Worth a million words!

Well, six months and six thousand pictures after purchasing this camera, I'm still a happy woman. Before I start the review, let me tell you right up front that I'm not a pro photographer. Before this camera, I owned two small and horrid digitals--both were Panasonics and both left me with a terrible taste in my mouth for digital. I carried a 35mm point-and-shoot for a while, but ultimately, I'm embarrassed to admit that my main mode of capturing memories onto film was either the video camera or a disposable 35mm. I own an SLR, but when a lens cracked years ago, I just never got around to replacing it.

Deep in my soul, I'm a creative person. So about eight months ago I started dreaming about taking pictures. It moved from dreaming to a full-fledged obsession. I didn't just want to get a good camera, I had to get one! I started hunting for an SLR, but when I decide to purchase a high-end product for myself, months of research usually ensues. This is because I hate getting ripped-off and I hate feeling, after my purchase, that I could have done better. But mostly, I want to have enough time to talk myself out of the purchase. If I think about it long enough, perhaps I'll decide the spur-of-the moment impulse is just that, an impulse. In this case, my search narrowed, eventually shifted to digital, and ultimately led me to the Sony DSC-F717.

Oh, what a camera this is! Clarity, ease--Sony is close to perfection here and has certainly made me more creative! For about a thousand bucks, Sony handed me a Carl Zeiss™ lens, shutter speeds of up to 1/2000 second (in auto mode), long battery life, and beautiful pictures. Bundled with my camera was:

AC power Adaptor
Rechargeable battery pack (NP-FM50)
A/V Connecting Cable
A lousy 32 MB proprietary Memory Stick (which I quickly upgraded to 128 MB)
Shoulder Strap
USB Cable
Lens Cap
User's Manual
CD-ROM with software to upload the pictures (I don't use it, instead I use what comes with Windows XP)

Although the camera looks bulky, it's really surprisingly user-friendly. My right hand fits naturally around the camera, with my thumb on the little thumb rest built onto the right side of the LCD screen and my index finger on the shutter button. Just a finger-wiggle below, is the jog dial to change aperture settings and the like, and a thumb-wiggle above is the power dial. My left hand curls around the lens barrel like they were made for each other, and my thumb easily controls the zoom or the switch from auto to manual focus. The menu/display buttons above the LCD screen take a little playing with, and more than once when first starting I accidentally set the camera to timer mode and made my kids wait around while I figured out why it wasn't shooting. Those are some interesting pictures of the floor as I tried to figure out what went wrong just as the timer went off. But the learning curve doesn't seem that steep to me--I never read the manual yet I'm taking pictures in every mode and have even invested in a tripod for some great night shots!

Another great feature is the swiveling lens. It rotates about 77 degrees up and 36 degrees down, allowing you to shoot in a crowd above their heads. To be honest, this is the only time I use the LCD screen, which seems to be incredibly clear except in bright sunlight. Even the bright sunlight problem is fixable; the user can control the brightness of the image and the backlight level with little hassle. It's only a problem for me when I'm wearing sunglasses in bright sunlight and think the camera is off before I adjust the brightness. The camera is tough too--the body is silver and made from a magnesium alloy that, so far, has withstood the test of being bonked on the ground when around my five-year-old daughter's neck. It feels solid too, and I haven't worried at all about a part falling off or breaking with use.

Image resolution is wonderful. I took some macro shots of dandelions to test and every single petal is crisp and clear. It's absolutely amazing! The camera allows for two JPEG compression levels, and a very user-friendly image resolution menu, which allows for a change of resolution on the fly. Additionally, after you take a picture, you can view it on the LCD screen and then zoom and crop right on the camera. The NightFraming feature is very useful, especially when taking pictures of sleeping children, although the NightShot feature seems pretty useless. It's a neat gimmick though, and my teenage sons says the pictures look like I'm an undercover spy. The camera also shoots MPEG movies, limited in length only by the size of the memory card. Because I still use a video camera, I can't really review this feature well-except to say that I've used it once to shoot a five second shot, the movie was fine, and the quality was good.

Some other bits, information, and features:

Image sharpening (+/- 1, 2)
14-bit A/D conversion allows for wider dynamic ranges
Flash intensity is adjustable; offers red eye reduction
Aperture priority (F2 to F8; 13 steps)
Auto-exposure bracketing has been very useful! +/- 0.3, 0.7 or 1.0 steps
Does burst-mode; Three shots at 2fps. Takes a few seconds to write the images in this mode though.
Can shoot Negative Art, Solarize, and Sepia images.
White balance easy to use with controls on the barrel.
Selectable ISO sensitivity: Auto, 100, 200, 400, 800
Manual exposure (with EV indicator)

Pros:
Image quality is excellent (breathtaking, beautiful, incredible!)
Battery life--506 minutes seems to be my average fully charged battery time. Charging time is short.
Startup is very fast.
Lens is sharp, zoom is fast.
Upload is quick.

Problems:
Macro mode doesn't work well with zoom.
I wish you could charge the battery on a charger so I can use one while preparing a backup.
Sony's supplied memory card is a joke! Why give us so much battery time and so little memory!?