Much as i love my Canon digital SLR camera and Canon HF100 HD camcorder, sometimes you just want something a bit more compact for casual snaps & clips. But at the same time you don’t want your causal snaps & clips to look like shit either. My previous compact camera was a Sony Cybershot T200 and it’s a brilliant snapper but the video wasn’t great. So i’ve upgraded to a Sony Cybershot T500 which is pretty much the same camera (though it goes from 8 to 10 megapixels) but it gains a 720 High Definition video recorder. Here’s my first test video with the camera:

I think it’s pretty good considering it came from such a tiny compact camera! Obviously it’s no replacement for a dedicated HD camcorder but it’s brilliant for something you can carry everywhere. Oh, and the photo’s ain’t bad either!

Click read more for my review

The large touch screen on the back of the camera covers the entire camera body (brilliant for video!) but at first the touch screen can be a little temperamental. It can seem quite unresponsive at times but this can be helped greatly by calibrating it – don’t calibrate it using your finger, use the end of a pen lid (or something like that that won’t scratch the screen) – you’ll be surprised how much this helps! Most of the controls are accessed through the screen and are easy enough to find.

Controls on the camera body are Zoom, Shutter button, switch from photo to video. And that’s it. The body itself feels very solid and the controls are easy to use, much easier than the T200 which had a fiddly little zoom rocker.

The photo’s straight out of camera on fully auto mode are very punchy. Much more so than my other T200 camera, it’s as if it’s on vivid mode but it isn’t. If you find the saturation a bit too much you can switch the camera into Neutral mode for a more regular look but personally i prefer my photos with more oomph anyway so i like it on default mode. There is some noise present in dark/dull conditions but i guess it depends what you want your camera for. If you want it for regular sized snaps then the pictures look great in my opinion.

So, overall i’m a happy bunny. It’s a great all-round compact camera/hd video recorder.