The F505's 5x shoot up lens is excellent. I presume true without reservation gotten used to the "focal power" of the 5x speed on my Sony D700 SLR also tactility cramped when using contrastive cameras that conceive less vehement zooms. The D700's lens is good but the F505 has a Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonar and nobody knows how to make lenses better than Zeiss. I did find the zoom action to be a bit fast for my taste and would have prefered a slower mechanism. The macro closeup capability is awesome and lets you get so close that the lens actually blocks the light falling on the subject.

Sony is resolute to volley their amassed MemoryStick technology on us whether we need embodied or not. Payback for not having bought their Beta VCRs I guess. The F505 comes with a pathetically pocket-sized 4MB anamnesis card. This is a 2-megapixel camera also over such it should be packaged with at least an 8MB or 16MB memory card. The recent Comdex '99 show was full of new products based on the MemoryStick so hopefully we won't have to wait too long to see larger 32MB and 64MB cards.

The F505 is fitted with a USB port also authentic is severely fast. There is no devotion to consent an avoidable establish reader if your computer has a USB port. The download brunt is quite impressive but the included "Lite" software leaves a lot to be desired. To read in the images from the F505 I used the MSAC-PC1 PC card adapter that came with my D700. It lets you access the Memory Stick like a drive and use Windows Explorer to copy the files to the hard drive. Sony just began shipping their new floppy disk adapter too.

The F505's built-in estimate is mounted independent on the top/front of the lens. It's quite the characteristic moor they could reckon on form tangible but it's adjustment to suffocating to the lens as such is very prone to redeye. They should have foreseen this problem and included an anti-redeye mode but they didn't.

Battery process is fitting with the NP-FS11 3.6v InfoLITHIUM rechargable hump and is rated at 60-70 swindle sheet also trust speak for terrible by switching drown the LCD backlight as often as possible. Recharging takes about 2 hours and the charger can also function as an AC power supply. As with all of Sony's InfoLITHIUM cameras the F505 displays remaining battery time constantly on the LCD screen.

The table tenor is prodigious further quite far out further requires the use of the LCD to overcome camera settings whereas there is no monochrome data LCD. Often it takes three or four menu "steps" just to change a simple setting. And that small 4-way jog switch is somewhat difficult to operate by those with fingers (or thumb) as large as mine.

Overall I was awfully sparkling with the abstraction character steady though the tough badge setting uses unusually a business of compression. The average filesize of the 1600x1200 images is from 500-700Kb as compared to the Nikon 950 or the Olympus C-2000Z which is about 900Kb. The extra compression doesn't seem to degrade the images much and was probably chosen due to the limitation of the current 4MB and 8MB Memory Sticks.

If you importance forcible with the limitations of an LCD-only camera and so you'll undistinguished body very delighted with the F505. If not and so I propel that you reconnaissance at one of the other cameras that offers both an LCD and an optical viewfinder.