Electronics : Sony DSC-W300 Titanium-Coated Digital Camera - Black (13.6MP, 3x Optical Zoom) 2.7" LCD

Rating: - Great camera but will it be reliable?
I've bought Sony cameras because I believed they had a reputation for reliability, however both this and my previous Sony have both gone faulty within the guarantee period. This camera let me down on a once in a lifetime holiday. Sony are repairing but the memories are lost for ever. My personal experience therefore is that Sony do not make reliable cameras and I would not buy another Sony camera based on this.

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Rating: - Impressive + unbeatable when reunited with its accessories
All features work well and very easy to use. Think of a Rolex submariner watch. Elegant enough for boardrooms, parties and tough enough for adventures. (But for diving, make sure it's in its underwater-case). Expect decent quality both from the camera and the pictures it will take. Make sure to use protective stickers on the LCD, so it could last considerably long with its titanium coating. The only negative words should go to the impractical viewfinder. It's just way too tiny to be of any use. The accessories are bit overpriced, but could worth buying.
Sony has just set a new tone for Point-and-Shoots and ad-hoc accessories.

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Rating: - Great point and shoot compact!
This is a great compact camera. It just sits on your palm snugly. The camera looks and feels solid but not too heavy in the pocket. It is also fast and responsive when taking pictures. The quality of the picture is beyond expectation from a point and shoot compact. If you are the regular SLR user but get fed up with the bulky camera then this compact camera would be the great alternative. The viewing LCD is big without the touch screen which is great as the touch screen would eventually get 'tired' and unresponsive with use anyway.
All the ISO associated noise etc are all common problems with any compacts anyway but in day to day 5x7 prints and web use, it gives really great pictures.
There is even a histogram too!
After using it a for a while, my wife loves it so much. She wants to add that it sits in the handbag really well without taking too much space among her other things (goodness knows what else she put in her handbags). The slideshow which can be shown on TV is pretty impressive.

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Rating: - Fit For The Job.
I must start by saying that this camera (DSC-W300) is the first digital camera I have purchased. I have some experience with 35mm SLRs, but I wanted a versatile piece of kit that would enable me to upload pictures to the internet, print directly from the camera, and add images to my PlayStation 3 console.

The first thing I should note, and as indicated by the above comments, is that I think compact cameras are fundamentally utility devices. There are many people on the internet who criticise this model's unsuitability for longer-distance and wide-angle photography, and the lack of many video modes. On the first point, I would say this: compact cameras are designed for high quality close-up images (family and friends groups, primarily) and are not designed for vary-focal images (e.g., someone standing 300 yards in front of Mount Fuji and expecting both to be in focus perfectly). On the second point: movie modes on a still camera are a lovely bonus for a camera but are an add-on that should not be counted towards any final evaluation of the product. Sorry to sound snotty, but those are the basics.

So, does the W300 add up for the basics? Clearly, the Carl Zeiss lens is going to deliver on the bread and butter family snaps that is always going to be the brief for compacts. The 13.9 megapixel rating is useful, although the 8MP setting offers fantastic quality images that can be converted to 16:9 1080p for viewing on televisions. It is true that the .9 of a MP seems to have been lost in the implementation of actually taking photos, as the highest setting is the flat 13MP!

There are the usual ISO presets, automatic and night settings, as well as smile detection technology. Again, the brief of a compact camera has been observed well by Sony, weighing easy-of-use against range of use. This is again apparent in the neat Movie Mode: the 640 "fine" and "standard" image settings are perfectly acceptable for on-the-fly movies showing the drunken antics and practical jokes that are the stock-in-trade of the light-hearted situations that the W300 predominantly deals with. The MPEG-1 video format is also compatible with Windows Media Player and the PS3, among others.
The software that comes with the W300 enables the user to add their photos to a calendar on their PC, and even add location details for each picture via internet maps. The standard easy-to-use image manipulation features are there, again underlining the pick-up-and-play nature of compacts. Videos can be converted to WMV, too.

On the downside, the zoom is only x3, meaning for the occasions when it is needed it is not as versatile as, say, some of the Panasonic models. Secondly, the battery life is not quite what I expected (quoted in the manual at 150 minutes -with LCD panel switched on- for taking pictures alone), and the charge time for a full battery is a whopping 330 minutes. These are the only significant drawbacks to the camera that I have found thus far.

Build quality is excellent, as expected from a Japanese-made product. The LCD screen is more durable than I had expected, and its 2.7" size is more than large enough for viewing back and editing any images.

My first impressions of this product are very positive. As a compact camera the DSC-W300 is a very capable camera, with many of the intelligent design features expected from Sony. However, for those wanting a decent amount of zoom or other quasi-SLR features, it may be best to go for another model, or just take the plunge and go for an SLR instead.

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Rating: - Point and Cyber-shoot
I bought the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W300 to compliment the big Sony Alpha A700 DSLR I also own. The A700 is a fantastic camera, but just too big and awkward in some situations. What I didn't want to lose though was too much of the quality of the DSLR. As a pocket-able alternative the DSC-W300 does not disappoint, it's small, robust, and produces brilliant pictures. Most people picking up this camera will probably go straight into the easy modes, but dig deeper and there's a whole host of interesting options. For me the top functions were absolutely brilliant low-light non-flash modes (better than the A700!) and that when changing shooting modes if reflects the colour balance on the LCD viewfinder (which you can turn of and use a physical viewfinder if preferred or you want to extend battery life).
I've seen criticism of the camera's 3x optical zoom; this is only an issue when using the camera at it's full 13.6 mega-pixel range. Drop the resolution and the magnification (albeit via digital means not optical) increases correspondingly.
Short-comings: My only niggles concern the camera's movie modes. Firstly the maximum resolution is just 640x480, although the frame rate is good. Secondly you need to pick your zoom level before you start shooting, as once you've started you cant change it.
Overall an amazing bit of kit, capable of producing some amazing photographs.