Sony Cyber-shot W180 and W190 cameras feature awesome digital zooms

Sony just announced a pair of Cyber-shot cameras in Europe. Both offer Sony's smile shutter technology, 3x zoom stabilized with SteadyShot, 2.7-inch LCD, a claimed ISO 3200 sensitivity, and 7 automatic scene selection modes. The W180, though, has a 10.1 megapixel sensor to the 12.1 megapixels of the W190 (pictured). Oddly, Sony's pushing the 17x/18x digital zoom capabilities on these -- something we haven't seen hyped for a few years:

Pristine picture quality is further enhanced by the high-quality 3x optical zoom lens. Smart zoom boosts maximum magnification to a frame-filling 18x for W190 and 17x for W180 for even more dramatic close-ups.

In other words, these cams are targeting entry-level consumers prone to enjoying a Big Mac and tattle-rag while shopping instead of doing any real pre-purchase research. Available starting July in silver, black, and red for "an outstanding value." Backside front, after the break.

[AA @ May 28th 2009 4:01AM]

Noticed these are using a Sony optical lens instead of a Carl Zeiss lens as found on other Cybershot models.

[Wonderkid @ May 28th 2009 4:10AM]

Sony lost the plot years ago. Their last good digicam was the f717 and a few of the older P and T series. The minute Akio Morita passed away, Sony lost a figurehead who could provide that "I get it" mentality that Steve J provides at Apple.

Educated consumers will go for a Panasonic F35/37 or if they can afford it, TS3/TZ7.

Sony, wake up and get back to your roots! And stop being so cheap. It's not you.

[Joe T. @ May 28th 2009 8:57AM]

The currently selling DSC-W300 is a wonderful camera with its 1/1.7" sensor.

[TavisJohn @ May 28th 2009 4:13AM]

Digital Zoom? What a joke! You can easily crop the image later.

Plus the Digital Zoom ONLY kicks in when you are using less than the max MP capture setting. So is no different than copping the pic later.

I can get a fantastic zoom with my Coolpix s560 if I want to take 3mp shots.

[Boards of Canada @ May 28th 2009 4:21AM]

Heu... yeah. Digital zoom is a gimmick. This is a 3x zoom camera.

[rtdunham @ May 28th 2009 10:31AM]

I've got four digital cameras for various purposes (long tele, max WA, geotagging, most compact) and the digital zoom is turned off on all of them. It's a shame people don't realize what a flawed "feature" it is.

[Rob @ May 28th 2009 4:46AM]

IMO it says everything about the camera if one of the big selling points is the fact is has Digital Zoom. Complete waste of time - take the pic and if you want to crop it do it on a computer which will do a much better job of it.

[Cunthor @ May 28th 2009 4:36AM]

I bet they've done some research along the lines 'average consumer only prints 6x4", and 12 mpx allows for 88.789% crop which is equal to 17.843X zoom, so we market it as 18X zoom, and in lower case faint letters print "digital only", then PROFIT"

[Mark @ May 28th 2009 4:36AM]

"In other words, these cams are targeting entry-level consumers prone to enjoying a Big Mac and tattle-rag while shopping instead of doing any real pre-purchase research"

Erm so they are aiming for much the same market Apple usually targets....

[loosely_coupled @ May 28th 2009 6:08AM]

I don't think Apple targets "entry-level consumers" based on their huge margins...

[Boards of Canada @ May 28th 2009 6:16AM]

Big Mac Pro.

[Frangible @ May 28th 2009 4:49AM]

Actually the previous generation of cheap Sonys cleaned up on dpreview's budget compact roundup in pretty much every category.

Digital zoom is mostly useless, but without a RAW mode, it does technically produce better results to do it on-camera than later in Photoshop. Anyway, it's one line from a press release. Sheesh.

Frankly, I can't stand the UI on Panasonics/Canons, and think Canons are grossly overrated as a whole. Equivalent Sony models routinely beat them on every metric, yet somehow the Canons still end up with a higher overall rating, despite having inferior image quality, performance, construction, and features. Fanboism, so objective.

Panasonics have (usually) better zoom ranges and image stabilization, but the models I've used all were quite laggy/slow and had oddly limited apertures.

I owned a cheap Sony from two generations ago, and would not buy one again. Don't get me wrong, it was an excellent camera, except the budget models had a lower-resolution 115K pixel screen which actually made getting non-blurry shots in marginal conditions surprisingly difficult compared to the 230K pixel screens... I couldn't discern how steady I was holding the camera nearly as well, and counteracting those fine motor movements is difficult without feedback. (optical image stabilization isn't magic)

Anyway, I'd save my money for a better model, personally -- unless they've improved the screen resolution since then (the article doesn't say and the camera's not up on Sony's site yet).

But the cheap Sonys are kings of that market segment.

[superhobo @ May 28th 2009 6:34AM]

No

[Bluecold @ May 28th 2009 1:41PM]

If you would actually have read the conclusions and the review, you would have seen that Panasonic got the highest praise every time. (except in the premium compact category).

[Mark @ May 28th 2009 12:06PM]

How are these digital zooms "awesome" as compared to normal useless digital zooms?

[va jj @ May 28th 2009 12:07PM]

turns your photo into pixelated blurred out porn effect.

[iKurt 5D @ May 28th 2009 1:14PM]

Buy a Canon Digital Elph. I have one and I can definitely see Canon's expertise in professional EOS cameras when using the little Elph. The image quality is amazing, the exposure is spot on, and I can get great movies. Sony's digital cameras are not bad, but Canon's are even better. They stayed with the same form factor and refined it over the years, and delivering fine optics and image quality.

[rabbu86 @ Jul 22nd 2009 7:38AM]

it is nice