High resolution with good detail, though contrast is high, and there's evidence of some fairly aggressive noise-suppression.

The extreme tonal range of this image makes it a tough shot for many digicams, which is precisely why I set it up this way, and why I shoot it with no fill flash or reflector to open the shadows. The object is to hold both highlight and shadow detail without producing a "flat" picture with muddy colors, and the DSC-T1 performed pretty well, albeit with a rather high-contrast image.

The shot at right was taken with no exposure compensation adjustment at all, very unusual for this shot among the cameras I've tested. Midtone values are about where they should be, but the strongest highlights are pretty blown out, and the shadows are still somewhat dark, a result of the harsh lighting and what appears to be a rather contrasty tone curve. I chose the Auto white balance as the most accurate overall, though the Daylight setting also produced good results.

Skin tones are pretty good, though slightly yellow, and the blue flowers in the bouquet are just about right. (Many digicams have trouble with this blue, but the T1 gets the hue about right.) Color looks good throughout the rest of the frame as well, although the red flowers look a little oversaturated.

Resolution is very high, with a lot of fine detail visible in regions of high contrast and surprisingly good sharpness from the tiny lens. Unfortunately though, it looks like the T1 is applying some pretty heavy-handed noise suppression, as details in Marti's hair and other areas of subtle contrast are flattened out to a uniform blur.

To view the entire exposure series from -0.3 to +0.7 EV, see files T1OUTAM1.HTM through T1OUTAP2.HTM on the thumbnail index page.

Excellent resolution and detail, though once again high contrast.

Overall results are similar to the wider shot above in terms of color and exposure, again with rather high contrast. Midtone detail is good, though the highlights are a bit bright. The shot at right was taken with -0.3 EV of exposure compensation, as the default exposure left the highlights on Marti's face much too bright. The T1's 3x zoom lens helps prevent strong distortion of Marti's features, a valuable asset in close-up shots like this. Resolution and detail are much higher in this shot, with stronger definition in Marti's face and hair, but they're not as crisp as you might find on a full-sized 5-megapixel camera, and the noise suppression still causes some loss of detail in Marti's hair.

To view the entire exposure series from -0.3 to +0.7 EV, see files T1FACAM1.HTM through T1FACAP2.HTM on the thumbnail index page.

Normal Flash

Slow-Sync Mode

Night Portrait Mode

Good intensity and coverage with the built-in flash, but high intensity setting was needed to deliver a proper exposure.

The T1's built-in flash illuminated the subject well, but required the High intensity setting for the best results. Color is good, though just slightly washed out from the high flash setting. (Here are sample images at the Normal and Low intensity settings.) I also snapped images with the Slow-Sync and Night Portrait modes, which both produced warmer results, due to the warm-hued room lighting. (Again, the High intensity setting produced the best results.) The Night Portrait mode did a fairly good job of blending the light from the flash and the room lights, producing less yellow cast than the basic slow-sync flash mode did.

Auto White Balance

Incandescent White Balance

A too-warm color balance, but good overall exposure.

This shot is always a very tough test of a camera's white balance capability, given the strong, yellowish color cast of the household incandescent bulbs used for the lighting. The T1's Auto white balance had just a little trouble here, and produced a strong, warm color cast. The Incandescent setting produced better results, though it too was just a little warmer looking than I'd personally prefer. Despite the warm cast, color is pretty good, although the blue flowers of the bouquet are dark and purplish. (Not uncommon in this shot, due to the very warm-hued room lighting.) The shot at right was taken with a +0.7 EV exposure compensation adjustment.

To view the entire exposure series from zero to +1.3 EV, see files T1INTP0.HTM through T1INTP4.HTM on the thumbnail index page.

ISO Series:
Noise on the T1 is a little hard to characterize. When you look at the individual color channels for this subject, there's a fair bit of noise there, particularly in the blue channel. Visually though, the noise in its full-color images doesn't seem as objectionable as I'd expect it to be, given how much is present in the blue channel here. While it does tend to lose detail in areas of the image with subtle contrast, Sony's noise-suppression in the T1 is very effective at delivering final images that look pretty "clean" to the eye.

Auto White Balance

Daylight White Balance

High resolution and detail, but a slightly warm color balance.

The T1's Auto white balance option produced the best overall color here, though the Daylight setting resulted in a similar image (just a bit warmer still). Overall color is good, though a bit warm, even with the Auto white balance. Resolution is high, with a lot of fine detail visible in the tree limbs and front shrubbery. Details are slightly soft overall, but consistent from corner to corner, with little of the softness in the corners that I've come to expect from digicam lenses, particularly those on subcompact models like the T1.

Excellent resolution and detail, with a moderate dynamic range.

This image is shot at infinity to test far-field lens performance. NOTE that this image cannot be directly compared to the other "house" shot, which is a poster, shot in the studio. The rendering of detail in the poster will be very different than in this shot, and color values (and even the presence or absence of leaves on the trees!) will vary in this subject as the seasons progress. In general though, you can evaluate detail in the bricks, shingles and window detail, and in the tree branches against the sky. Compression artifacts are most likely to show in the trim along the edge of the roof, in the bricks, or in the relatively "flat" areas in the windows.

This is my ultimate "resolution shot," given the infinite range of detail in a natural scene like this, and the DSC-T1 performed fairly well. The tree limbs over the roof and fine foliage in front of the house show a lot of fine detail, with pretty good definition, but there's clearly not as much detail present here as you'd find with the bet full-sized 5-megapixel cameras. Details are surprisingly sharp across the frame, although there's just a little blurring in the upper left corner. The camera lost most of the detail in the bright white paint surrounding the bay window, a trouble spot for many digicams, but does hold onto a fair bit of detail in the shadow area above the front door, with relatively low noise as well. Overall color looks good, despite the slightly bright exposure. The table below shows a standard resolution and quality series, followed by ISO, contrast, saturation, and sharpness series.

Resolution Series:

ISO Series:

Contrast Series:

Contrast Series
Low	Normal	High

Saturation Series:

Saturation Series
Low	Normal	High

Sharpness Series:

Lens Zoom Range

A typical 3x zoom range.

I routinely shoot this series of images to show the field of view for each camera, with the lens at full wide angle, at maximum telephoto (3x, in this case), and at full telephoto with the digital zoom enabled. The DSC-T1's lens is equivalent to a 38-114mm zoom on a 35mm camera. That corresponds to a moderate wide angle to a pretty good telephoto, and is just slightly biased toward the telephoto end relative to the 35-105mm range that is most common on consumer digicams. Following are the results at each zoom setting.

Auto White Balance

Daylight White Balance

Slightly warm color, but excellent detail.

This shot is often a tough test for digicams, as the abundance of blue in the composition frequently tricks white balance systems into producing a warm color balance. Both the T1's Auto and Daylight settings produced slightly warm color balances, though the Auto setting was the most neutral, and the color overall was better than most cameras manage on this test. The slight color cast produces purplish tints in the blue background, as well as in the shadow areas of the blue robe. Resolution is very high, with great detail in the embroidery of the blue robe and on the red vest. (The original data file for this poster was only 20MB though, so cameras like the T1 are definitely capable of showing more detail than the poster has in it.)

Standard Macro Shot

Macro with Flash

A small macro area, but with soft details and softer corners. Flash has trouble throttling down.

The T1 performed pretty well in the macro category, capturing a very small minimum area of only 1.82 x 1.36 inches (46 x 35 millimeters). Resolution was high, with a lot of fine detail in the dollar bill, but details were rather soft throughout the frame, especially in the corners. Color looks good though, and the exposure is about right. The T1's flash had a little trouble throttling down for the macro area, and overexposed the shot. - Plan on using external illumination for the closest macro shots.

Auto White Balance

Daylight White Balance

Good overall exposure, good color, but a slightly warm color balance.

The T1's Auto and Daylight settings produced similar, warm images, so I chose the Auto setting for the main shot as it had a slightly lesser cast. Exposure is just a hint bright, but the T1 still distinguishes the subtle tonal variations of the Q60 target well. The large color blocks are a bit warm, and slightly oversaturated, but otherwise hue-accurate. The shadow area of the charcoal briquettes has moderate detail, with moderate noise.

ISO Series:

Low-Light Tests

Limited low-light capabilities, enough for city street scenes at night (just), but fairly clean-looking images.

The T1 operates under automatic exposure control, though you can manually adjust the ISO setting. Still, low-light shooting is a bit limited. The T1 produced usable images only down to the 1 foot-candle (11 lux) light level at ISO 400, and in Twilight mode, the images at that level were darker than I'd consider acceptable. Color balance was pretty good though, just slightly blue. Sony's noise-suppression processing works hard here, but generally does a good job, with the final images a fair bit less noisy than I suspect the original sensor data was. (The flat tint blocks of the MacBeth(tm) target are pretty clean-looking, but you can see a lot of noise around their edges, and in areas where there's a lot of higher-contrast detail, such as the min-res target.) The table below shows the best exposure I was able to obtain for each of a range of illumination levels. Images in this table (like all my sample photos) are untouched, exactly as they came from the camera.

Flash Range Test

A tendency to underexpose flash shots, with limited range as well.

In my testing, the T1's flash started out rather dim, and decreased steadily out to the 14 feet limit of this test. (Not the camera to use, if you need to shoot large groups of people at moderate distances at night, but fine for indoor shooting at close range, or for a fill-flash with a subject in the foreground.) Below is the flash range series, with distances from eight to 14 feet from the target.

8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft	12 ft	13 ft	14 ft
1/ 40 secs F4.4	1/ 40 secs F4.4	1/ 40 secs F4.4	1/ 40 secs F4.4	1/ 40 secs F4.4	1/ 40 secs F4.4	1/ 40 secs F4.4

ISO-12233 (WG-18) Resolution Test

Very high resolution, 1,350 lines of "strong detail." Average barrel distortion, higher than average pincushion.

The T1 performed well on the "laboratory" resolution test chart. It started showing artifacts in the test patterns at resolutions as low as 1,000 lines per picture height, in both horizontal and vertical directions. I found "strong detail" out to about 1,350 lines. "Extinction" of the target patterns didn't occur until about 1,600-1,650 lines.

Optical distortion on the T1 is average at the wide-angle end, where I measured approximately 0.8 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end did only slightly better, as I measured 0.6 percent pincushion distortion there. The 0.8% barrel distortion at wide angle is average among the cameras I've tested, although I personally feel that that level is too high. At the telephoto end, 0.6% pincushion is quite a bit higher than average. Chromatic aberration is moderate, showing about six pixels of coloration on either side of the target lines. (This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.) Although I saw a little softening in some images, most of my shots from the T1 showed relatively little of the softness in their corners that I've come to expect from subcompact digicam models.

Resolution Series, Wide Angle

Wide Angle	"Fine" JPEG	"Normal" JPEG
2,592 x 1,944	T1RESWLF	T1RESWLN
2,048 x 1,536	T1RESWMF	-
1,280 x 960	T1RESWSF	-
640 x 480	T1RESWTF	-

Resolution Test, Telephoto

2,592 x 1,944 (Fine, Tele)

T1RESTLF

Sharpness Series

Sharpness Series
Soft	Normal	Sharp