Digital Camera Home > Digital Camera Reviews > Sony Digital Cameras > Sony MVC-FD87

Sony MVC-FD87 Sony announces an affordable 1.3-megapixel digicam with basic features, good quality pictures, and a dual-media storage drive! Select a topic Reference: Datasheet MVC-FD87 Sample Images --------------------------------- 1. Intro and Highlights 2. Executive Overview 3. Design 4. Viewfinder 5. Optics 6. Exposure & Flash 7. Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests 8. Operation & User Interface 9. Camera Modes & Menus 10. Image Storage & Interface 11. Video, Power, Software 12. Test Results & Conclusion --------------------------------- Print-Friendly Review Version Additional Resources and Other Links Reader Comments on MVC-FD87 Review --------------------------------- Digital Camera Comparometer (TM) --------------------------------- <-- Digital Cameras (Home) <-- Digital Camera Reviews Index <<Design :(Previous) | (Next): Optics>> Page 4:Viewfinder Review First Posted: 5/4/2001

Viewfinder
The FD87 provides a 2.5-inch, TFT color LCD monitor for composing images, but no viewfinder. The Display button, just below the LCD monitor, controls the information display, which reports the amount of floppy disk space, the number of captured images, image size and quality settings, the remaining battery time, and other variables such as Flash, Focus, and Program AE modes. Pressing the up arrow on the Arrow rocker pad displays the LCD menu system (pressing the down arrow turns off the menu). Once the menu is displayed, you can scroll through each submenu and its contents using the arrow keys.

The LCD features a backlight, which can be turned on or off by a sliding switch on the top left side of the back panel. This backlight brightens the display when shooting in sunny conditions, and significantly increases the brightness level when shooting indoors. There's also an LCD Bright adjustment in the Record menu, which changes the contrast of the display to lighten and darken the image.

In Playback mode, the LCD monitor offers a six-image index display mode and a playback zoom that enlarges captured images as much as 5x. Once a captured image is enlarged, the arrow keys of the Arrow rocker pad can be used to scroll around the image, allowing you to check fine details. The image information display in Playback mode reports the date and time the image was captured, the file name, image resolution, number of images saved on the memory card or floppy disk, and the amount of storage space remaining.

In our tests, the MVC-FD87's LCD monitor showed approximately 91.6 percent accuracy at wide angle and about 92.3 percent accuracy at telephoto. Since we generally like to see LCD monitors as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the MVC-FD87 was a bit tight, but performed reasonably well in this respect.