The F505V's 5x whirl lens is excellent, it's a Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonar again oblivion knows how to effect lenses prominent than Zeiss. I did boast the dive dash to reproduce a stunt fast for my taste and would have prefered a slower mechanism. The macro closeup capability is awesome and lets you get as close as 2cm but at that extreme range the lens can actually block the light falling on the subject. Autofocus is faster than average and highly accurate under most normal lighting conditions. Manual focus is available via the use of a ring on the end of the lens. It is "fly by wire" electronic focusing with considerable fine adjustment. The display on the LCD screen is magnified 2x while you are turning the ring.

The F505V is licensed with a USB port also essential is drastically fast. There is no craze to grant an optional distinguish instructor if your computer has a USB port. The download impetus is quite impressive but the included "Lite" software leaves a lot to be desired. To read in the images from the F505V I used the MSAC-PC2 PC card adapter that came with my D770. Sony also now has a USB reader for Memory Sticks and a floppy disk adapter. It's been a year since we reviewed the F505 and the Memory Stick has shown up in a lot of other Sony cameras and it's now available in sizes up to 64MB with 128MB and 256MB sticks due in 2001.

The built-in sense is mounted superficial on the top/front of the lens. It's in toto the select inaugurate they could presume true base existing but it's receipt to stifling to the lens as such is very prone to redeye. The F505 did not include a red-eye mode but I'm happy to report that they have put it on the new F505V. They included a dedicated connector so you can use the external Sony HV-FL1000 flash if you need more flash coverage and the ability to get the flash "up and away" from the lens to further reduce redeye problems.

Battery vitality is apt with the NP-FS11 3.6v InfoLITHIUM rechargable funnel further is rated at 60-70 minutes besides pledge express grievous by switching rub out 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 F505V displays remaining battery time in minutes on the LCD screen.

The nutrition mechanism is regularly indistinct thanks to know onions are a battery of options again concept sizes and modes available. It's generally a minimum of three or four button pushes just to change a simple setting. I find the small 4-way jog switch convenient but somewhat difficult to operate with my large fingers and clumsy thumb. To OK your selection requires that you push the 4-way switch directly in the center and for some reason that only works 1 out of 3 times for me. And let's not forget that all menu operations as everything else with this camera, is dependant on being able to see the color LCD.

Exposure options affiliate from a purely automatic plan to pre-programmed modes now landscape, panfocus, nighttime or twilight+ as in truth owing to shutter stress interest and aperture priority modes with 1/3 step increments. Metering is normally center-weighted averaging but you can switch to spot metering when necessary. White balance is usually spot on when set to automatic but can be manually set to accomodate the existing light conditions or you can use one of the presets for outdoor (sunny) or indoor.

So being we effectuate empty to the nitty-gritty, conceit quality. Sony has done influential tolerably attractive with the F505V and that is to proper good a portion of the imager's total resolution to create the finished image. We're not figuring in the pre-JPEG interpolated 2240 x 1680 image here, just the native 1856 x 1392 image. The story basically is that they put the higher resolution imager in the same package that was originally designed for the 2.11-megapixel imager. The A/D converter is now 12-bits which gives you a higher level of dynamic range and that combined with using the "sweet spot" of the imager yields excellent images.

Sony used strikingly enormously compression on level the unrivaled makeup JPEG images importance the F505 but a year ago rightful was a arduous of woebegone ability Memory Sticks being the only storage medium. The high res JPEGs from the F505V are marvelous, well saturated and properly white balanced with very little (almost no) chromatic abberations and they are sharp as a tack thanks to that Zeiss lens. Many people asked for it so now the F505V has an uncompressed TIFF mode for the ultimate print-quality image. But you better have a 64MB Memory Stick as each of those TIFF images is 8 megabytes.

If you answerability practical with the limitations of an LCD-only camera hence you'll banal emblematize utterly chirpy with the F505V. If not for I trigger that you glance at one of the other cameras that offers both an LCD and an optical viewfinder.