Supercharged Sony Cybershot

Author's Rating:

Pros: Image Quality (wow), myriad settings for pro quality shooting, Sony quality, CF/MicroDrive option

Cons: Price (worth it), thick user manual, alot to learn to fully use all features.

The Bottom Line: 
Pro-quality camera that digital photography enthusiasts will adore. Awesome image quality, feature packed, its a veritable powerhouse. This cam will make a good photographer great!

Author's Review
(SECOND UPDATE) I have taken over 2500 digital pictures in the last 3 months and most of them are quite excellent. THE NAYSAYERS ARE MAKING A HUGE DEAL about Chromatic Aberrations...all digital cameras have CA, some better and some worse. Any pic with purple fringe can undergo a quick "hue/saturation" adjustment in Photoshop and the purple is gone! Lately I have been taking nightshots and late evening low-light shots that are just incredible, and with a smaller aperture there is no purple fringe at all. Yes, there are better digicams than the F828, I just hope you have a caddy carrying around all of those expensive lenses for you! I will be making a two-day trip all over the Mendocino/Sonoma coastline in two weeks.....I am going to shoot 500 - 1500 shots in a day or two. I will be travelling light and bagging an amazing amount of fabulous pictures. The Sony F828 is all I need!

(UPDATE) I sincerely thank Howard Creech for his extrordinarily detailed analysis of the Sony Cybershot F828 dated 1/4/04. Several weeks ago I was quite tempted to purchase a Fuji FinePix S-7000 6+ megapixel camera. After reading Howard's review on that camera I decided the Fuji S-7000 was not what I was looking for. Kudos Howard!

I have waited a very, very long time for my first QUALITY digital camera. I was unimpressed with earlier, low-megapixel cams good for postcard sized prints only. I have long believed in Sony quality, but I wasn't thrilled about being locked into the pricey "Memory Stick" media on all of their digi-cams. Low and behold they have delivered a thoroughbred in the Cybershot DSC-F828. The new technology RGB+E CCD, 7x optical zoom Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T lens and CF card/MicroDrive capability (in addition to "memory stick" port) is truly cutting edge. This is a quality "prosumer" grade digital camera! Surely some D-SLR owners will thrash on this camera, but I don't have to lug a bag full of lenses like they do! I own a Sony Mini-DV camcorder (TRV-27) which has the Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar lens, and the video quality from this cam is beautiful! The DSC-F828 camera uses the same battery and memory stick media from my TRV-27, which is an added value in my books.

Now it will be quite a while before I can use all of the features (aperture priority, shutter priority, et cetera) with aplomb, but with the fully automatic setting I have taken some wonderful pictures. Some are indoor flash pictures with a wide assortment of colors, and I have printed 8" x 10" images that are extremely sharp! The manual zoom is very reminiscent to a SLR film camera, and the pop-up flash is quite potent. Zero-lux (no light) capability has proven a real boon in the TRV-27 camcorder, and will no-doubt be very useful in the DSC-F828. One website rapped the weight of the camera (roughly 2 pounds), but I find that this camera has substance and build quality. I looked at a bunch of 3 - 6 megapixel cameras...the Fuji FinePix S7000 and the Minolta DiMage Z1 being among them.....plastic bodies, so lightweight that they did not feel like quality to me. When you shake the DiMage Z1, the lens bounces around in its housing....is this quality? The magnesium body of the F828 is SOLID (the Rock of Gibralter comes to mind). TIFF and RAW image capability is noteworthy, and when an image is being saved in RAW format, a "fine image quality" JPEG file is produced at the same time.....this does take a little longer to write to the flash memory. One could find fault in this, but I am pleased at having options....the JPEG is print ready, the RAW file can be "tweaked" to ultrafine detail by a digital photography expert.

One feature that is truly amazing to me, is that while the DSC-F828 is a stellar still-camera, with the appropriate media loaded it is a better camcorder than my TRV-27.