Sony DSC-U60 Digital Camera Owner Review

Tom Jones
Male, 47 yrs old.
5'11" tall, 180 lb (180 cm, 82 kg)
tom at jrat dot com
Residence: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

September 21, 2004

Biography: I started backpacking as a young sprout, hiking in New Hampshire intensively in high school. Then I discovered climbing, as in technical rock climbing. Now, being weak, old and lazy, I have come back to backpacking, but mostly I do technical canyoneering, which is somewhere between climbing and backpacking.

I started out as the proud young buck, and carried the 50 lb pack (uh, 22 kilo pack). Now I am smarter, and try to be lightweight, though not ultralight.

I am an advanced-amateur photographer, and sell a few photos here and there, shot on film, under the name Utah Photo Wild. I carry a digital camera for snap-shots, to build trip reports for my canyoneering blog: Canyoneering USA: Latest Rave

Product Information:

Manufacturer: Sony www.sony.com
Date of Manufacture: 2003
Listed Weight: (none)
Weight: 6.8 0z (193 g)

Batteries: 2 - AAA
  (2 Sony rechargeable NiMH AAAs and charger included)
Image: 1632 x 1224 or 2.0 megapixels
Memory: Memory Stick
Connectivity: USB compatible
MSRP: $ 249.95

Self-Timer: fixed length 12 seconds.
Tripod Mount: NO - but, the bottom is flat to the screen, for standing the camera on a flat surface.

It is the BEST of cameras, it is the WORST of cameras.

Allow me to explain.

The Sony DSC-U60 is a wonderful little camera that has one very-important feature: it is Tom-proof. While I am generally easy on gear, I am definitely hard on cameras, and used to tear them up on a regular basis. Five digital cameras in three years: one left by the side of the trail; one left on the top of the car; one destroyed when a drybox failed; one just stopped working; and one zoom lens jammed with the fine sand of the desert (after one trip). For me, digital cameras were an expensive hobby.

The U60 was made for people like me. It is waterproof to 5 feet, and built into a sturdy, thick plastic case. No zoom lens. Sturdy rubber seals. Simple and lightweight. It's great!

The U60 looks more like a cellphone than a digital camera. Its clever body is canted sideways, so when I hold it out in my right hand, the lens is vertical. It is made for watersports. There is no viewfinder, just a 1" (25mm) (diagonal) LCD screen. It fits in my hand well, carries in a pocket well, and tucks easily in the lid of my pack.

The controls are simple and easy to understand. A power button turns it on and off. A flash button cycles through the flash settings: auto, red-eye suppress, on, off. A menu button turns the menu on and off. Up and down keys run through the menu options, and an exec key makes it so. A small rotating switch changes between "View Photos", "Take Photos", and "Take Movie Clip" modes.

There is no zoom. Instead, the lens is fixed at a 35mm equivalent of 33mm - which is good for wide angle fans like me.

The bottom of the camera opens up with a very sturdy, and lockable, latch. Inside, easily accessed, are the batteries (2 AAA), the memory stick, and the USB port. A rubber O-ring makes a sturdy seal on this sturdy door.

Field Information

I have used this camera on canyoneering and hiking trips for about 8 months. We've been in the field about 50 days, mostly on technical canyoneering trips that include rappelling, swimming and pushing through narrow slots. All trips have been in the desert where fine sand can be hard on photo and electronic gear. Temps have ranged from just below freezing to 100 degrees F (37 C).

Review

In many ways, I love this camera. It is great to have a camera that does not have to be babied. I take a lot more pictures in the most-fun places, because I don't have to take it out of a dry keg. I can keep it in my pocket when swimming or rappelling, or clip it to my harness. At the end of the trip, I can just leave it in the lid of my pack, or toss it under the seat of my car, or just forget about it. With most cameras, I carefully keep track of where it is and whether it is in danger of getting damaged - in the pack, in the car, when unpacking. With the Sony U60, I just don't.
 

The controls are simple, but then again, I don't ask for much. There is some shooting mode stuff that I don't use, and don't care to. I can punch the flash on and off very easily. The U60 turns on and off in eight seconds, more quickly than most digitals, and the picture-taking delay is only one second. The small LCD display is adequate, but takes getting used to. In some light conditions, it is hard to see what is in or out of the photo, and I've been known to ask people to wave so I can see if they are in the picture. This is a minor annoyance. I was skeptical of taking pictures for a whole weekend on two AAA batteries, especially rechargeables. But it works. I am able to take 60 pictures on a single charge - usually enough for a weekend. Since it takes standard AAAs, I can pull the batteries out of my headlamp if I need more juice. The charger is nice and charges the batteries overnight. The Memory Stick provided with the camera is very small, 8 MB. I bought a 128 MB Stick that can hold about 200 pictures, so I am unlikely to run out of space. Connecting to the computer is another well-designed feature of this camera. Pop open the bottom, plug the USB cable in, and the software automatically downloads all the pictures to my harddrive. While it may seem silly to complain about 30 seconds of mousing and clicking, now that I have it done automatically, the other way seems silly. Picture taking in the field is convenient. It is nice to have the camera easily at hand, even when swimming or rappelling. It is very fast to pull out, turn on, click a picture and put away - much faster than any other camera I have used. Sometimes the front piece of glass fogs up or gets gunk or water on it, and has to be wiped off in order to get clear pictures. The small LCD display does not show enough detail to be able to tell this, so I have gotten in the habit of checking the front before taking pictures, and wiping with a finger or cloth if needed. The Worst of Times

"So how are the pictures?" one might ask. Not so hot. But let me be clear on this, while not so hot, they are generally plenty good enough for the web, and for sharing snapshots with friends and the public. They are great for the blog. The technical requirements of photos for putting up on the web are modest, and the U60 works fine for that. But for other stuff, they are not very good. The small physical size of the lens and chip results in bleed from pixel to pixel, and the pictures are neither sharp nor contrasty. Lets look at some pictures. Here's one of Tom and Sharon after a swim in a canyon, as prepared for posting on my website. I've reduced it 3:1 to fit on the page, and sharpened it to account for the resizing. Looks pretty good. This is, actually, a pretty sharp photo for this little camera. The image is not particularly bright nor contrasty. Usually when preparing U60 photos for the web, I end up pumping up the brightness, pumping up the contrast, and juicing up the color saturation a bit to get it looking "right". While pumping pictures up takes only a minute or so, it only works when the photos are in the middle range of tones, and photos with difficult lighting tend to look terrible when pumped up. Let's look at the actual pixels - how do they look? Our second picture is a straight 1:1 as taken by the camera, of Sharon's face. While Sharon is beautiful, the picture is neither very contrasty nor very sharp. It's kind of fuzzy. The 2 megapixel camera I had before was much, much sharper, showing sharp contrast between pixels.

Our final pictures zooms in another 2:1 to show the lack of contrast between pixels. While the lack of picture quality is not terrible, it does limit what the camera can do. In taking pictures of gear, I find myself cropping a lot and getting poor pictures that do not show details very well. The lack of quality also makes it unsuitable for ANY use other than showing pictures on a computer screen. Other problems: The focus on the camera is often not very sharp, and this makes the quality problem worse. Maybe this is only a problem in dim light, but I take pictures of gear inside where the light is dim. The small size and light weight of the camera make it difficult to hold steady, and I have to concentrate on holding it still when taking pictures. When other people take pictures, they are often blurry, because the natural motion when holding the camera out and snapping a picture is to move it a little bit just as the picture gets taken. Conclusions This is a great camera for taking pictures for the web. It is waterproof and unusually rugged. The picture quality is not so hot. If I want to make prints, or crop things down a fair amount, I am out of luck. Suggestions: I can't wait for the 4.0 megapixel version with a better chip and better optics. Hopefully the U60 will be successful enough that Sony will expand the line to include cameras that actually produce good pictures. For the moment, I will continue to use the camera for taking my web pictures, at least until I run over it with the car or something.