Digital photography has made quite a make on the domestic and professional markets, now the speed at which an image can be delivered and manipulated are as important as its quality, a great picture that's too late or difficult to edit or transfer may never see the light of day. All of which has led to an explosion of digital cameras in the domestic market with increasing image quality and falling prices.

Sony have been at the forefront of providing what all gadget users crave, stylish yet efficient devices that fit the purpose and yet almost become a fashion item themselves. There is no doubting that this comes at a price and Sony are not the cheapest electronics brand, but and its a big but Sony equipment works out of the box with a high reliability.

The DSC P72 is now one of the lower models in the Sony range having started as a flagship model with a 3.2 mega pixel effective resolution it provides image quality that is more than acceptable for all but the most demanding of domestic users, unless you want to blow up images to fit on a wall 6 mega pixels is an extravagance.

Plus the fact that you'd be walking around with £400 - £500 pounds of camera on you, enough to make group 4 security nervous! at sub £200 the P72 offers most of the features of the higher Sony range, a 1.6 inch TFT monitor on the rear allows you to review images or to use it as a viewfinder as you operate the 9.6x digital zoom. The intelligent flash system adjusts the amount of assistance needed from a small amount of fill in flash to full on illumination, the P72 also includes synchronised shutter to give the best pictures in low light conditions, in fact leave this baby in auto mode and almost anyone can take good pictures.

You can of course control almost all features manually, so the real photographers amongst us can adjust everything from aperture f 2.8 - 5.6 and shutter speeds for 2 seconds to 1/1000, would have been nice to have an override for long exposure work. Images are saved to either Sony memory stick or the memory stick pro cards, the later can stretch to a huge 1gb of storage.

At this price point the P72 uses 2 AA batteries not ideal and higher models do use lithium rechargeables a much better option but again at a price, the MPEG movie capture is really only of use if you upgrade the standard 16mb memory stick the 1gb pro stick would allow 44 minutes of VGA resolution movie.

The DSC - P72 is really a quality piece of electronics at a great price, if you aren't David bailey 3.2 mega pixels is fine and this silver baby make a lot of sense.

More Digital Cameras -

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