Tracey Capen

Sony CD Mavica MVC-CD400

Huge photo capacity on relatively cheap media is the CD Mavica MVC-CD400's finest feature. Using 156MB, 3-inch CD-R or CD-RW discs, you can store up to 50 images shot at the camera's highest resolution (2272 by 1704 pixels) or nearly a thousand at its lowest (640 by 480). And the discs cost just over a dollar apiece. Complementing its 4-megapixel capacity, the MVC-CD400 has most of the high-end features you'd look for in an $800 camera, including movies with sound; aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full-manual exposure control; and a relatively fast, f2.0, 3X optical zoom lens. You can even add audio notes to your shots as you take them. And the CD400 is one of the few digital cameras we've seen that has a hot shoe for mounting more powerful flashes.
There's no optical viewfinder on this camera; you have to use the LCD on the back of the camera for all shooting. As with most cameras that adopt this arrangement, composing your shots can be a bit awkward, especially in bright daylight. You have to hold the camera at eye level and about a foot from your face so that you can focus on the LCD screen. It would have been far more convenient if the LCD panel rotated up, as it does on the Canon G2, the Olympus E-20N, and the Nikon Coolpix 5000. We found the LCD panel too dim when shooting outdoors in bright light--neither the active backlight nor the battery-saving passive backlighting was adequate. We were also dissatisfied with the camera's jog dial, one of Sony's signature controls for its electronic devices. In theory, the jog dial lets you spin through settings quickly when you want to pick your aperture in manual exposure mode, but we found it tricky to use. The problem involves the jog dial's double-duty design. A typical scenario: In manual mode, you spin the jog dial to choose from among aperture, shutter speed, or exposure value (EV) control, and then you press it to lock onto one of the three. Then you spin the dial again to choose from the range of settings. All too often, however, a little too much pressure on the dial throws you back into the aperture/shutter/EV selection mode. The jog dial's small size exacerbates the problem--we had to press down to get enough traction to spin it.
The CD400 is relatively large and heavy-- unavoidable side effects of having a built-in CD-RW drive. That said, the camera's large grip makes it comfortable to hold, and (with the one exception mentioned earlier) the controls are easy to use. Sony gave the CD400 a nice balance between quick-to-use buttons and relatively simple, easy-to-read menus. The CD400 produced mixed results in our image-quality tests. Prints taken in our lab looked sharp, with good detail and accurate exposures. The camera's mannequin and still-life shots were a bit sharper than those produced by the Sony DSC-P9 we tested at the same time. The CD400's ability to reproduce colors, however, was somewhat erratic under artificial light. Our still-life photos had a slightly greenish cast and muted colors, and flash shots of our mannequin were bathed in an orange tint. Harsh highlights on the mannequin's face also looked unflattering. On the other hand, the CD400 produced accurate, pleasing colors when we photographed our mannequin under daylight-balanced lighting. Outdoor shots looked generally accurate, though some casual photos had relatively dull colors. Telephoto shots taken of a distant object were noticeably less sharp than images taken of close objects. For a camera with a CD-RW drive, the CD400 had remarkably long battery life. We took 355 shots on one charge of its rechargeable lithium ion battery. Once finished with a shooting session, you can't immediately whip a CD-RW disc out of the camera and into your nearest PC's CD-ROM or DVD drive. Before those drives can play the disc, you must run it through a finalization process in the camera. Typically, this takes about 80 seconds and entails placing the camera on a solid level surface and not jostling/moving it until the process is done. If you plan to add more shots to the disc, you have to reverse the process and unfinalize the disc. The MVC-CD400 comes bundled with Pixela's ImageMixer software for storing and editing photos. Given the camera's high-capacity discs, we wish Sony had included a better image archiving/organizational program, such as ACDSee or Canto's Cumulus.
Given the camera's lack of an optical viewfinder, this model is probably not a good hobbyist camera, but it would suit any business that must take large numbers of high-resolution photographs. The CD-RWs offer huge capacity on the cheap and almost instantaneous archiving.

Buying Information

Sony CD Mavica MVC-CD400 4 megapixels, 2272 by 1704 maximum resolution, 34-102mm focal range (35mm equivalent), f2-f8 aperture range, shutter speeds from 8 seconds to 1/1000 second, LCD viewfinder (no optical viewfinder), USB and video connections, 156MB CD-RW media, one lithium ion rechargeable battery, 21.5 ounces with battery, Pixela ImageMixer software. One-year parts and 90-day labor warranty, toll-free support for 15 hours daily. $ 799 4 megapixels, 2272 by 1704 maximum resolution, 34-102mm focal range (35mm equivalent), f2-f8 aperture range, shutter speeds from 8 seconds to 1/1000 second, LCD viewfinder (no optical viewfinder), USB and video connections, 156MB CD-RW media, one lithium ion rechargeable battery, 21.5 ounces with battery, Pixela ImageMixer software. One-year parts and 90-day labor warranty, toll-free support for 15 hours daily. http://www.sony.com/di 800/222-7669