First off, if you are looking for a professional quality digital camera, you need not read any further. Go elsewhere because this product is not one of them. As the manufacturer SONY explains about the product, DSC-P1 is not designed for professional photography applications. The letter 'P' in its model name stands for 'play' or 'pocket' according to SONY's very own product planner. If you want to read more about that and product background, here is the link: http://www.sonystyle.com/digitalimaging/p1story.htm

With that said, here is what an actual user, myself, has to say about DSC-P1's features, benefits, and all of its dirty details.
The camera features 3.34 megapixel CCD with resolution from 640x480 up to 2048x1536. Such high resolution actually can compensate for one of the camera's own cons which I will get into later. Anyway, the benefit of having such high resolution is that you don't need to get too close to an object in order to take a close-up shot. You simply take a picture at higher resolution without getting too close to the object to prevent camera from going out of focus. Then in a photo-editing software (the camera is bundled with a video editing and a photo editing software package) you simply crop the picture to shape it the way you want it. Or if you are just taking a picture of some beautiful scenery, the higher resolution also helps. It is like getting all your pictures developed at sizes larger than 5x7"!
This brings up my next issue with the camera: bundled 8MB memory stick. I am throughly disappointed at SONY for not including a memory stick with larger capacity. Higher picture quality means more memory usage per picture. And included 8MB memory stick really is not appropriate for any practical application of the camera. I am currently using a 128MB memory stick and take most of my pictures at 1600x1200. With 8MB memory stick, I can only take no more that several pictures at such resolution. So if you are genuinely interested in this camera, be prepared to spend another $100 or so for a larger capacity memory stick (I would say you need at least 64MB to take decent amount of pictures without having to run to your computer to dump the cache).
Now for some fun tools that the camera provides: special effects and A/V application. When I say 'special effects,' please don't get too excited. They are no more than simple filters to change the feel of pictures. DSC-P1 has 'b & w' effect for taking b/w pictures, 'sepia' for giving pictures 'aged' look of brown overtone, 'solarize' for giving uh...solarized look, and 'neg. art' to make pictures show as they would on actual film. I find most of these effects not very useful when it comes down to actual picture taking. They are mostly just for fun. If you are at the level of tweaking pictures using filters found on high-end software tools such as Photoshop and CorelDraw, these on-board effects would not even come close. Besides, if you are already doing that, you should really be considering a professional grade camera, not this one. DSC-P1's A/V capability is strictly designed for email purpose or other basic video application. After all, this is a digital 'still' camera, not a camcorder. DSC-P1 allows maximum of 15 sec. video recording time per shot at 160x112, 320x240, or 320 (HQ). This is a nice feature to have when you are on vacation and faced with one of those moments that you want to capture but a still shot just won't cut it.

When I first started using this camera, I had a hard time with its delayed response in taking pictures. If you want to take a picture of a moving objects such as my cat for example, the task becomes quite tricky. Certainly, it is possible but you have to get used to the way DSC-P1 responds to your touch. Even then, I still wouldn't recommend using DSC-P1 to take such pictures. It just is not very reliable for such application.
Another problem I've encountered with the camera has to do with its sluggish focusing capability with close objects. For just taking close-up shots of things for normal display purpose, you can get away by deploying the alternative method I've mentioned earlier (when I was talking about the camera's high resolution). If you need to take a close-up shot of something at very high resolution, however, then you are in big trouble. It just won't focus.

Overall, the camera is very compact, pretty easy to use and navigating its menu structure is a breeze with its 4-way button. The camera does have some other basic features found in most compact automatic 35mm cameras such as built-in flash, red-eye adjust, focus-lock, zoom, etc. But DSC-P1 gives you a bit more options as far as adjusting white balance, flash intensity, sharpness, exposure. Hey after all, we are living in a digital era and this is a digital camera. I just wish that the price wasn't so high and the mentioned problems didn't exist.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 575.00