I have been trying to decide which camera to get for some time, could not for the life of me make my mind up, especially considering my £100 price limit. At this range the more featured cameras are bigger, the smaller cameras generally more oriented towards general use.

I finally decided to go for the Sony W110, 7.2mp, face detection 4x optical zoom and some nice pre-set scene modes. What follows is a brief review and evaluation of these kind of features over a camera phone etc…

Firstly the zoom on the camera is brilliant, can’t go wrong with 4x optical zoom and the extra digital zoom is done very well, although with no anti shake technology you have to have a steady hand or a tripod. Check out the pictures below, as you can see when zoomed fully in at 8x the image is still good quality and doesn’t look too shabby;

 

Up to 8x mixed zoom

The camera is great in low light, there is a pre-set scene mode which will keep the shutter open for some time (usually about a second) rather than just using a very high iso (which adds incredible noise to the image), obviously this has to be used when the camera is resting or on a tripid, the results are great. On the left is an average phone camera, as you can see it’s terrible, on the right is the low light scene mode from the W110, the image actually comes out brighter than it looks to the naked eye.
 

Low light photo, Cellphone (left) vs. W110 (right)

Finally a lesson in post processing, most people tend to pop their images straight from the camera to their PC’s or online somewhere like facebook, most still have red eye and a lot of them could be very much improved with just a quick few seconds in something like Adobe’s Lightroom, the following image taken during daylight shows the difference a little tinkering can make (left is before, right is after);
 

Post processing is very important

In closing, I’m quite happy with the Sony W110, it was only £80 so under budget, which is always good. It meets my needs, which were to be compact, capable of 640×480@30fps video and have at least 3x optical zoom. Read on for a few photo’s I’ve taken with the camera.