Hot wired: Sony catches it on camera

The Sony Cyber-shot is a smart piece of work.

Sony has been severely chastened by shareholders for failing to maintain the dominance of some of its traditional markets in this millennium.

The creator of the once-ubiquitous Walkman goes almost unheard in this age of miniaturised digital audio.

Maybe the simultaneous launch this week of four quite different Sony digital cameras points to an arena where the company sees itself as a global leader.

Certainly they have some key segments covered. There's one for the slim and fashion-conscious, one for arty creative types, one for the family, and an SLR-style model for those who fancy themselves as professionals.

All this in an era when most of us get a free camera in our cellphone.

Does the Sony approach make sense? Certainly the Cyber-shot N1, which I see as a a family model, does. The $900 N1 is the least pretty of the four, the familiar telescoping Karl Zeiss lens out front providing 8.1 megapixel resolution. The back is mostly a 7.5cm LCD display, the largest in the compact camera market and it's the first Cyber-shot to have a touch panel screen.

This large display means you can easily use the camera to show off your photos. And it records each image in full resolution to a removable memory stick and also as VGA (low resolution 640x480) in the camera's 26MB memory, creating an in-camera album of as many as 500 images.

A paint function allows you to draw on the pictures with your fingers or with a stylus.

The album can present sorted images as slide shows, complete with fades and zooms, set to pre-loaded or imported soundtracks.

The Cyber-shot M2, the arty creative type's option, offers still image (up to 5.1 mega pixel) and MPEG-4 (640x480 at 30 frames a second) video modes. Looking like a clam-shell cellphone, the M2s swivelling LCD screen makes one-handed self portraits easy.

It can store 1100 VGA-size images and will allow you to select background music for slide shows.

Pricey at $1000 but the hybrid video mode - which uses a buffer to record five seconds of video before and three seconds after a still shot - could make some priceless Minties Moment memories.