Pros & Cons
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- Sharp design.
- Good image quality.
- Decent low-light shooting with low image noise up to and including ISO 800.
- Responsive touch screen.
- Attractive, easy-to-use UI.
- Can use optical zoom and refocus during video recording.
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- Only-average speed.
- 3-inch LCD only shows 2.5-inch window when shooting at full resolution.
- Poor connectivity options.
Sony Cyber-shot T110 Specs
| 35mm Equivalent (Telephoto) | 100 mm |
| 35mm Equivalent (Wide) | 25 |
| Battery Type | Lithium Ion |
| Display Resolution | 230000 |
| HDMI Output | Proprietary |
| Memory Card Format | Memory Stick Pro Duo |
| Memory Card Format | Secure Digital Extended Capacity |
| Optical Zoom | 4 x |
| Sensor Resolution | 16.1 |
| Type | Compact |
| Video Resolution | Yes |
The 16.1-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-T110 ($219.99 direct), the least expensive touch-screen shooter in Sony's lineup, is a great little camera. Its good-looking, the touch screen works well, and photos and HD video look sharp. The T110 isn't completely perfect, but its issues are relatively minor including poor connectivity options and the large 3-inch display showing only a small 2.5-inch image when shooting at maximum resolution. Otherwise, though, the T110 is a solid, affordable touch-screen camera.
Design
The T110 is chic little camera, available in silver, black, red, pink, and violet. I tested a silver model, which resembles the brushed aluminum shell of an Apple MacBook Pro. Its smooth, rectangular body looks very aerodynamic, with curved edges and flat surfaces. The few physical controls (Power button, shutter release, and a zoom rocker) on the top edge of the camera sit flush with the body; even the zoom rocker is just a little nub that moves back and forth inside the camera, but it still feels comfortable to use. The lens is protected by a sliding shield panel that automatically powers the camera on and off (though there's also the aforementioned Power button).
The back of the camera looks like a palm-sized HDTV. There are no buttons, just a touch-screen LCD that sits within a flat black border covered by a glass pane. This design is typically referred to as an Infinity Display; it creates the illusion that the display extends to the end of the camera body.
The display itself isn't particularly impressive, and comes with an odd quirk. The 3-inch touch screen has a mediocre 230K-dot resolution, at a 16:9 aspect ratio, while the camera's sensor is 4:3. If you shoot your photos at full resolution, the screen displays it in a pillarboxed 2.5-inch viewable window. The Editors' Choice
The 4x optical zoom lens has a 25 to 100mm (35mm equivalent) focal length, so it can give you a very wide perspective. It doesn't reach quite as far as the
Of all the manufacturers, Sony offers the most intuitive touch camera interface. It's colorful, uses easy-to-read fonts and icons, and includes a description for all of its shooting modes and features. It's a great-for-a-camera touch UI, but it's still generations behind your typical touch-screen smartphone experience—so you should throttle down your expectations.
When you shoot in Automatic mode, you never really have to use the touch screen; all of the mission-critical operations have dedicated buttons (zoom in/out, shutter release, power on/off.) This is a welcome design decision compared with the
Performance
As far as speed, the camera powers up and takes its first shot in an average of 2.6 seconds. Once on, the camera averages a sluggish 3.5 seconds of wait time between shots. The Kodak M580 is more than a second faster, averaging 2.3 seconds. The T110 averages 0.6 seconds of shutter lag (the time between hitting the shutter release and capturing an image), which isn't particularly impressive.
Still images from the T110 look great. In the PCMag.com labs, we use www.imatest.com to objectively measure image quality. The camera calculated a center-weighted average of 1,920 lines per picture height, a solid showing. The Kodak M580 and Canon SD1400 are a little sharper, respectively averaging 2,127 and 2,152 lines.
The T110 has good low light performance for a point and shoot camera. If Imatest detects less than 1.5 percent noise within an image, it's considered usable. The T110 can keep noise below that level at settings up to and including ISO 800. That's better than the M580's maximum effective level of ISO 400, but the SD1400 bests them all by achieving ISO 1600.
Video on the T110 looks great and the camera operates just like a pocket camcorder, quite rare for compact point-and-shoot models. While shooting video on the T110, you can use optical zoom and refocus silently. Not many compact cameras let you do either while recording video, and the ones that do typically do so noisily. The high-definition 720p30 movies created by the T110 are standard .MOV files, so they can be easy uploaded into YouTube and Facebook.
Connectivity on the T110 may drive you nuts. Many cameras have a standard mini-USB and mini-HDMI ports to easily connect to PCs and HDTVs. The T110 has neither. Instead, it has one proprietary port and a proprietary cable that only displays video and photos in standard-definition. The camera writes to both Memory Stick Duo and SD/SDHC/SDXC cards, so you can just pop the memory cards out and into your computer's card reader (if you have one).
The $219.99 Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T110 offers a good touch-screen experience and great photos at a low price. If you like the size but don't want a touch screen, take a look at the Canon PowerShot SD1400. If you're looking to stay in this price range but want more zoom, try the Editors' Choice Kodak EasyShare M580, which offers 8x. Both cameras offer slightly faster performance and slightly sharper images, at a similar price.
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