Cyber-shot DSC-W5

The Sony Cyber-shot DSCW5 is both physically and functionally impressive. Weighing nearly 200g, it is one of the larger 5 megapixel models we've seen, but it's not as large as some of the 10X zoom models. It is housed in a black or silver aluminium chassis, and looks very suave, if a little big to lug around in your pocket.

It also sports a wonderful 115,000 pixel 2.5" LCD. The more time we spend with digital cameras, the more we are convinced that a large screen really improves the picture-taking experience. To see your subject lit up on a large, high-quality LCD is infinitely better than squinting at a blurry rendering on a 1.8" screen.

The number of manual features is equally impressive. You can control focus, shutter speed and aperture manually, as well as white balance, sharpness, saturation, brightness and ISO levels. The feature set is truly impressive for a 5 megapixel model.

It comes with 32MB of onboard memory and supports Memory Stick and Memory Stick PRO flash memory cards for expansion.

The camera is equipped with Sony's Real Image Processor, which reduces the lag between shots. This makes a noticeable difference: the camera took only one or two seconds to recover between shots.

We found the camera's image quality lacking during our tests. While it produced some reasonable indoor shots, outdoor images came up a little pale. With a little tweaking of the camera's impressive settings, however, this could be easily rectified.