Sony’s Picture Station Digital Photo Printer DPP-FP95 is a snapshot photo printer with better features than results. Considering its high price, you shouldn’t have to accept so many compromises.

The printer is compact and comes with a built-in carrying handle. The included CD contains a basic printer driver, but the DPP-FP95 is designed to be used on its own. Insert a media card (or a PictBridge-connected device), and you can start using the large, 3.6-inch LCD and the small array of buttons on the top panel to work with photos. The button labels are mostly clear, and the display does a great job of showing useful information and providing cues for further action.

The DPP-FP95 digital photo printer features a filter function that allows the modification of the colors in your image. For instance, the cross filter function can make the lights in a photo more dramatic while the partial color filter function lets you keep the center of a photo in full color and remove the color in other areas of the photo.

The paint filter function adjusts the image to appear as if were printed on canvas, and the monochrome and sepia filters let you create a more artistic black and white image from a color photo. The fish-eye filter lets you add a new perspective to a portrait or landscape picture. In addition, all images can be easily enlarged, cropped, and rotated from the on-screen display.

he Sony DPP FP95 is a dye-sublimination printer, which means colours are layered on to the paper one-by-one and because of its push/pull technique, you need room for the paper at the front and the back. The printer only takes Sony’s own 6x4in photo paper, which comes in a pack with sufficient ink and paper for 120 photos and costs £29.

Printing took 42 seconds, within the time claimed. We were impressed with the vivid colours and clear detail.

Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-T77 is a slim 10.1 Megapixel compact with a 4x optically-stabilised lens and a 3in touch-sensitive widescreen display. Announced in August 2008, it’s the successor to the Cyber-shot T70. Sony’s kept the display, sliding front panel and minimal physical controls, but increased the resolution by two Megapixels, extended the zoom range from 3x to 4x, enhanced a number of the automatic settings, and slimmed the unit down to a mere 15mm thick.

The earlier T70 was popular with gadget-lovers who were drawn to the touch-sensitive controls and smile-shutter feature which actually waited until the subject looked sufficiently happy before automatically taking the shot. With the new T77, Sony’s further enhanced these features while adding a longer zoom and making the body even slimmer. As before though, the big question is whether the touch controls are a novelty or a genuine enhancement to the user interface. Find out in our review of the Cyber-shot T77 where we’ll test the new features and compare its image quality against key rivals in a similar price bracket.

Like all of Sony’s recent cameras, the Cyber-shot DSC-T77 has built-in memory instead of having a memory card included in the box. The T77 has a paltry 15MB of onboard memory, which holds just three photos at the highest quality setting. Thus, you’ll want to get a large memory card, and fast. The DSC-T77 supports Memory Stick Duo media, and I’d start out with a 2GB card.

The DSC-T77 can use two different batteries: the included NP-BD1, and the optional NP-FD1. The only difference between the two is that the FD1 has the InfoLithium feature, which allows the camera to tell you exactly how many minutes of battery life you have left. Both batteries have just 2.4 Wh of energy, which is about as low as you’ll find

There’s no denying that the T77 is a very cool looking gadget. Everyone to whom I showed it was impressed by its slim body, elegant styling and solid build quality. It is available in a wide range of colours including silver, black (shown here), pink, brown or bright green. Despite its low weight the camera’s body is made of steel and is exceptionally well built. The sliding front cover is solidly mounted and feels very secure, and when closed it provides good protection for the lens and flash.

The all-black T500 has a mostly metal body, and sliding the front cover down reveals not only the optically stabilized 5x f3.5-4.4 33-165mm-equivalent lens but a larger-than-normal stereo microphone as well. The whole body measures 3.9 inches wide by 2.4 inches high by 0.8 inch deep, but the little camera feels more substantial than Sony’s slimmer models usually do with a weight of 6.2 ounces. A texturized rubber grip juts out from the right side giving you something to push down on to drop the lens cover and hold while shooting. On back a wrist-strap loop sticks out providing you someplace to rest your thumb next to the 3.5-inch touch-screen LCD. On top are the only physical controls: a power button, play button, and a shutter release that has a zoom ring on front and a switch at the back for quickly jumping from still shooting to movie mode.

The T500 camera integrates a wide (16:9), 3.5-inch (measured diagonally), transflective, touch panel LCD screen for easy navigation, framing and viewing in strong light conditions. It has a Carl Zeiss® 5x optical zoom lens with a wide field of view (33 – 165 mm, 35 mm equivalency). It incorporates Optical SteadyShot™ image stabilization and high sensitivity settings up to ISO3200 helps combat blur and facilitate flash-free shooting for natural-exposed photos. The model also incorporates face detection technology, an intelligent function that automatically detects up to eight faces in the camera frame and adjusts focus, exposure and flash. If having to wipe off fingerprints is a deal breaker, you’ll want to skip this camera–and probably the increasing number of touch-screen models, for that matter. Aside from fingerprints, you might take issue with the touch screen’s unresponsiveness. It’s adequately fast for poking around the three onscreen menus (Home, Menu, and Display) along with the handful of controls that are accessible directly from the screen including flash, macro, timer, and resolution. Navigating the camera settings is easy enough. The Home menu gives you access to all the main features and options, while the Menu screen provides context-sensitive options; for instance, if you’re taking still pictures, you get all the shooting choices like scene modes and resolutions. Nevertheless, Sony dropped this Home/Menu distinction in its 2009 models for a reason.

Besides the enhanced video functionality, the Sony Cybershot DSC-T500 has a 5x 33-165mm Carl Zeiss zoom lens (35mm equivalent), a 3.5-inch touch screen LCD display, Optical SteadyShot image stabilization, face detection, and sensitivity to ISO 3200. The T500 has an HDMI connector so images and video can be shared on high-definition TV sets, and new slideshow features with music and fades. The new Sony Cybershot DSC-T500 digital camera will be available at the end of September for about $400. For more on the T500, click on the press release link below.

The fact that the T500 features a large switch dedicated to changing the camera over from still image capture to video shooting might be your first clue that this isn’t your typical digicam with video capability tacked on. Using their experience designing camcorders as a jumping-off point, Sony appears to have thrown a lot of weight behind the T500′s high-def video recording capability.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T700 is closely related to the DSC-T77 that was announced at the same time. The T77 is a replacement for last year’s DSC-T70 model, and both new cameras feature a higher-res 10-megapixel sensor which is coupled to a more powerful Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar branded 4x optical zoom. Where the T70 had an already roomy 16:9 aspect ratio 3.0-inch touchscreen LCD, the Sony T700 boosts this to an even larger 3.5-inch display with a staggering 921,600 dots of resolution, triple that of its lower-priced sibling. The other main difference from the T77 is that the DSC-T700 has almost four gigabytes of available memory, vastly more than the 15MB found in the T77.

Touch screen cameras certainly are nothing new at this point. But for everyone except jaded camera reviewers, it seems that the novelty of being able to tap your way through settings changes on a huge screen hasn’t worn off. Biases about whether or not a touch interface does more to get in the way of ease of operation than it makes up for with cool touch-responsive integrations aside, there’s still something a bit “sci-fi” about a camera with little or no physical interface: even though the convenience of actual buttons means that they’ll probably never become a thing of the past, touch screens continue to seem like the technology of the future.

Additionally, the T700 boasts an unprecedented 4GB of internal memory, to keep pictures on hand, like a pocket photo album. Unfortunately, the T700 fared poorly on our tests for low light and resolution performance. The touch screen also proved to be problematic, with less than ideal response times, and a general feeling of inaccuracy. The camera offered less control than we’d like in many shooting situations. On top of that, the photo album functionality felt tacked on, and not well implemented. Overall, we found the camera to have a nice body, and a few good features, but only average performance, despite its substantial $399.99 price

Sony Bravia ZX1 is the world’s slimmest television up to now. It is only 9.9mm thick at its edges however it is a bit thicker at the back bottom. It can be mounted to a wall or placed on its own stand. It can also be used as a monitor for a computer. In its idle mode it can also play a slide show of images stored into it via a USB. The image is displayed by the high qualityLEDs on all the for sides of it. A technology called “Bravia Engine 2? is used which, according to Sony, improves every aspect of the image. It can easily handle fast motion sequences with itsMotionflow 100Hz with image Blur reduction (IB reduction). The Motionflow 100Hz inserts additional frames to the picture to compensate for the scenes of 50Hz.

One of the ways the boffins at Sony were able to make this TV so slim is BRAVIA Edge LED Technology. In layman’s terms this means the LED (Light Emitting Diodes) are around the edges of the screen and not behind it, which is the ‘traditional’ way of lighting these screens. All the tech-talk aside, the end result is that it works quite well. On close inspection there is some minor backlighting issues around the corners, but this is indeed very minor and something you’d really have to look out for. In normal viewing situations I don’t think this would amount to any major show-stopper.

Overall the BRAVIA ZX-1 is a pretty impressive achievement – it looks great, it’s about as slim as these things will ever get and has decent picture quality. The media receiver box eliminates just about all cabling to the screen itself, bar the power lead (and HDMI for 1080/24p), making discrete wall mounting easy and at 12.2kg you won’t need wall bolts the size of spark plugs. On the downside the limited number of analogue inputs may trouble some users, but the three HDMI ports might make this acceptable. The real downer was the pitiful set of speakers built into the stand, but this can be overcome with dedicated speakers, albeit at a price. As long as you can live with these it makes for one heck of a unique TV – and at $5,499,- you would hope so.