Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-T77 manages to stand apart from its rivals. It's a slimline 15mm thick and comes in five colours, including pink, green and the brown version pictured here.
At 3in, the touchscreen all but fills the rear of the camera. The only buttons are for power, the shutter release, playback and zoom. The slender battery is good for only 220 shots per charge, and while its size makes it easy to slip into a pocket, it also makes the T77 hard to hold steady.
The camera is responsive, and is able to capture a photograph every 1.9 seconds without the use of flash, and every 2.5 seconds with the flash enabled. We did find that working around menus on the touchscreen wasn't as speedy or simple as when using traditional buttons.
Usual serviceThe T77 features the oft-spotted 10-megapixel, 1/2.3in sensor, which has a penchant for vague fine details in bright conditions and grubby splodges in dim lighting. Still, compared to the many other similarly specified cameras, the T77 wasn't bad.
Colours were vibrant and rich, and shots taken indoors at ISO 400 were of sufficient quality to view on a computer screen. The 4x zoom gives some extra magnification beyond the typical 3x designs, and had impressive sharpness in the corners at the extremes of both the wide angle and telephoto settings.
The stabilisation, which is based on the sensor, worked well, but it was not as reliable as systems from Canon, Nikon and Panasonic.
The T77's delivers reasonably good images overall, but you are able to get results as good, or better, for less money. Still, the attraction of the Cyber-shot brand and the allure of a touchscreen means the Cyber-shot DSC-T77 still has a measure of appeal.
Author:Martin James
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