Sony Reviews

We have used this at our design firm for three years, and it has been flawless. Amazing pictures, great features, excellent usability in terms of downloading from the memory stick. The tilt feature is very useful for shooting low or when you have to shoot over the top of someone's head (great for those auto show pictures when that guy just won't move out of the way!)

I've used it at home as well with my Mac, and the downloading is just as simple. Just plug the USB cable in and there you go.

Recently we decided to get a "new" camera for home, and purchased one of the new sony digital cameras, the P71. It is rated at a much higher megapixel, but immediately I noticed the pictures were nowhere near as good as with the trusty f505. We took it back right away and came here to buy a used f505.

Don't be fooled by "megapixels", you can have a ton but if they are all shot through a tiny lens, the pictures just can't be that good. The size of the lens on the dsc-f505 is huge, and it really shows in the photos. An excellent camera.

This is the camera that finally convinced me digital photography was mature enough to use on a regular basis. It has all the right bells and whistles: 1600x1200 max resolution @ 2.1 megapixels, a nice Zeiss zoom lens, UDB port connection to offload images. The included memory stick is a little small but Sony sells memory sticks as large as 64 meg, which will hold 110 images at the camera's best quality, and 200+ images at "average" quality. A couple of memory sticks and an extra battery make a good kit to travel with. I recently spent a week in Paris and London and took 700 pictures, offloading them each night to a laptop. I was thoroughly impressed with the way the camera works and the photos it produced.

As a former pro-photogrpher and now web/graphics developer, I had heard the usual negative comments about digital cameras. And I am, to say the least, a fanatic about quality. However, when I saw this camera (looks alone) I had to have it. The response from other digital camera owners is generally raised eyebrows. Other reviews here reflect those concerns: "It's a great camera, but no optical viewfinder?" Yes, I thought so myself at first. But consider the following: The lens rotates vertically 180 degrees on the camera body allowing the photographer to hold the camera directly overhead - or anywhere down below - yet still see the LCD pefectly. The advantage? Complete mastery of that universally dogging fact of photo-life, PERSPECTIVE - the single most important factor in any good photograph's composition. To my knowledge, the F505 is the very first hand-held camera in the history of photography to accomplish this. So whatever is lost by the lack of a viewfinder is compensated ten thousand times by this magnificent fact. Further, when I took my first photo (indoor with flash), my jaw dropped to the floor. I could read the cover notes on CD cases across the room. Color? Absolutely precise. Frankly, I had never seen anything quite like it. The new version - the F505v - adds the TIFF format for pros, which places this camera precisely at the pinnacle of its class. Drawbacks? There is a slightly noticeable lack of extremely tiny detail in certain type of outdoor images. And, as with all digital cameras, dynamic range could be improved. But all-in-all, the F505 is, in my view, the hands-down, all around winner.