Tracey Capen

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F717

When we reviewed Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-F707 last April, we noted its inventive design, uncommon low-light shooting capabilities, long battery life, and dazzling images. The DSC-F717 retains all of that and adds USB 2.0 connectivity, zone autofocus, a manual zoom ring, and numerous smaller refinements. Like its predecessor, the F717 has an unusual shape--it's basically a large "L" with a 5X optical zoom lens making up one leg and the square-shaped body making up the other. It's neither compact nor light, and it takes two hands to operate comfortably, but for the most part its controls are well placed. The F717 is a touch more flexible than most of its competitors: The lens rotates vertically around the body, which helps when you're trying for awkward ground-level shots or shooting over the heads in a crowd. (With the former, the LCD panel is facing up; for the latter, it's pointing down.) Differing from the menus of many advanced cameras, this Sony's menus are kept simple--there's no wading through layer upon layer of selections. The camera has a moderate number of buttons and dials to control its most important functions, and you can learn them pretty quickly. The most complicated control is Sony's Jog Dial (also featured on its notebooks), which performs multiple tasks such as setting the aperture, shutter speed, and exposure value compensation. But the Jog Dial is moderately fast to use, once you get the hang of it. The F707 had a large ring on the front end of the lens that you used for manual focusing. This new model adds zoom control to the ring's capabilities. Set a switch to autofocus, and you can select your focal length with the ring; set the switch to manual focus, and you go back to the traditional two-button rocker switch for your zoom. The ring is a faster, more precise zoom control than the rocker switch, but we noticed a slightly annoying lag between our turning the ring and when the image in the LCD started to enlarge or shrink.
Deleting shots in the F717 is relatively slow. It's one of the few advanced cameras without a quick-delete function. DPOF printing options are also extremely limited. As we noted in our look at the previous Cyber-shot model, the F717 is no lightweight--it weighs nearly a pound and a half--and its massive lens and unconventional shape take up a large amount of space in your carry-on bag.
Like nearly all digital cameras with longer-range optical zoom lenses, the F717 has an electronic viewfinder in addition to the standard LCD panel. A switch on the camera body lets you toggle between them, and you get the same exposure and status information in both. Minolta's DiMage 7i does the Sony model one better here: Minolta added a sensor to its camera that detects when you have your eye up to the viewfinder and automatically turns it on and the LCD panel off. On the other hand, the F717's display looks sharper and faster--images do not jump as you pan the camera. Another one of the Jog Dial's tasks is setting the autofocus zone, a new feature in the F717. Probably most useful for portrait or macro photography, the zoned autofocus lets you set one of five zones (center, right, left, top, or bottom) within the viewfinder as the point on which the F717 focuses. Other modest improvements include a hot flash shoe (in the F707 you could mount an external flash, but there was no electrical connection in the shoe between the flash and the camera), an 800 ISO setting for low-light shooting, and a slow-sync flash mode.
Easy operation, a relatively long telephoto lens, and a wide selection of imaging controls make the DSC-F717 a great choice for the upscale hobbyist.