting too much from the P1, but was surprised as just how poorly it performed, especially in the low-light department. I decided to return this camera and buy a Nikon Coolpix 880 which is a little larger, but has many more features than the P1 plus proven Nikon image quality and mechanics (most of the features of the 990 plus a great scene mode). Plus, the CP880 (even with 2 batteries and an extra charger) was less expensive than the P1. I think that Sony has the right idea with packing such a large 3.3MP sensor into such a small camera, but for me it would never work because of the quality of indoor people photos that I demand. If you take mostly outdoor, well-lit photos then maybe this camera is for you, but if you demand any quality in low light situations I would look elsewhere (Nikon 880, Sony S70, Upcoming Sony S75, Canon G1). I hope that this has helped some of you make a better decision on purchasing a digital camera… have fun!


Recommended: No