Sony DSC-TX7 10.2MP CMOS Digital Camera with 4x

Lowest Price

:

Brand

: Sony

Model

: TX7 Blue

Reviewer: J. Gonzalez| Date:2010-02-14

I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHERE TO START, THIS CAMERA IS THE BEST PURCHASED I MADE IN A LONG TIME . I HAD A SONY CYBERSHOT T-20 8.1MP AND IT WAS ALSO A GREAT CAMERA AND WANTED TO UPGRADE TO A CAMERA THAT CAN RECORD MOVIES IN HD. WELL AT FIRST I ENDED UP BUYING THE 12.1MP W/ 4.6X OPTICAL ZOOM PANASONIC TS1 WATERPROOF CAMERA AND IT WAS AN OK CAMERA , IT HAD MANY FLAWS AND THE BATTERY COMPARTMENT FELT CHEAPLY MADE SO IT WAS NOT AS WATERPROOF QUALITY AS THE OLYMPUS ONES. ANYWAYS I ENDED UP RETURNING IT BECAUSE OF THE QUALITY PICTURES AND THE FACT THE CAMERA HAD MANY FLAWS IN TERMS OF QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE. SO I DID A LOT OF RESEARCH LOOKING FOR THE BEST COMPACT CAMERA OUT THERE THAT COULD FIT MY NEEDS. I WANTED TO TRY TO BUY THE CAMERA BUT THE PRICE WAS THE ONLY THING HOLDING ME . ANYWAYS AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION AND COMPARISON BETWEEN THIS CAMERA AND THE OTHER ONES OUT THERE , I FINALLY REALIZED WHY THIS CAMERA WAS THIS EXPENSIVE. THIS IS A TOP QUALITY BUILD CAMERA WITH A GREAT LENS, GREAT SCREEN AND PICTURE QUALITY AND OUTSTANDING HD RECORDING . I WAS ALSO WAITING FOR CNET TO GIVE A PROPER REVIEW ABOUT THE CAMERA BUT AFTER GOING TO YOUTUBE AND SEEING VIDEO RECORDING QUALITY AND PICTURES AROUND THE INTERNET , I DECIDED TO GO FOR IT . WHEN I FIRST TESTED IT , I WAS AMAZED BY THE WHOLE EASE OF USE AND ALL THE DIFFERENT FEATURES. BOTTOM LINE IT IS AN AMAZING CAMERA AND ITS A GREAT REPLACEMENT TO MY OLD SONY CYBERSHOT T-20 . I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THIS SAME CAMERA SOMEDAY WITH THE WATERPROOF/SHOCKPROOF FEATURE.

GREAT THINGS ABOUT THE CAMERA:
PARONAMA PICTURE : AMAZING FEATURE AND WORKS WAY BETTER THAN PREVIOUS MODELS WITH THIS FEATURE .

DIGITAL ZOOM : DOESNT JEPORDIZE PICTURE QUALITY AS MUCH AS OTHER CAMERAS OUT THERE , IT LOOKED PRETTY MUCH LIKE OPTICAL ZOOM THE WHOLE TIME. GREAT DIGITAL ZOOM.

3.5 LCD SCREEN.

1080i 60fps hd recording . amazing feature to record fast moving objects.

ease of use.

reads both memory stick pro duo and sd cards alike. (new feature from sony cameras)



CONS:

Expensive

Blue camera is a fingerprint magnet. ( I recommend to get the gray one , it looks like a dark gray instead of silver color)

Review from Review from Amazon

Reviewer: Jason Levitt| Date:2010-02-09

I am actually a Canon fan, but the TX7 is a small compact that takes good stills *and* video, as well as having a bunch of special features (panorama, HDR, etc). Canon currently has no feature match for the TX7 in a P&S style camera this small.

I think other reviews have done a great job of running down the pros and cons, but I have to say that, besides the slew of interesting features in such a small package, the thing that got me interested was that this is the first Sony camera that takes regular SDHC cards (it also can use the proprietary Sony Memory Sticks).

Summary:

Pros:

- Great camera features in a small package!
- May be the best low-light performer for its size
- AVCHD *and* MP4 video formats (your choice)
- SDHC *and* Sony Memory stick compatible (your choice)

Cons:

- Short-ish battery life and longer-than-average recharge time
- Poor lens cover design
- No audio leveling of any kind (not even a distortion light)
- Only one physical connection port and it's proprietary

As others have mentioned, the slide-down lens cover is the biggest ergonomic gaffe, though it's probably not going to be a dealbreaker for most folks (just adding a couple of little metal ridges to the cover would have significantly improved it). It's easy to run your thumb over the lens when pushing the cover down. People with large hands may also find the tiny buttons and skinniness of the camera a bit daunting.

The "blue" camera, by the way, is actually "dark blue" and is so dark that it looks like it's black - my friend and I could barely see any blue in it. (Is there also a "blue" as well as a "dark blue"? The photo on Amazon looks like a considerably lighter shade of blue than my camera).

The video capability has been heavily touted, but I haven't read much about the accompanying audio. Unfortunately, the camera provides no way to control the volume levels at all. You get whatever comes in the stereo mic on the front of the camera (Sure, it's just a tiny P&S, but if you're going to put high quality video formats into the camera, why not basic audio level control too?). There's not even a distortion light.
I tried recording a very loud band, and, of course, it did distort, but, overall, it definitely handled audio better than my Canon TX-1.

By the way Mac users, MP4 videos files show up in iphoto9, but AVCHD files do not. However, the SDHC card mounts as a disk on your desktop, so you can simply drag the AVCHD files to your hard drive when USB connected. There is also Sony's PMB software, but I didn't feel like installing it. There is the option of using TransferJet, but I don't feel like paying for the expensive TransferJet card and I don't have any TransferJet-compliant devices anyway.

Speaking of USB, one thing that bugged me is that the only I/O port on the camera is a proprietary Sony port. Sony supplies a little dock with the camera and your standard cables (HDMI, USB, etc) plug into the dock. Some may like that, but I prefer just plugging a USB cable directly into the camera. Fortunately, you can buy a USB cable that has USB on one end and the Sony proprietary connector on the other (I've seen a 6ft long one for $15 or so, but is there a short one?). The dock has a DC-in port but you have to buy an AC adapter for that. The manual says that the AC adapter does not charge the battery (I assume it just maintains the battery level at its current level).

The slide-down lens cover is a bad enough design (in an all too-important place) to give 1/2 or 1/3 of a star off. The lack of audio control is also problematical (at these prices, anyway). Battery life isn't that great, especially when shooting video. The proprietary connector port is a nuisance. I'm going to have to give this 4 stars though it does have a very nice feature set in a very small package.

Review from Review from Amazon

Reviewer: Photo-Am| Date:2010-02-07

I've got my Sony DSC-TX7 from Amazon just a few days ago. First impression - it's very small and thin. Feels very solid, a little bit heavy for its tiny size. A very dark blue color looks pretty good. A wrist strap has been already attached at the factory; otherwise it can easily slip out of your hands. It is very good for a party - you can put it into your pocket and do whatever you want, even dance, and this camera will not bother you with its presence.

The build quality is very good and I generally like its construction. The only issue is the shifting of the lens cover to turn camera on and off - that mechanism is pretty tight but the lens cover does not have any kind of prominence you could grasp to move that resisting shield up and down.

The startup time is pretty short - about 1 sec and the writing of a single picture into the memory card takes less than a second. In the burst mode you can take 10 shots for just 1 sec but then you should wait for about 10 sec while they're being writing to the memory. The menu provides a friendly interface to manage those groups of shots.

TX7 has a big 3.5" clear and bright high-resolution display with 920K pixels and a wide angle of view which is easily visible even in a direct sunlight. Most of the camera's functionality is accessible via that touch-screen display. TX7 has a very intuitive menu which is visually divided into 3 parts - narrow left and right vertical bars and a big central area. On the top of the right bar you can see the remaining battery charge indicator, available number of pictures, current shooting format and resolution. In the lower part there are the two buttons: Shooting Mode and Playback. If you touch the mode button a list of the available modes will appear in the central part: Intelligent Auto, Program Auto, iSweep Panorama, Movie, Anti Motion Blur, Hand-held Twilight, Backlight Correction HDR, and Scenes.

The left navigation bar has a "Menu" button on the top with 4 predefined icons below. It you touch that "Menu" button the central area will display icons of the parameters which in conjunction with the left-bar ones represent all the available shooting attributes for the currently selected shooting mode.

The most interesting is that if you touch the gearwheel icon on the top, then you can drag with your finger any of 4 icons from the left bar toward the center of the central screen area and drop it there. And then you can touch any other available icon from the central area and the similar way move it to the empty slot on the left bar. By doing this you can customize that quick-access menu separately for each shooting mode the way you need (make sure you touch firmly and drag slowly). And the same way you can choose those quick-access icons for the playback mode as well.

The TX7 model, unlike many other recent Sony P&S cameras, was lucky enough to get a genuine Carl Zeiss zoom lens. Its mechanics is just great - it performs zooming, auto-focusing, and the optical image stabilization in absolute silence. However if you start zooming while shooting video and then quickly release that tiny zoom lever you will get a kind of "clatz-z" short noise on the recording footage. If you try to release that lever very smoothly you will get gentler "click-h" replica.

The optical image stabilization of the Carl Zeiss lens in conjunction with the digital one provided by Sony works pretty well and allows to shoot pictures at a very low shutter speed around 1/8 - 1/10 sec so you can use lesser ISO and therefore get better picture quality in the low light condition. Auto focus works well in both daylight and low light situations, especially if in your settings the AF Illuminator is ON.

Just be aware the auto focus and image stabilization works all the time your camera is on. It might be convenient from one prospective, but on the other hand is sucks the battery much faster. On my Panasonic ZR1 and ZS3 I can choose a mode when the auto focus is activated only when the shutter button is half pressed and the image stabilization is turned on when you're actually making a shot. It would be nice if Sony provided the similar functionality which would greatly prolong the battery life. Meanwhile open the lens cover only when you're really going to make a shot and close it right after that.

The lens has a very convenient for the party (and any indoor) shooting zoom range starting with just 25 mm (of the 35-mm equivalent). It allows making good framing in pretty small compartments. The quality of the pictures taken at 25 mm are pretty good, however if you apply the full zoom - up to 100 mm (35-mm equivalent) you might experience some quality decrease. Generally when you zoom-in you expect to see the bigger size of the shooting object and to get more visible details. Most of the times when I took a picture of a certain subject first at wide 25 mm focal length and then stretched to the full 100 mm it did not show much more details. The image was bigger, as expected, but more fuzzy with less contrast and saturation. In many cases it was making an impression that when I applied the full 4x zoom, only about 50% was actually made by the optical adjustment while the remaining 50% were filled up with a kind of digital zoom, which obviously can not bring any more details. By the way, when I was physically walking 4 times closer to the subject and making a shot with the initial 25 mm (equivalent) - it showed much better sharpness, clarity, and contrast in comparison with the zoomed one. So if you want to get nice sharp shots - take pictures without much zooming. Also take into account the maximum aperture F/3.3 provided at the wide angle drops significantly to F/4.6 at the telephoto end which might cause camera to greatly increase ISO and apply more aggressive noise reduction which might result in loosing even more details.

From my prospective the noise reduction mechanism implemented by Sony in TX7 is the biggest Sony's achievement and at the same time a source of the biggest picture quality problems in this camera.

Actually the root cause is the "Exmor R" sensor: regardless of all that hype around its low-light performance my own experience with the two Sony cameras - WX1 before and TX7 now shows that sensor is actually at least as the same or even more noisy than its CCD predecessors. May be in theory it should have some advantage, but in the real implementation they either could not make it working properly or may be some other unpredictable problems of that design came to the scene and not only eliminated the anticipated positive effect but also spoiled the entire performance.

On many pictures taken with my old Sony DSC-T100 at its lowest ISO-100 I could not admit any noticeable noise. On some pictures taken by TX7 at its lowest ISO-125 some areas, which I guess the processing algorithm did not recognize, show pretty much noise. But that is a relatively rare case because most of the pictures are entirely processed by the Sony's noise reduction mechanism. IMHO the problem is - they're over-processed and even those which were taken at the lowest ISO.

That algorithm generally works very well for the evenly-painted surfaces. One of my indoor pictures displays a man surrounded with the light-painted walls and also a part of the glossy-black door is visible as well. The picture was taken at ISO-320, but that black door shines without a single pixel of noise and the bright walls look very good also. The man's clothes look also clean without any noise and the only problem is his face - it looks like having a thick layer of make-up on it. The picture was taken from the distance just about 3 feet but you can not see the man's eyelashes, and even his eyebrows have become partly obliterated by the aggressive noise reduction. His white of the eye does not show any blood vessels as it normally should be and looks like made of plastic.

It seems that noise reduction algorithm recognizes the 3 types of picture areas: relatively even panes, sharp edges or transitions, and the parts with a complex structure which can not be divided into the first two categories. It strongly removes the noise from those flat panes pretending they do not have any significant details which are worth to keep, it probably makes some sharpening to the edges, and I guess does nothing to the complex structures because it does not know what would be better to do with them. That assumption comes from the observation of some portrait-like photos taken in iAuto mode with the flash, where a mid-aged person has a plastic-even face with a few scars. The thing is that algorithm put heavy make-up everywhere on the man's face and therefore hid the sensor noise altogether with the most man's wrinkles, but it "recognized" a couple of most visible wrinkles as "edges" and therefore not only showed them but even made more sharp and contrast what made them looking like scars. The pictures taken with Panasonic ZS3 looked much more natural and showed the real skin texture as well as all the small and big wrinkles the way they were.

Sometimes I go to the park and take some shots there. On the pictures taken in the late autumn with my old Sony T100 I can recognize every branch on the numerous trees across a small pond. Of course they're not sharp, but at least I can see the distinct trees with distinct branches. On the similar pictures taken by TX7 many areas with those distant trees look like the picture was rubbed out and the average color was spread across those areas, however some odd tree branches can strike out of those indistinct areas. You would hardly enjoy the landscape pictures looking like that.

So that noise reduction algorithm would be mostly applicable for the indoor and in particular for party shooting because there is no distant trees or other objects of nature inside and most of the artificial indoor things are either of big or medium size with even panes and sharp edges.

TX7 has a Twilight Hand-held mode which can help either to improve a low-light picture quality when the using of flash is prohibited, or to get a picture in so challenging light conditions where otherwise you could not get one at all.

One more useful mode is "Backlight Correction HDR". It is not only about backlight conditions but it also might be very helpful in any case when your picture consists of the fragments with very different brightness. Camera does the two shots in a quick succession, each of which is optimized for the lightest and the darkest areas and then combines both of them into one shot. The actual efficiency of that method might vary and depends on the difference in the areas' luminance.

Another interesting feature is the iSweep Panorama mode. You can shoot either a horizontal or vertical panorama, and there are the two modes: standard and wide. A standard horizontal panorama can cover up to 180 degrees (or less), while with the wide one you could shoot almost the entire circle. Just remember: you should take your horizontal panorama within 10 sec. A standard vertical panorama covers about 130 degrees and the wide one - about 180 degrees, and you should complete it within about 8 sec. Be aware that zoom does not work in that mode and the recording is done at the most wide angle (25 mm equivalent focal length). The resulting horizontal panorama is not of a high quality - it has just 1080 pixels of the vertical resolution. If your subject does not fit the frame or if you want the better resolution you can do this trick: 1) switch to the vertical up-to-down panorama, 2) choose the wide one, 3) turn you camera 90 degree counter-clockwise and shoot your panorama from left-to-right within 8 sec. In this case you will have 1920 pixels vertically. One more hint: Before starting panorama point your camera to any object which is at the average distance and half press the shutter button to catch the right focus. Then holding the button half pressed, turn to the most left position, press the button all the way down and start shooting. It is important because if in your starting direction there is any object which is much closer than most of the objects in you panorama then you would catch a wrong focus and most of the panorama would be out-of-focus.

The most interesting and I believe the best feature in this tiny package is the full-frame High Definition 1080 60i AVCHD movie mode. Shortly - it's really good! Actually there are the 3 available movie modes: 1080 AVCHD, 720 MP4, and VGA 640x480 MP4.

In all the P&S cameras I have now and had before the VGA mode was nothing to write home about. In WX1 it was a complete trash and even in Olympus E-P2 it was not much better. In the EP2's review I wrote it's HD video clips in low-light look like a Wide-VGA, not HD. But with TX7 it's quite opposite: I've never seen so good VGA mode before! It actually looks more like a low-level 4:3 HD than a regular VGA. It's pretty clear and sharp, not much noise even in low-light environment. I guess it better fits for indoor shooting because it seems the noise reduction mechanism wipes out the small details. And one more thing - it's got a mono-sound.

The intermediate 720 MP4 mode seems good in case if you are not able to view the AVCHD files. Its quality is slightly lower than the 1080's one so I wouldn't recommend it if your computer allows handling the full HD clips.

And the full 1080 60i (interlaced) mode with AVCHD codec is just great. Note: sometimes you can see "60i" and the other times - "50i". The latter one is for PAL standard in Europe, while the "60i" one is for NTSC in the US. The quality is very good: really high resolution, sharp and clear. Both the auto focus and image stabilization work pretty well and no audible sound give them away. The Carl Zeiss lens zoom works absolutely silently so no disturbing sounds being recorded onto the footage.

What I like very much about TX7 as a high-quality camcorder - it has stereo microphones which point to the subject in front of the camera, which means they mostly catch the person's voice instead of collecting the noise from surroundings. On many other P&S cameras the microphones are pointed to the ceiling.

And the last advise: If you're shooting a movie clip of a person in front of the camera, make sure there is no any visible subject behind that person which is brighter or has much more contrast. In the movie mode you can not set the focus to the center or any other point you choose - the camera selects the focusing area on its own, and if there is something more bright or contrast behind the person you're taking picture of, then camera might focus on that subject behind and the person might be out of focus.

UPDATE: A series of photos taken indoors at low light with flash on the other day showed very different result than described above. Instead of "thick layer of make-up" it was quite opposite - all the small details on the face of a woman (in her mid-forties) as well as her eyes looked abnormally sharp and contrast. I had to reduce both sharpness and contrast in Photoshop to make it more natural, but finally it looked much better than the above mentioned one with the man's face under a heavy "make-up". The major difference was ISO: in the first case the camera in "iAuto" mode set automatically ISO=320 (on some other similar photos even 400) while this time I set manually in "P"rogram mode the minimum ISO=125. The pictures was slightly darker, but the skin texture was not missed and the overall result after some post-processing looked much better. So the rule number one of having nice pictures with TX7 is to keep ISO at its minimum whenever its possible.

In my Panasonic cameras (ZS3 & ZR1) the light sensitivity in both HD and VGA mode is about the same, but it turned out in TX7 in the VGA mode it's approximately twice higher than in HD and roughly 3 times more than the sensitivity of the Panasonic cameras. It's definitely a big plus for the low-light shooting.

So this Sony DSC-TX7 camera seems mostly suitable for shooting the indoor still pictures and is very good as a HD video camcorder.

Review from Review from Amazon

Reviewer: W. Otto| Date:2010-01-29

The DSC-TX7 was introduced this week (Jan 2010). Overall I am very pleased with it. I can finally take indoor pictures with an acceptable success rate, which has not been possible with older point and shoot cameras except in flash mode. In bright light conditions, or with flash, the camera performs comparably to other point and shoot cameras. Overall, pictures are sharp.

It is a very slim camera but the performance beats all the other similarly sized cameras I have tried. There is a light to help focus on a subject in dim light conditions.

The Cybershot Handbook manual is very cryptic about several things, but the camera performs well.

Although the manual is very unclear about this, you can save money on media by getting the SDHC class 4 memory rather than the Sony proprietary memory stick. The camera will use either type. The maximum memory card capacity is 32 GB, enough even for HD movies.

At first the CMOS sensor seems to give very good performance compared to the CCD competition, and the camera excels in low light conditions. Upon closer examination, you will find that Sony has put that fast processor to work doing aggressive noise reduction. In addition to this, the camera has a twilight handheld mode which snaps 6 different frames, and picks the best parts of each frame to synthesize a single final frame. So long as things do not move rapidly, and your lighting conditions do not vary (such as with fluorescent or sodium lights which tend to stobe) things work well. Combined with optical stabilization and the CMOS sensor, this makes possible shots that would be hopelessly blurred in the other cameras I have tried.

Another advertised trick is the backlight correction HDR or high dynamic range function. In this mode, the camera takes two exposures, with different exposure times, and combines the bright parts of the picture from one frame and the dim parts of the picture from the other frame. This is supposed to allow details in the shadow and details in the highlights to both be visible. In practice, this extends the dynamic range only slightly over that of other cameras. Flash can not be used, and pictures inside a darkened room with a sunlit view through the window are only partly compensated. I found the results to be less exciting than advertised. I think Sony needs to work on this particular mode.

The touch screen interface only takes a few minutes to get used to, and using the camera is a joy. In general the pictures are very good, but do not compete with the pictures from a full size DSLR.

TransferJet only works if you use TransferJet enabled Memory sticks.

The LCD screen is excellent with nearly a megapixel of resolution.

The panorama function is guided by the camera; all you have to do is tilt the camera from side to side. It takes the frames and stitches them automatically. I tried it inside my home office. It managed to stitch together a nice panorama when I thought it would be seriously messed up. Instead it worked fine, even in relatively low light.

Here are the test photos: [...]. You will notice that the tiny Sony compares very favorably to the much larger Fujifilm S7000. Please see the comments below for additional information.

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE IMPROVED

The camera lacks a way to record audio comments for pictures.

There is no histogram display that I can find on this camera to guide you on the exposure quality. I do not find any LCD screen to be good enough for that.

I would like the manual to be better written and contain detail such as, what are all those options in the P mode that are available? It seems Sony wants you to play with the camera until you find what you want.

There is not much control over the exposure except to take a shot, and if you don't like it you can adjust the exposure up or down. This is an awkward and time consuming process. You have to trust the camera to get it right, and there is no histogram to guide you in any event.

The zoom function relies on a tiny switch that seems out of place given that almost all other functions are available on the touch screen.

The automatic white balance function produced yellowish pictures under some incandescent lighting conditions. There really is not much excuse for this, because very inexpensive cameras are able to deal much better with this situation.

The battery charger seems to be very slow compared to the Canon.

That nifty sliding panel on the front is attractive and a neat idea, but it can be a little difficult under some conditions to slide open or shut. If there were some grooves to give you a better grip it would help. Surely someone could have designed some attractive grooves.

I am not sure what the point of the little docking station is. A simple USB connector would have been just as effective and saved us all $20. Or the money could have been used to supply a much needed carrying case.

Review from Review from Amazon