Sony MVC-CD300Sony expands its CD-equipped camera line, adding erasability, buffer memory, a 3-megapixel CCD, and a more compact case!<<Reference: Datasheet :(Previous) | (Next): Print-Friendly Review Version>> MVC-CD300 Sample ImagesReview First Posted: 2/28/2001 |
| We've begun including links in our reviews to a Thumber-generated index page for our test shots. The Thumber data includes a host of information on the images, including shutter speed, ISO setting, compression setting, etc. Rather than clutter the page below with *all* that detail, we're posting the Thumber index so only those interested in the information need wade through it! ;) |
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Outdoor portrait: (1354k) The extreme tonal range of this image makes it a tough shot for many digicams, which is precisely why we set it up this way. The object is to hold highlight and shadow detail without producing a "flat" picture with muddy colors, and the Sony MVC-CD300 handles the challenge well. We shot samples of this image with the automatic (1377 k), daylight (1371 k), and manual (1367 k) (One-Push) white balance settings, choosing the daylight setting for our main series. The automatic setting resulted in a slightly cool image, while the manual setting produced warmer results. The daylight setting is just a touch warm as well, but we thought it had the best overall color balance. Skin tones in particular look very good, and the difficult blues of the model's flowers and pants are almost exactly right, although we noticed some faint, purplish tints in the flower petals. (These blues are hard for many digicams to reproduce correctly.) The bright, red flowers are just a little too bright, with the usual red/blue "halo effect" that causes some loss of detail. Resolution is excellent, with a great deal of fine detail visible throughout the image. Details are also sharp and crisp. The shadow areas show an excellent level of detail, with only moderate noise present. We also picked up a small amount of noise in the house siding. Our main image was taken with a +0.3 EV exposure adjustment to get the best exposure in the shadow areas without overexposing the bright highlights. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.7 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Closer portrait: (1320k) The CD300 also does a great job with this closer, portrait shot, thanks in part to its 3x lens. (Shorter focal length lenses tend to distort facial features in close-up shots like this and the availability of longer focal lengths is a key feature if you're going to be shooting close-up people shots.) We again shot with the daylight white balance option: Although still slightly warm, it did a good job with the skin tones. As is typical with this shot, resolution is much higher, with even sharper details around the face and in the strands of hair. We can also see the subtler, smaller details of the house siding. Noise is again moderate in the shadow areas, and just barely visible in the house siding. Our main shot was taken with a +0.3 EV exposure adjustment. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.3 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Indoor Portrait, Flash: (1194k) The CD300's built-in flash does a great job of illuminating the subject, though the camera produces an orange cast in response to the strong incandescent lighting in the room. We shot a series of images with the flash set to the Low (1209 k), Normal (1194 k), and High (1318 k) intensity settings, which also allowed in a nice amount of ambient light. As the flash power gets stronger, the orange cast decreases (as you'd expect). However, with the high flash setting, color on the subject is nearly washed out. The normal flash power seems to be the most accurate setting, producing a nice white value on the model's shirt and good color saturation. The low setting isn't too bad, just a hair too dim. In an effort to balance the flash and ambient lighting, we shot with the flash at the low intensity setting, with a slightly faster shutter speed (1236 k) setting (using the camera's shutter-priority metering mode). This reduced the orange cast, but also darkened the background of the image. The ability to combine variations in flash intensity with changes in shutter speed provides a great deal of creative control for flash exposures. (With a Canon dedicated flash unit mounted on the camera's hot shoe, this same flexibility would extend to external-flash exposures as well.) |
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Indoor portrait, no flash: (1224k) This shot is always a very tough test of a camera's white balance capability, given the strong, yellowish color cast of the household incandescent bulbs used for the lighting, and the CD300's white balance system did an excellent job. We shot versions of this image with the automatic (1218 k), indoor (1213 k), and manual (1226 k) (One-Push) white balance settings, choosing the manual setting for our main series. The automatic setting produced a slightly magenta image, while the indoor setting resulted in an even warmer image with more orangish tints. Color balance looks absolutely great with the manual white balance setting though. The white of the model's shirt is very accurate, and the skin tones look pretty good (maybe just a little too pink in the face). Additionally, the flowers look quite accurate, though the blue flowers are a bit dark with the usual purplish tints. Noise level is surprisingly low throughout the image. We shot our main image with a +0.7 EV exposure adjustment. The table below shows a range of exposures from zero to +1.7 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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House shot: (1439k) NOTE that this is the "new" house shot, a much higher-resolution poster than we first used in our tests. To compare the image of the CD300 with previously tested cameras, here's a shot of the original house poster in the automatic (1473 k) white balance setting. We shot samples of this image with the daylight (585 k), automatic (591 k), and manual (586 k) white balance settings. Both automatic and manual settings produced cool, slightly bluish images, while the daylight setting resulted in a slightly warm image. We chose the manual setting for our main series, despite the cool cast, as the overall color balance looked best. Resolution is great, with a lot of fine detail visible in the bricks and shrubbery, and in the tree limbs above the roof. Details are also nice and crisp, with only a tiny hint of the halo caused by in-camera sharpening along the light and dark edges of the white roof line trim. The roof shingles and shadows show moderately low noise. The table below shows our standard range of resolution and quality settings.
Sharpness Series We also shot a series with the camera's adjustable sharpness settings, which produced very subtle differences in overall softness and altered the contrast only slightly.
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Far-Field Test (1466k) This image is shot at infinity to test far-field lens performance. NOTE that this image cannot be directly compared to the other "house" shot, which is a poster, shot in the studio. The rendering of detail in the poster will be very different than in this shot, and color values (and even the presence or absence of leaves on the trees!) will vary in this subject as the seasons progress. In general though, you can evaluate detail in the bricks, shingles and window detail, and in the tree branches against the sky. Compression artifacts are most likely to show in the trim along the edge of the roof, in the bricks, or in the relatively "flat" areas in the windows. We shot this image with the automatic white balance setting, which produced a slightly cool white value. This shot is a strong test of detail, given the practically infinite range of fine detail in a natural scene like this, viewed from a distance. Resolution looks very good, with a nice level of detail in the tree branches above the house, as well as in the bricks and house front details. The stronger details of the wooden fence behind the house (visible on the driveway side) and the side yard shrubbery are also visible. Overall, the image is very crisp in the linear details, though slightly soft in the more organic, rounded details of the shrubbery. We also judge a camera's dynamic range in this shot, comparing how well the camera holds detail in both the shadow and highlight areas. The CD300 does very well in this respect, catching a fair amount of detail in the bright, white paint of the bay window. The camera also picks up a reasonable amount of detail in the shadow area of the porch, with the brick pattern and porch light just barely visible. Noise is moderate in the roof shingles and shadow areas of the house. We also shot with the 100 (1422 k), 200 (1371 k), and 400 (1467 k) ISO settings, which brightened the exposure with each increase in ISO. The 400 ISO setting overexposes the image, losing detail in the bright, white trim. Noise level also increases to a moderately high level at the ISO 400 setting. The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series.
Sharpness Series We again shot with the CD300's adjustable sharpness setting, which again made fairly subtle changes to both image sharpness and contrast.
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Lens Zoom Range We've received a number of requests from readers to take shots showing the lens focal length range of those cameras with zoom lenses. Thus, we're happy to present you here with the following series of shots, showing the field of view with the lens at full wide angle, the lens at full 3x telephoto, and at full telephoto with the 2x digital telephoto enabled. The CD300's wide angle setting captures a very wide field of view, with good detail and just a hint of barrel distortion along the curb of the street. The level of detail and sharpness increases with the 3x telephoto setting, increasing the level detail in the bright, white bay window. We were pleased with the CD300's 2x digital telephoto, which does a nice job of maintaining fine detail as it digitally enlarges the image, though resolution is somewhat less than in the other two shots. (Note too, that these shots were taken at the camera's next-to-lowest resolution setting of 1024x768: Higher resolution settings are less able to take advantage of the digital zoom, trading off more sharpness than is apparent here.) Details are also much softer. Noise remains moderately low with the digital telephoto image.
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Musicians Poster (1353k) For this test, we shot with the automatic (1371 k), daylight (1369 k), and manual (1398 k) white balance settings, choosing the daylight setting for our main series. The large amount of blue in the image often tricks digicams into overcompensating, and we noticed that the CD300's white balance system had a little trouble adjusting the color balance. The automatic and manual settings resulted in very cool, bluish images, with the automatic setting producing the strongest color cast. Daylight white balance resulted in a warmer image, but produced the best looking skin tones on each model. The warmer cast gives a greenish-yellow tint to the blue background, and a slightly yellowish tint to the Oriental model's blue robe. Still, we felt the overall color balance looked best. Resolution is very good, with nearly all the details of the bird wings visible on the Oriental model's robe (even the fainter details of the smaller bird). The violin strings are well defined, without a strong moire pattern (many digicams produce moire patterns on these sharply defined strings). The fine details of the flower garland and beaded necklaces are also crisp and clearly visible. Noise is moderate and mostly visible in the blue background (some of the noise may be in the actual poster itself). The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series. Resolution/Quality series
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Macro Shot (1345k) The CD300 performs exceptionally well in the macro category, capturing a minimum area of just 0.94 x 0.70 inches (23.77 x 17.83mm). Detail and resolution are both excellent, and color balance is very nice as well. We caught a moderate amount of barrel distortion from the wide angle setting of the lens, and just a hint of corner softness (mostly visible in the three pence piece). The "1" in the bill is a little soft also, most likely due to the very shallow depth of field when shooting this close, and the three-dimensional nature of the subject. The gray background shows very little noise. The CD300's built-in flash (1395 k) has some trouble throttling down for the macro area due to the very close range of the camera, creating a hot spot in the top half of the image, and the bulk of the lens barrel casts a dark shadow area in the lower half. |
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"Davebox" Test Target (1279k) We shot samples of this target using the automatic (555 k), daylight (566 k), and manual (558 k) white balance settings, choosing the automatic setting for our main series. As you might expect, the daylight white balance setting produced a very warm image. Manual produced nearly accurate results, but still with a hint of warmth. Color balance looks very good in the automatic setting, with the large color blocks nearly accurate. (The cyan and yellow blocks are just slightly undersaturated, the rest are spot-on.) The brighter yellow, green, and orange color blocks have about a pixel of a halo around the outer edges, just inside the black lines. The CD300 isn't fooled by the subtle difference between the red and magenta color blocks on the middle, horizontal color chart (which is a common problem area for many digicams), adeptly reproducing the black separator line. The CD300 also captures the subtle tonal variations of the Q60 chart all the way up to the "B" range (another common problem area for digicams). The tonal gradations of the smaller, vertical gray scales also look very good, though the darkest two blocks just barely blend together. (A very good performance: This is about as good as it gets for consumer-level digicams.) Great detail in the shadow area of the briquettes, with only low to moderate noise. The white gauze also shows a nice level of detail. Resolution looks great overall, with sharp details on the mini resolution target. We also shot with the 100 (1298 k), 200 (1403 k), and 400 (1449 k) ISO settings, noticing that exposure stayed relatively the same with each shot. Noise level, however, increased with the 200 and 400 ISO settings, becoming moderately high at the 400 ISO setting. The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series. Resolution/Quality series
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Low-Light Tests The CD300 does a great job in the low-light category, as we were able to obtain bright, clear images at light levels as low as 1/16 of a foot-candle (2.7 lux), at the ISO 200 and 400 settings. At ISO 100, the image was reasonably bright and clear at 1/8 of a foot-candle (5.5 lux). Images were usable as low as 1/16 of a foot-candle (0.67 lux) at all three ISO settings, though with slight magenta casts. Noise level was highest, but still only moderate, with the ISO 400 images, with moderately low levels at the other two ISO settings. To put the CD300's low-light performance into perspective, an average city night scene under modern street lighting corresponds to a light level of about one foot-candle, so the camera should be able to handle most dark shooting situations. The table below shows the best exposure we were able to obtain for each of a range of illumination levels. Images in this table (like all of our sample photos) are untouched, exactly as they came from the camera.
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Flash Range Test In our testing, we found the CD300's flash effective as far as 15 feet from the target. Flash intensity was very bright at the eight foot distance, diminishing to a normal intensity level with each additional foot of distance. The progressive decrease in brightness beyond 8 feet suggests an "actual" flash rating of 8 feet. We found the flash to be reasonably bright even at the 15 foot distance, however. Bottom line: With a more normal target (less black in the background), the flash probably works reliably up to 8 feet, but you may be able to go quite a bit farther with it, depending on the subject. Below is our flash range series, with distances from eight to 15 feet from the target.
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ISO-12233 (WG-18) Resolution Test (1258k) Given that it uses the same lens as the DSC-S75 and DSC-S75, it should come as no surprise that the CD300 turned in a really exceptional performance on the resolution test. We "called" the CD300's resolution as 900-950 lines per picture height in the horizontal direction, and 850-900 in the vertical, with detail visible vertically well beyond 900 lines, and horizontally to well beyond 1000. As with the earlier S70, and S75, the CD300 seems to show resolution beyond what should be theoretically possible, according to the Nyquist theorem and the CCD's pixel count. We attributed this to the camera's excellent suppression of artifacts, both in chrominance (color) and luminance (brightness) domains. There is in fact some aliasing visible beginning around 750 lines vertically (where theory says the limit should be), but it's so well controlled as to be almost invisible. Overall, a really remarkable performance, another triumph for Sony's excellent optics and signal processing. Resolution/Quality series, Wide Angle
Sharpness Series
Resolution Series, Telephoto
Sharpness Series
Resolution Series, Digital Telephoto
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Viewfinder Accuracy/Flash Uniformity The CD300 has no optical viewfinder, but its LCD viewfinder is exceptionally accurate, showing 99+% (effectively 100%) of the final image area at all image sizes and focal lengths. Since we like to see LCD monitors as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the CD300 turns in a very pleasing performance in this area. Flash distribution looks relatively even at the telephoto setting, with a small hot spot in the center of the target (almost certainly due to reflective glare from the target itself). At the wide angle setting, flash distribution also looks good, with a very small amount of falloff at the edges and a tiny hot spot in the center of the target. Optical distortion on the CD300 is moderate at the wide angle end, as we measured an approximate 0.6 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end fared slightly better, where we found an 0.3 percent pincushion distortion. Chromatic aberration is also quite low, showing about one or two pixels of coloration on each side of the black target lines. (This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.) Optical performance of the lens is very good overall, as both the barrel distortion and chromatic aberration are less than we're accustomed to seeing on digicams of this caliber. |
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