Sony DSC-W100

Reviewed March 2007

Image Quality

This observation aside, the DSC-W100 is less typical in the fact that it offers an optical viewfinder, a feature that is less and less common on compact cameras such as this one.

Moreover, its LCD monitor, albeit of only average resolution, offers good contrast and is bright, allowing it to remain perfectly legible when used under direct light outdoors.

Equipped with a Carl Zeiss optical zoom, a certain performance level can be expected from the DSC-W100’s lens.

Indeed, the zoom is free of distortion, either at its widest angle — a modest 38 mm equivalent — or at the telephoto end. Likewise, the zoom is free of chromatic aberration throughout its focal length range, even when confronted by a very strong contrast; a situation that can easily cause purple fringing with many cameras.

Image sharpness is generally good and homogeneous, but is a touch softer at the telephoto end with the widest aperture, something corrected by the use of a smaller aperture.

Similarly, the default Multi metering pattern evaluates shots in a reliable and accurate way. It does, however, have a slight bias towards the highlights, which can on occasion cause fairly deep shadows. The up side of this bias is that the camera generally captures details in the highlights, and those in the shadows can be pulled out with software later, while the reverse is nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, like all cameras, the DSC-W100 always yields its best image quality when it is used with plenty of natural and even light.

Noise is undetectable in the DSC-W100’s images at its lowest sensitivity of 80 ISO. The 100 ISO level reveals a slight amount of noise in shadows, but even up to 200 ISO, noise is minimal. Beyond this level, images become noticeably noisy, which in turn leads to a loss of the smaller details.

Worth underlining, however, is the fact that the noise reduction system of the DSC-W100 is excellent when it is automatically applied to long exposures. Using the Manual mode, exposure times of 30 seconds at 80 ISO are noise free and show no loss of sharpness. (See the Test Photos section of the review.)

The highest sensitivity level of the DSC-W100, 1250 ISO, is nevertheless useable if the image is captured in black and white, or sepia, a process that eliminates the random coloured pixels caused by noise. The result is an image that, albeit grainy and not very detailed when seen on a monitor at 100% scale, has the look of an old photograph and which, when printed out to a 4 x 6 inch (10 x 15 cm) size is sharp and offers an image quality that is entirely acceptable.

Although the DSC-W100 only provides 2 levels of compression, these are available with all image sizes.

The compression applied to images captured using the Fine setting range from 6:1 to 7:1 — depending on the complexity of the subject — normally avoids the loss of image detail and does not cause the appearance of compression artefacts. At this level of compression, images can be printed to a 8 x 10 inch (25 x 20 cm) size at 300 dpi with excellent results.

The Standard compression level, on the other hand, is generally twice as strong — in the range of 12:1 — and is best reserved for use with images that will be reduced in size, or printed out to a small size.

The DSC-W100 offers a good value. This is a camera that offers good image quality easily, which becomes excellent when it benefits from good outdoor light, allowing it to capture perfect colours that print beautifully.

Moreover, users that would like to be able to experiment with night photography will very likely appreciate the DSC-W100’s 30-second maximum exposure time, and its remarkably effective noise reduction system.