Sony DSC-S70 Digital Camera

The Features

As with many digital cameras in this price range, the DSC-S70 has a long list of features. Some are shared with many other higher end digital cameras, while some are features that few possess. As always no single product is perfect, thus we will also discuss the downfalls to the S70's feature set.

Movie Mode

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Let's being with a feature that the Sony has that only a few other digital cameras possess. In addition to being able to capture still pictures at up to 2048x1536, the S70 can also capture movies in MPEG2 format. The S70 has three capture modes when recording movies: a high quality 320x240 mode, a regular 320x240 mode, and a 160x112 mode.

The camera can be set to take 5, 10, or 15 second movies when the shutter button is depressed once or it can take up to 60 seconds of continuous movies when the shutter button is held. The picture effects described below can be applied to the movies, however the zoom is locked when recording, meaning that if you start recording in wide-angle, it is not possible to telephoto zoom in.

To see just how the movies are captured, we recorded a very similar set of movies in each mode. You can view the 320 high quality movie by clicking here, the standard 320 movie by clicking here, and the 160 movie by clicking here.

The difference between 320 high quality and standard 320 are hard to see in a still picture that is so small, but zooming in on the image during playback reveals a bit lower quality image. In addition, the sound in high quality mode is drastically better than that in normal mode. The size difference between the two modes really shows how much more information is stored in high quality mode, as our high quality test movie is about 1.4 MBs larger than the standard quality one.

The 160x112 mode is really only useful for creating animated web cards or such, where size is of the utmost concern. Don't get us wrong, even at 320x240 high quality mode the S70 is still extremely far behind a standard camcorder, both in image quality as well as movie size. One thing that hurts the Sony, however, is the fact that the maximum recording time is set to 60 seconds regardless of the memory stick or resolution used.