Sony DSC-W80 Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Good overall color and hue accuracy with slight oversaturation in bright reds and blues.

Saturation. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W80 oversaturates the strong red tones, and some blues and purples a little, but the results are still quite pleasing. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. The DSC-W80 does render skin tones slightly on the warm side in most cases, but many consumers find slightly warm skin tones more pleasing than cooler ones. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. Here, the DSC-W80 again performs well, though it pushes cyan and magenta tones toward blue and some reds toward orange. Still, very good results. The other important part of color rendition is hue accuracy. Hue is "what color" the color is.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting

Warm casts with both Auto and Incandescent white balance settings. Slightly above average positive exposure compensation required.

Color balance indoors under incandescent lighting is quite warm, with shades of pink and yellow in Auto white balance mode, while the Incandescent setting, though still somewhat yellow, looks more pleasing overall. Unfortunately, like most Sony compacts of late, there is no Manual white balance setting on the W80, so the Incandescent setting is the best you'll do indoors without post-processing. The DSC-W80 requires +1.0 EV exposure compensation boost to get a good exposure, a little higher than average for this shot. Skin texture appear quite clay-like in this lighting. Overall color is a bit pink in Auto mode, making the blue flowers look purplish. (Many digital cameras reproduce these flowers with a dark, purplish tint, so the DSC-W80's performance wasn't unusual.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.

Outdoors, daylight
Good color and exposure, though slightly high contrast.

Outdoors, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W80 performs pretty well, with only sight overexposure in the outdoor far-field house shot. The Sony W80 requires the average amount of positive exposure compensation on the portrait. Contrast is on the high side and, unfortunately, there's no contrast adjustment to help compensate. The DSC-W80 captures good color outdoors, without too strong of a warm cast. Overall, pretty good results here.

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Resolution
High resolution, 1,300 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,300 lines per picture height horizontally and vertically. Extinction of the pattern occurred between 1,800 and 1,900 lines. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Sharp images overall, though slight edge-enhancement on high-contrast subjects. Moderate noise suppression limits detail in the shadows.

Sharpness. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W80 captures reasonably sharp images, though with slightly mottled detail. Some edge enhancement artifacts are visible on high-contrast subjects such as the crop above left, but it's minimal and not uncommon. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows moderate softening due to noise suppression, as the darker areas of Marti's hair show limited detail. Skin is also without detail and quite clay-like. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

ISO & Noise Performance
Low to moderate noise at the normal sensitivity settings, but very high noise and strong blurring at ISO 800 and above.

Noise levels are low to moderate at the Sony W80's lower sensitivity settings, with much higher noise above ISO 400. Noise pixels are bright at the higher settings, which increasingly throws off the color balance. At ISO 800, the resulting grain pattern eliminates some of the finer details, giving the image a stippled effect. At ISOs 1,600 and especially 3,200, heavy noise reduction obliterates most fine detail, resulting in an image that looks more like a watercolor painting than a photograph. At ISO 3,200 the color balance is so out of whack that there's a strong purple cast.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with good overall detail, but slightly high contrast and limited shadow detail. Poor low-light performance.

Sunlight:

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W80 produced fairly high contrast with deep shadows under the harsh lighting of the test above. Detail is limited in the shadow areas, with some noise suppression visible. Though the shirt is nearly blown at +0.7 EV, I preferred it to the image at +0.3 EV, whose skin tones were under exposed. Depending on the photographer, you could lean one way or the other, but most W80 owners are going to want to just print an image, and the +0.7 image will produce a better print with little or no tweaking. (In "real life" though, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.)

Note: Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

Low light: The Sony DSC-W80 performed poorly on our low light test, mainly because its longest shutter speed is only one second. At ISO 100, images were not bright at any level. At ISO 200, it took one foot-candle of illumination to get a borderline bright image. At 400, it took 1/2 fc, and so on. While reasonably bright, the ISO 3,200 image at 1/16 foot-candle was incredibly noisy with poor detail. The camera's autofocus system worked fairly well, able to focus on the subject down to the 1/8 foot-candle light level unassisted, and well past the darkest light level we test with the AF assist lamp enabled.

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) For such applications, you may have better luck with a digital SLR camera, but even there, you'll likely need to set the focus manually. For information and reviews on digital SLRs, refer to our SLR review index page.

Coverage and Range
Uneven coverage at wide angle. Poor flash range at normal ISO settings.

Coverage. Flash coverage was rather uneven at wide angle, better at telephoto (but too dim). Indoors, under incandescent background lighting, the Sony DSC-W80's flash underexposed our subject at its default setting. Using the flash's High Intensity setting helped, but results were still a bit dim. The camera's Slow-Sync flash mode fared better, though with a warmer cast.

ISO 100 Range. At ISO 100, the wide angle shot at six feet was reasonably bright, decreasing in brightness from that point on. At full telephoto, flash power was inadequate even at six feet. Sony apparently has decided to rely on its high ISO capability to capture flash shots, as suggested by the results below at ISOs 800 and 500.

Manufacturer Specified Flash Test. In the shots above, the DSC-W80 seems to perform exactly as Sony says it will at both wide angle and telephoto, producing a good exposure (albeit slightly overexposed at wide angle), at the rated distance with its ISO set to Auto. It did, however, have to boost ISO to 800 and 500 respectively to do so, resulting in noisy images.

Note: Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. We've now also begun shooting two shots using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims.

Print Quality
Good print quality, slightly oversaturated color, good 11x14 inch prints at ISO 100.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W80 had enough resolution to make decent 11x14 inch prints; 13x19 inch prints were too soft. ISO 200 also handled enlargement to 11x14 well, but ISO 400 was better at 8x10. Shadow detail in particular fell apart at ISO 400, with large blobs of chroma noise in low detail areas, while sharper areas still looked fine. ISO 800 followed a similar line, with more blobby representation of simpler areas, forcing a switch to 5x7 before it wasn't noticeable. ISO 1,600 at 5x7 was soft, but rather like a painting that looks fine at arm's length. 4x6 was better, again producing a usable shot. ISO 3,200 was unfortunately too soft at 4x6, with a purple color shift that combined with the noise to create a purple haze. We recommend avoiding ISO 3,200.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon Pro 9000, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 review for details on that model.)