AegisRyan’s Island

I just get my 2nd gadget, Sony DSC-N1 Digital Camera last few weeks. It is the replacement camera for my family existing Konica Minolta Xg (review link1, link2)

which was bought at 2 years back. I’m very disappointed at Konica Minolta Xg due to it’s battery life, flash features (which i hate the most), slow response time.

Xg was recommended by shopkeeper when I approved them for Digital Camcoder. At first, I decided to buy a digital camcoder for my parent’s Shang Hai, China trip. I have no knowledge and did not do any researh on the digital camera and digital camcoder. I realized that digital camera doesn’t offer high resolution for photo shooting and the shopkeeper try to convince me to purchase one digital camera and another one digital camcoder. And he did close the deal, at the end I bought one Konica Minolta Xg and Canon MV730i Camcoder.

And now is 2 years later (Sept 2006) after first digital camera, Xg, my parent will have another trip to Yunnan, China on October 2006. As I felt that the existing Xg camera is kinda weak, so I decided to buy a new camera for their trip. I was clever at this time, I take a week time to do research on digital camera. I only plan to go for either Canon or Sony brand’s camera. After the research, only Canon’s camera catch my eye because I doesn’t know much Sony as well and most commonly seen is Canon. Even among Digital Camera review sites, Canon always stay at higher rank. So, I made up my mind for Canon IXUS 800 (Canon SD 700 IS), Canon A700, and Canon A540.

On 16th September 2006, I was told that there is a Canon Digital Camera fair at Gurney Plaza, Penang which was held by KY digital Photo. I went to Gurney Plaze with my fellow Bryan for the Camera but we didn’t head for the fair. It is because Bryan’s friend is one of the staff of KY Digital Photo so we planned to visit their shop. His friend is very friendly and having jokes with us. I asked him about the comment of Canon IXUS 800, A700 & A540. He told me that A540 (which I want the most) is out of stock and give me another better choice - Sony Cyber-shot DSC-N1 . He claimed Canon LCD CCD 90% will be broken around 2 years time. I believe his word because my existing Canon Camcoder MV730i’s CCD was broken after a year.

The reasons he recommended Sony DSC-N1 are:

• Cheaper than Canon IXUS 800
• 3 inch LCD screen
• Touch Screen
• 8.1 Mega Pixel
• Carl Zeiss lens
  
• Slide show features
• Internal memory and Album features.
• Resized or cropped images at any Mega Pixel without losing image quality
• Image Paint feature.
  

The guy told me that night shot of N1 is better than Canon and giving us sharp images. After I tried the camera, the flash is very strong, and the images really very sharp and detail when I view it in PC. I like the trimming features which we can zoom the image from camera and crop/trim it. We can save the trimmed/cropped image in any mega pixel resolution. For example, if my current image is shot in 3 MP, we can crop the image and save it as 8MP, or 5MP as we want. It even can resize VGA resolution image into 8MP quality image without losing its detail. That’s amazing features provided by Sony DSC-N1.

And don’t be fooled by CNET editor review of Sony DSC-N1. I found that CNET editor only rate it 6.6 out of 10. When you look at user rating and user opinion, it has higher rate as 8.6 out of 10 from 42 users. User rating is more important than CNET editor rating because there are 42 user compare with only ONE CNET editor who rate the product. You could read the review and user opinion from following link:

• Digital Camera Resource Page(DCRP) - Sony Cyber-shot DSC-N1
• Imaging Resource - Sony Cyber-shot DSC-N1
• Steve’s Digicams - Sony Cyber-shot DSC-N1

Useful links (recommended Camera):

• DCRP - Jeff’s Favorite Digital Cameras (updated September 2006)
• Cameras.co.uk - Digital Camera Buyer Guides