I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, holy shit that is a long name but we move on. My test was a simple one. I used the Cybershot HX5 (one of the best damn cameras I’ve ever used) and I wanted to see, if I used a higher speed Memory Stick, would it impact my pictures. There have been plenty of scenarios where I’ve been wanting to take a picture but my camera was still processing the past picture. This can cause you to just miss pictures during daylight and worse, when it’s a lower light situation, you think your camera is done taking the picture and you move your hand away and bam, blurry picture.
Reviews
As we continue to gear up our site and do more reviews, I’ve sat back and analyzed how other sites do reviews, when they are able to gain access to them and what they offer in them. It first becomes clear to me that the major tech blogs all get their products for free to review before they are released, while we are purchasing our products for review (yikes). More so, the reviews I’ve found are in depth, but many times are not useful. Here is what I mean; many reviews get extremely technical and in depth, and that might be great for the tech crowd, but chances are that crowd already knows about the products and their likes and dislikes. This leaves those who really need the reviews to decide if this is the right product for them. This crowd has nowhere to turn to. They don’t need to know about the processor versus last year, versus 8 other products. They want to know about this product, what it does, and how it does it. With that information they can make up their mind about the product.
For this reason, I’m introducing a new series if reviews called “The Everyday Review”. The goal of this review is to take a product and start looking at it from an everyday consumer’s eyes. I’ll ask questions like: How easy is it to set up when you take it out of the box? How is the layout of the device? Can I easily integrate it into my other products, and how might it handle during day-to-day use? For example, although there will be some talks about features, the idea of my Sony W330 review was simple. The person who is buying this is looking for a good budget-friendly camera. They are not looking for 100 different settings and options. They want to know: When I take this camera out of the box, what can I do with it? How does it handle when I take it outside for a trip and shoot some normal pictures (not sit there and compare ISO settings in one light vs another vs 5 other cameras). And that’s exactly what I did. After the basic setup, I took the camera out for two days and just took pictures like most people would. Here is my experience with the camera after a 2 day shooting spree and another week of intermediate use.
Hit the jump for the full review and sample pictures.
I have to first start out this review by saying that unlike the other big blogs, we were not given a Sony Dash to review. So today, I headed on over to Best Buy where I bought a Sony Dash and I point this out to show our love here for Sony products and our commitment to you, our readers. Also, as to be expected, it took nearly 30 minutes to get what I wanted at Best Buy because god forbid anyone having a clue about products.
Ok. I’ve now spent about a good two to three hours with this product and I must say that I get it. I see what Sony was going for and what that final vision was. I’ve read on random blogs and on Facebook and such that the question is: why get the Sony Dash when there is an iPad? First, this is completely bogus. One unit is a table while the other is a stationary unit for the house that also has apps. In the end, these are two completely different units. The idea of the Sony Dash is the following: This unit can be in your bedroom, in your kitchen or wherever else. From there, the Sony Dash can display your Twitter and Facebook feed, it can show you your stocks, weather and news and even stream Youtube, Netflix and Amazon on Demand videos. Music streaming is brought to you buy Pandora and few other companies. I must also point out that Pandora does run on the background as well so while your Twitter feed might be up, you can rock away to your Pandora. Awesome.
Hit the jump for the complete Sony Dash Review.