[font color=\'#000000\']I've been looking for a compact 'carry anywhere' camera for some time now. The Sony T1 seemed about right except for the price after additional memory card and battery.
Well, eBay to the rescue! I've never shopped on eBay before. I thought it was all second hand stuff of dubious quality. However, it seems I've managed to get a brand new T1 with 256MB Memory stick PRO duo and spare battery for less than the recommended retail price of camera plus 32MB card and one battery.
Whenever I see reviews of small digicams that are often compared with more expensive DSLRs, I always wonder why the reviewer doesn't include a comparison at equivalent DoF and shutter speed. After all, selecting an appropriate DoF and shutter speed for a hand held shot is an important consideration. There are many situations when the light is low; late in the afternoon; in a shaded environment; on an overcast day; or inside a large building where flash will not reach far enough, where one really wants a combination of large f stop and hand-holdable shutter speed.
Without a tripod, one either uses 800 ISO or doesn't bother taking the shot. So I wondered how the T1 would compare with my D60 at 800 ISO.
The 1/2.4" sensor of the T1 with a diagonal of just 7.66mm, represents a DoF multiplier of 3.3 stops compared with the D60 and 5.7 stops compared with full frame 35mm. So, the T1's maximum aperture, wide, is F3.5 which gives the same DoF as the D60 at f11. In program mode and bright light, the T1 seems to be capable of F5.6, wide, (automatically jumps up to that) which is equivalent to F19 on my D60. At first, I thought this might be an electronic filter and not a real, optical F stop, but tests suggest clearly that it is a real F stop.
I used the Sigma 15-30 set at 24mm and f19, which is equivalent to the T1's 6.7mm at f5.6. The T1's ISO was set at 100 and the D60 at ISO 800. These settings produced an almost identical shutter speed - 1/180 for the D60 and 1/160 for the T1. I compared the shots.
This might be no surprise to many of you, but the T1 trounced the D60 under these conditions. The noise in the D60 images was very significantly greater than in the T1 images. Would these noise differences be equalised with Neat Image? Definitely not. In the shadows, the D60 simply didn't have the detail. Even when the T1 was set to -1 EV, it produced more detail in the shadows than the D60. The slightly greater resolution of the D60 was not as significant as the lower noise of the T1, under these conditions.[/font]
