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Sony DSC F717

by Mahesh R Shirgaonkar, 2003


Introduction

Six months back I had an epiphany: I realized that the entire process of taking pictures with a film camera (35mm, medium or large format) was too time consuming and definitely costly. So, I started considering getting a digital camera to shorten the process of producing digitized photographs.

Like most other folks, I have always considered most digicams to be really costly toys. A few digicams, like the Canon D60, the Nikon D100 and the newest Canon 1DS cost a fortune and supposedly produce photographs that are comparable to 35mm slides. These cameras were (and still are) way beyond my budget of around $1000.

Looking around the web, reading various reviews, I came up with a list of 5 cameras I could afford:

  • Sony F717
  • Nikon 5700
  • Minolta Dimage 7Hi
  • Olympus E20
  • Canon G4

I finally got myself the Sony F717. What follows is a justification of my act!

Getting it

I bought my Sony F717 from the local Fry's store in Santa Clara. The package consisted of the camera, a 32MB memory stick(MS), a battery, a charger, a USB-cable, neck-strap, guide, and some other stuff. Having read the reviews I knew that 32MB MS would hold around 12 JPEGs. I also knew that the battery would last about 4 hours on full charge. So I bought the following items along with the camera:

  • an extra battery
  • a 128MB MS
  • extended warranty (Sony provides only 90-days warranty!!)

The total package cost me just over $1200, though prices for the base package have gone down since. Within a few days of buying the camera I also bought two very important accessories:

  • a remote control
  • a lens-hood

Sony had a limited recall on a few 717s. Those 717s had to be sent back to Sony for some debugging. Immediately after buying my camera I checked with Sony to see if I had to send in my camera. The answer was a no! I was happy! :)

The body

The most striking feature of the Sony F717 is its unique L shaped body. For a long time I was skeptical of this design. Change is always tough to accept. Getting used to the L shape wasn't too much of a change for me. It is almost like using any 35mm SLR.

Externally, the 717 is quite similar to its predecessor, the 707. The only major differences I could see were:

  • some of the buttons/controls were placed differently
  • the 717 has a more bright body. The 717 is sharply silvery, while the 707 was a mellow metallic brown. Lacking any engineering reasons for the choice of body color I think a brown, or maybe even a black 717 would be much better. The small silver body mounted on top of a gigantic tripod attracts a lot of attention which I really hate for various obvious reasons.

The body has a nice bright LCD, and an electronic viewfinder with a rubberized eye-cup. Switching between the LCD and the viewfinder is easy and quick enough as the camera has a special button for this purpose. The LCD and the finder (as Sony calls it) are mutually exclusive: when you are using the LCD, the finder is off and when you are using the finder the LCD is off. The finder and the LCD reveal the same information. There's a lot of information that can displayed. You can configure/choose what information you want shown.

I find the LCD to be bright, crisp and clear. I use a Belkin PDA screen overlay to protect the LCD from dust, grime and smudges. This reduces the brightness, though!

The body has a small built in flash right behind the lens. The flash is definitely useful in certain situations (fill flash, etc) but it goes without saying that you would need an external flash if you use fancier flash techniques. The camera sports a hot-shoe. Note that the hot-shoe is not enabled by default. It has to be enabled through the camera settings menu. There have been reports of successful use of Canon's 420EX and various Nikon flashes with the 717. As yet I have not tried any external flash with the camera.

The camera provides most of the standard features found on cameras in this price and feature range:

  • exposure compensation, bracketing, AE lock, metering mode selector, built-in flash control (on/off/auto), self-timer (on/off)
  • complete auto and scene (portrait, landscape, etc) picture taking modes
  • aperture priority, shutter priority, manual, program modes
  • a mode to shoot movies
  • a mode to review pictures and movies
  • a mode to setup the camera

Additionally, the camera also provides controls for:

  • macro mode (which I think is a joke but is a popular setting on most 35mm and digital p&s cameras) NOTE: the flowers and the roses were photographed using a closeup diopter, and not just the camera's macro setting.
  • white balance (a very fancy name for controlling the tone of the photograph. It is essentially the same as using correction filters when you are shooting with regular film in say incandescent light, or late night, etc.)

The control buttons are spread all over the body and the lens casing but I think they are quite well placed. When I bought the camera I compared it to a Canon G3. The G3 has numerous buttons all over its body! Instead of providing all those buttons, Canon could have as well provided a key-board! ;-) Compared to the G3, the 717 has fewer buttons that are well placed. Of course, the trade-off with fewer buttons is that you need to press a couple of them to get to a feature. e.g, to enable bracketing, you need to press Menu, select Recording Mode and then enable Exposure Bracketing! Thats quite a bit of button fiddling right there.

The Lens

The second distinguishing feature of the 717 is its tilting lens. Most other cameras in its class provide a tilting LCD. I think the Nikon 9xx and the 4500 are the only other cameras with tilting lens feature. Before I bought the camera I was very skeptical of this feature and its ease of use but I got used to it very quickly.

I like to think of the 717 as a digital ZLR. It has a built in 5x optical zoom. It also has 2x digital zoom. Most of the photographs I shot at the SF Zoo were taken with the digital zoom enabled and I am quite impressed with the lens as well as the digital zoom.

The actual focal length of the lens is 9.7-48.5. It is a Carl Zeiss Vario Sonnar lens. True to Sonnar (German for very bright), the lens is fast: f/2.0-2.4! The physical length of the lens is constant, i.e. zooming does not extend the lens barrel. This makes using filters on the lens easy.

I found the AF to be reasonably fast. Bill Tuthill pointed out that CDI found the AF to be very slow! It is definitely not Canon's USM. I think it is faster than most Nikon lenses I have used: the 28-105 ED, 60mm Micro and the 80-200/2.8 ED. A more interesting feature is that the camera can actually focus in absolute dark! In such situations, the camera uses a special Holographic-AF mechanism to project a safe laser criss-cross pattern to illuminate the subject. I found the AF to be accurate in all the situations.

The lens zoom can be controlled electronically, using two little switches on the lens barrel. The lens zoom can also be controlled manually using the ring at the front of the lens. The camera lets you set the direction in which you wish to turn the ring to zoom in or out. I have set it to match my Canon lenses.

The lens can also be setup for manual focusing. In this case the ring at the front of the camera acts as the focusing ring and you have to zoom using the two little switches on the lens barrel.

The 717 lets you attach filters in front of the lens. The Nikon 5700 does not have this feature!! As soon as I bought the camera, I bought a regular Skylight 1A filter to protect the lens from dust, accidental finger prints and everything else. I also bought a circular polarizer and a 3+ magnifier. Oddly enough the polarizer's effects are not obvious when looking through either the finder or the LCD. This makes using the polarizer tricky! I have almost stopped using the polarizer now. The 717 uses 58mm filters. These can be found in abundance even at local photography shops. Also, the 58mm filters are considerably cheaper than say 67mm and 77mm filters.

Sony provides attachment lenses that can help you extend or shorten the focal lengths. I have not tried these for two reasons: they are costly and they are really big and ugly (design wise).

The lens exhibits visible distortion. This is not alarming though! A quick recap of the lens' focal length should tell you that this is essentially a fish-eye lens in all reality. It is just that the image sensor is so small that the lens gives a picture equivalent to 38-190 zoom on a 35mm SLR but, in all reality it is a ~10-50mm zoom! My Canon 20-35mm zoom shows visible distortions over its entire range on a 35mm slide image! Again, I wouldn't complain about the distortion, but it is something to know, remember and compensate if you can.

Thankfully, the tripod receptacle is placed under the lens barrel. The lens is heavier than the body so this makes complete sense. The lens seems to be in an aluminum casing. I personally believe that the main body is all plastic though I could be wrong.

Interesting features

I found the following features on the 717 very interesting:

  • A small button to quickly modify the white-balance.
  • Nightframing: this is like looking through an IR scope, but it takes almost regular looking pictures
  • Nightshot: near IR photography!
  • Holographic AF: described earlier
  • A whopping 3 fps!

The nightframing and nightshot modes are quite restrictive in terms of what other camera features can be used. I am still not sure how useful these modes would be to my photography. Just to understand what these modes do, I took two photographs of my room-mates cat. The photograph in this section was taken in the Nightshot mode. The other photograph presented in the Body section was taken in Nightframing mode.

The camera provides quite a few features to edit images. I am not sure you really need these features built into the camera. I cannot imagine anyone wasting his/her time fiddling around with those tiny buttons, draining your precious camera battery, trying to edit images, changing their size, etc on the camera's really tiny LCD. Dude, thats what computers are for!

Camera/Computer Interface:

The camera connects to the computer over USB2.0. It can connect to computers with older USB ports as well but the data transfer rate would be obviously slower. The software that comes with the camera allows you to download and edit images on Windows XP. I used it for some time but, my Windows XP notebook has a mere 1024x768 resolution. My Linux notebook on the other hand has 1600x1200 resolution. A quick search over the web revealed that the gphoto2 can be used to grab images off the camera. For those of you who want to do it the steps are as follows:

  • set the camera in PTP mode
  • execute gphoto2 --list-ports. This should list your USB port.
  • execute gphoto2 --auto-detect. This should show the camera as a F707. Don't worry about this. You aren't missing anything.
  • execute gphoto2 --list-files. This should show you all the files currently on the camera's MS.
  • You can now execute gphoto2 --get-all-files to retrieve all the files. Gphoto2 also allows you to retrieve a range of photographs.

Those of you interested in using Gphoto2 would find more information here. Realize that you would need the Linux USB subsystem (libraries, modules, etc)  installed on your system. Make sure your Linux system actually supports all the required features before using Gphoto2 to avoid frustration and complains.

The only image manipulations I do are:

  • rotate images to make them stand upright
  • reduce the size of the images to save public/free web-space and to ensure that images load faster.

All images accompanying this article were made smaller using the following script on a Linux notebook:

#!/bin/bash

for i in $*.jpg; do
djpeg $i | pnmscale -xysize 700 700 | cjpeg > `basename $i .jpg`-thumb.jpg
done

Image quality

I am quite happy with the image quality. I have been using the camera in 2560x1920 JPEG mode and the images look very nice on most of my monitors and LCDs. Colors, contrast and brightness in the images are very well balanced. I haven't seen any of the super-red complaints a few people have thrown around. Of course, image quality depends on who's seeing the image. So, you would have to decide for yourself.

Before we conclude this section I would not deny that quality might not be the same as say Provia 100F exposed through a Canon 70-200f/2.8 or similar high quality lens. Realize though that the medium format guys would slam us pointing out that their 220 Provia 100F images are far higher quality than our 35mm Provia 100F images. I believe it is basic human nature to be unhappy with image quality. I have learned to be happy with what I have and more importantly with what I can afford. Technology advances by leaps and bounds every moment. Canon is already selling its EOS-1DS all over the world. I know I cannot afford it right now. Even if I could afford it, I know I would never spend that kind of money on a digital SLR when I could get almost 4 EOS-1V 35mm SLR cameras for the price of one 1DS! The issue is simple: at this point in time I could afford to spend just about $1200 on a digicam and I believe I got one of the best from those available in the market right now. (Wow! Why am I ranting? Onto the review now ...)

Features I haven't yet tried

The only major feature I haven't yet tried is saving images in TIFF mode. The camera can save images in TIFF format. TIFF provides loss-less image compression as opposed to JPEG's lossy image compression. So, if you are into image editing, then due to the lossy-compression employed by the JPEG algorithms, after a couple of image manipulations, you would have lost significant image information. Ok, enough of geek-talk. The bottom line here is simple: if you don't manipulate images significantly you could save them in JPEG format. Otherwise you should try and use TIFF format. The camera manages to save the JPEG file in fraction of a second. A TIFF image takes up a lot of space (e.g, a 32MB memory stick can hold only 1 TIFF image and a 128MB can hold about 7 TIFF images, according to the 717 manual) and also a lot of time to save to the memory stick. Again, these are known limitations.

You can set the ISO sensitivity level on the camera to 100, 200, 400, or 800. I played around with this a bit, but I have set the camera to ISO 100 for almost all of the photographs so far. Again, this is not necessarily something worth playing around with if you always use a tripod (I do!). It is good to know though as you can use it when you cannot use your tripod either due to regulations or because you forgot to haul it with you!

Complaints

The max capacity of a memory stick (currently) is 128MB. With about 51 photographs on one 128MB stick, is the memory stick size really restrictive? Well, I hate carrying all those little memory sticks. It is too easy to lose them, drop them, etc. A larger memory stick (e.g. 1GB, 2GB) would be more useful.

Sony has already announced larger capacity memory sticks. Thankfully, Sony has assured 717 users that the new 1GB memory stick will work with the 717. The expected price for the 1GB memory stick is about $800! Thats just a few hundred dollars less than the price of the camera!! Whoa!!

The body is a bit too small for my taste. A wider and taller body or a battery-pack to extend the height of the body would be really nice.

The camera did not come with either the remote shutter release or lens-hood. Each of these accessories is quite costly and Sony proprietary. (The world of open-systems is coming to an end, I guess!) The lens-hood I bought really sucks! It came with a ring on which to mount it. But, the ring rotates quite a bit and the hood is loose! Also, the lens hood cannot really be reversed as Sony claims.

With all the features the camera provides, I like to keep the manual handy every time I take the camera out. The manual is printed on really cheap newspaper quality paper. I am quiet sure that within the next few months the manual is going to be nothing but shreds of paper. Sony could have published the manual on good paper with good binding.

Maybe the camera should have provided a feature to save images in RAW mode. RAW mode images are really raw (exactly what the image sensor recorded). RAW mode images are smaller than TIFF and save faster. (BTW, Canon provides RAW mode images on most of its better digital cameras.)

My biggest gripe is that Sony provides ONLY a 90 day limited warranty! Whats up with that? This forces most people to buy extended warranties from some local reseller. I guess this is Sony's way of rewarding the resellers for selling Sony products! It is high time Sony realized this problem and offered longer term warranties retroactively! Their products are great, but not perfect (the initial 717 recall clearly indicates that).

Conclusion

For about $1000 [street price, February 2003] Sony is offering a really decent 5MP digital camera with a superb Carl Zeiss 5x optical Vario-Sonnar zoom lens. The camera is deeply rooted in Sony's proprietary technologies (memory stick, battery, remote shutter release, etc). You have to pay Sony dearly for every little accessory you need for the camera! Overall, I think this is a pretty well designed digicam that helps you capture really nice photographs. The camera provides loads of features that you would have to explore as you need them. So, it is good to have the manual handy.

Where to Buy

sony_f717s.jpg (16917 bytes)

The Sony F717 is stocked by:

  • Ritz Camera - the camera is in stock with a USA warranty and there's no shipping charge or sales tax
  • Adorama - in stock
  • B&H Photo - in stock

Buying from these retailers via these links results in support for photo.net, so please consider them if they can supply your needs.

Other Reviews:

There's a whole lot of information available out there. Here are a few links:

If you search through various news-groups, mailing-lists, etc, you would find a lot more info.

Competition

It would be unfair to finish this article without talking about the competition. So, here goes:

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bill Tuthill for pointing out that the original writeup was too verbose. He also pointed out that the 717's AF wasn't as fast as I thought it was. He would definitely have more to say in the discussion that would follow this article.

I would like to thank my room-mate, Gretchen Miller, for proof-reading this document and  Bob Atkins for making sure that this review made it onto photo.net

Numerous other folks helped in various ways through their constructive and/or encouraging comments. I would like to thank my parents .... (ok! enough already! ;-)

Originally written: December 25, 2002.
Updated: February 2, 2003.
Copyright (c) 2003, Mahesh R. Shirgaonkar. All rights reserved.
Mahesh R Shirgaonkar's Photography Website

Readers' Comments


Add a comment



Yaron Kidron , February 10, 2003; 02:00 A.M.

I took the F717 for a spin a few months ago, along with my film SLRs. My verdict? The lens is indeed good, a great performer. Other than that, almost everthing else gets blown away by a novice-level SLR. This was the camera that pushed me to the DSLR zone because of the image quality, but made me forget all illusions about substituting an SLR with a "ZLR".

Image lattitude is a little "thin"; Even less than slide film. Manual focusing works, but is a drag. The user interface is ok, about the average for cameras in that class. The "Complete darkness" AF and IR shoot seemed like a complete gimmick to me (This camera couldnt even compete in AF with my ancient 630). Macro is a nice feature, but the lens is much better optimized for far-distance subjects. Oh, and whats with that memory stick issue?

Go for it if you really want good optics, good image quality, but can't afford a used D30 (only 200$ more, and a heck-of-a-lot more Camera).

Jaap Voets , February 10, 2003; 09:39 A.M.

I own the predecessor of the F717 (the F707) and I really like it. If you cannot afford the top quality Digital SLR's these Sony cameras are worth every penny.

I can agree on most of the review, it will hold equally for the F707 as the F717. On one thing I really disagree. The macro option is one of the things I use a lot. Switched to macro, the camera will focus up to a few millimeters away from the front lens. Even the smallest insects will show up ultrasharp on your picture. You'll pay a price ofcourse for this, with only a (very) limited DOF, depending on how close you are to your subject.

One of the things I've noticed in my year of experience with this camera is that the resulting JPEG's are roughly 2 Mb's in size. If you rotate them in photoshop, a resulting file of +/- 700 Kb is created that has the same quality as far as I can see it.

One solution I've found for the limited capacity of the Memory Sticks is to use an Imagetank (= portable 20 GB harddisk). This will hold enough images to get you through a very long vacation. But I'm too are desperately waiting for >512 Mb Memory sticks, simply for the fact that I can not change a stick when using it under water.

Anh Tran , February 10, 2003; 11:59 A.M.

I love my SOny F707 and I aready bought the F717 but I haven't tried to compare 707 vs 717. Come and talk about your Sony camera at www.cybershotclub.com

My Sony F707 gallery is www.xichlo.com

Arthur Yeo , February 10, 2003; 05:04 P.M.

The review is really nicely organized and thank you for sharing your thots! I am a current owner of the Nikon Coolpix 4500 and I share many of your joys of digicam-ing but there's one consistent pain I share, too.
My immediate need (or should I say complaint) about p+s digicams is the light-bleeds around the edge of a light source, like in your example above. I see this problem consistently across many p+s digicams; particularly in night shots without flash. Does anyone have a solution to this?

Godfrey DiGiorgi , February 10, 2003; 05:04 P.M.

I have been shooting with the F707, predecessor to the F717, for over a year now, using it for a very wide variety of work. I'm extremely happy with this camera family and would recommend it. It is not the best choice if your needs include heavy-duty flash use, particularly studio flash, but it is just stunning in ambient low-light, infrared and macro work ... the latter done best with a close-up lens at telephoto settings.

I recently did some experimentation to enable IR photography in daylight. Sony crippled this part of the NightShot mode by making constraining NightShot to be used only in Automatic mode, not allowing the aperture to stop down, and not allowing any exposure shorter than 1/60 sec. The ISO also floats, making getting solid daylight shots difficult through overexposure. My solution is to lock the ISO setting at 100, use a B+W 092 or Hoya R72 filter coupled with either a B+W 106 (ND 64x) or Hoya G(X1) deep green filter. You can see a thumbnail matrix comparison of different filters in use on the F707 on my website at:
http://www.bayarea.net/~ramarren/photostuff/irfiltertest/index.htm.

All in all, the Sony F707/717 are excellent cameras.

Godfrey

Andreas Carl , February 14, 2003; 09:10 P.M.

I bought the F717 a few weeks ago and am very happy about it. I never use Auto or P Mode, since it restricts to shutter speeds 1/30 or faster. I find that I can easily handhold 1/8 sec on wide-angle and 1/40 at tele. I find that I dislike the digital noise at ISO 200 and even worse at ISO 400, so I fix the ISO at 100. Night shots handheld at 1/8 sec ISO 100 look MUCH better than the same at 1/30 ISO 400.

I use the histograms to determine exposure! I find that with a little practice I get consistently better (to my taste) exposure, if I do it manually, using the histograms. This is one of the very COOLEST feature of this camera.

I also find surprisingly little difference between TIFF, JPEG fine and JPEG normal mode (analyzing the images on a pixel level). I decided to us JPG normal routinely, that gives about 100 pictures per 128 MB memory stick. I find the memory stick "limitation" a non-issue. I bought a 20 GByte image tank, so whenever the stick is full, I just pluck it into the image tank and download it. Easy and fast.

I LOVE how fast this camera is. After switching it on, it's ready to take the first picture in less than the time it takes to remove the lens cap! This is a refreshing change from the Nikon Coolpix I had previously. The Carl Zeiss lens is great. No: VERY great! I set sharpen to -2 (I prefer to do it myself in photoshop). I find that the degree of sharpening depends on the intended use of the image: I use different sharpening for webdisplay than for printing, and depending on how large I want to print, the sharpening differs as well.

I find the menus extraordinarily easy and intuitive. I use the camera always at waistlevel, looking at the LCD screen, which is nice and bright (like I am used from my Hasselblad). I think the EVF is a total waste and could be done without. I'd rather see a little flip-up shade for the LCD (like on my Hasselblad ;-)

I find myself playing more and more with manual white balance too, especially after sunset (or before sunrise) the manual mode is necessary to remove the blue cast. OK, I am rambling on, did I mention that I LOVE this camera. (Hope this info was useful)

PS: The photo of the pelican above illustrates what I consider the greates drawback of digital cameras (including the F717): too large DOF. Guess, we have to wait until full size sensors become more affordable...

Sharif El-Hamalawi , February 20, 2003; 04:28 A.M.

Mahesh, thanks for the interesting and useful article. As a native German speaker please let me just correct that "Sonnar" is definitely NOT German for "very bright". Cheers, Sharif

Michael Katz , February 21, 2003; 01:01 A.M.

Thank you for your comments on the Sony 717. I currently use the old 3MP S70 and I love it but I want to up grade. I have looked at the Canon and Nikon as well as the Sony. After reading the article I have decided to continue with the Sony and purchase the 717.

The article was very well written and gave me all of the information that I need to make the correct decision for myself.

The article did mention night shot settings. I have two of them on my S70, a regular night and a plus. I use these setting all the time and if you play with the flash at the same time you can obtain some wonderful photo's. I have experimented with it for the past several months and I'm now looking forward to doing the same on the 717. I would be more than happy to discuss what I do with anyone. I do have a picture on my site here of Trees in San Sabastian, Spain. That is a good example of one of the creative uses of the night setting on the Sony.

I appreciate all of the imformation that you gave me on this.

Michael Katz

Doug Bowles , February 24, 2003; 04:32 P.M.

I've just purchased the F717 for several reasons, while still keeping my Minolta Maxxum 7i; so far I've fired off more than 200 pictures trying to get a handle on the way the exposure system works for me.

I've really gotta be careful in high-contrast situations (on a ski-hill or a hockey rink, for instance) where the subject is the smaller part of the contrast. The camera has a tendancy to severely underexpose and add a significant amount of noise to the image. I find that the "bright sun" setting in the white balance mode still tends to underexpose the picture, so I've had to start shooting all my "snow-and-ice" pictures manually. The green-buttoned magic auto-matic setting is useless for anything other than snapshots, and I do most of my exposures in "P" automatic mode.

I too have had to set my ISO setting to 100 to reduce noise - an ISO400 setting on this camera will add a significant amount more noise than the same picture taken with 400 ASA film on a decent camera, and then scanned (I know, I tried it and compared two very similar photos).

I find the flash is OK indoors but tends to overexpose slightly if the subject matter is within ten feet. Beyond ten yards you need extra flash power for sure. Another thing I've found is that when using a flash combined with centre-weighted metering you completely lose the rest of the photo - if that's the intent, fine. Otherwise I've found that using the averaged metering works better with a flash. I'm going to need to do some more playing around with flash power settings to know what and where all the hard limits are.

Image quality is great as long as the exposure is good. You can get away with overexposing, but not with underexposing. The one thing I'll say is that I've become much better in Photoshop since buying this camera. Another thing I'll say is that there are a lot of adjustments you can make through the menus and various buttons before taking the shot - each of these adjustments have some kind of effect on the final product, and it'll be some time before I'll be able to "automatically" know what settings to change on my automatic camera to get the picture I want.

Mahesh S , February 28, 2003; 05:02 P.M.

First off, thanks a lot for all the constructive comments.

First wanted to put up an "errata" for things people have pointed out so far:

* Thanks to Rajesh Bawankule and a few other folks who pointed out a typo: I have wrongly mentioned Canon "G4" in the first few sections of the article. It obviously ought to be G3.

* Thanks to Sharif El-Hamalawi for pointing out that "Sonnar" is obviously not a German word! (Isn't sonne/sonnen == sun usually used for very bright?) Anyway, doesn't matter! Time to start reading those German books again. :)

A few other notes:

* Although I personally don't find IR photography interesting a lot of people actually use the 717 (and its predecessor, the 707) for IR photography (as Godfrey DiGiorgi has pointed out). There are quite a few links out there (search on google) that describe how to use the 717 + all the other various filters for IR photography. Some of the photographs are surrealistic. Others are, well, wacky! :) Its amazing how people use the same tool in so many different ways.

* Information I want (if someone can help):

Does anyone know of a good writeup on Sony's extension lenses (wide and tele) for the 717? I played with them for a very short time, but didn't like the feel of these lenses (as I have already stated in the article). But, over the past few weeks the 38-190 equivalent lens feels limiting. I use the digital zoom to extend beyond 190. But there's nothing to go wider than 38. So if any of you have hands-on experience with either/both of those lenses it would be really nice to know. What do you think of the optical quality? Do the lenses balance well on the camera or should we be worried about the front ring coming off the camera? ;-) And so on.

All in all, I still think this is a great camera.

Have fun!

Oliver S. , March 07, 2003; 08:54 A.M.

As to Sonne, this German noun refers to the sun; sonnen (verb) - 'bathe in the sun'. If you click your way through the Zeiss website, you'll find an article on lens names; in the part about the Sonnar, they write:

A lens design with relatively few glass-to-air surfaces, invented by Dr. Ludwig Bertele at Carl Zeiss in 1930 to provide the fastest lenses of that day for 35 mm photography offering speeds up to f/1.5 [...] This is where the name comes from, containing the German word for sun, 'Sonne', the symbol of utmost brightness. Since the Planar® lens with its many glass-to-air surfaces could successfully take over the 'fastest lens' role from the Sonnar® lens, after Dr. Alexander Smakula at Carl Zeiss invented anti-reflex coating in 1935, the Sonnar® design turned out its other virtues. Today it is the basis for compact high-performance medium telephoto lenses with speeds up to f/2.8, very elaborate correction of lens errors [...], incorporating expensive optical glass types, and offering very even corner-to-corner illumination.

Obviously, you can go beyond f:2.8 if the image circle need not cover a medium format frame. Btw it's a rather unusual name as all other Zeiss lens designations are built entirely from Greek and/or Latin terms. (Which would have brought us a heliogon or solagon or heliotar or soltar...)

And thank you very much for the fine review, Mahesh!

Gene Paull , April 09, 2003; 06:31 P.M.

Hi! I bought the Sony DSC F717 for a similar reason as Mahesh, mainly the price was way under that of a DSLR and the CCD receiver is sealed, hopefully impervious to dust. Having just returned from a weekend in the Sierra Madre Oriental of northeast Mexico I can add a comment or two. First, I don't think the F717 produces images on a par as a 35 mm with prime lenses and Provia or Reala. I printed the images at 6 x 8, shooting maximum resolution, and, while "nice," they are ever so slightly soft.

With the criticism out of the way I can say I really enjoyed doing my own developing, not having to scan, and almost immediate upload to the website. For web-based work and 4 x 6 prints I see no reason to use film. The camera is very capable with all kinds of buttons and menus that take care of everything.

Mahesh's review was very complete; reading it helped a lot before I went into the field.

Bogdan Radu , April 11, 2003; 07:58 A.M.

Pretty good and informative article. I would like to add a few observations though. Both the camera's body and lens barrel are made of magnesium alloy except for some plastic parts (the pop-up flash top for instance). In bright sunlight situations the LCD is almost useless and this is how I found out the viewfinder is not all that bad after all. The live histogram is also extremely useful and insures the shot is exposed exactly the way you want it (with some limitations of course, namely exposure times over 2 seconds)). By far the feature that I like the most is the swivel body. It's so very nice to keep the lens pointing at your subject while the body swivels to confortably follow your hand in most situations. A feature that the review didn't point at is the flash usage on manual mode. Indeed if the camera is switched to manual mode and the flash is set to fire, you could use a reasonable range of settings with relative impunity as the flash will fire in "TTL like" mode to ensure proper exposure. I does actually fire twice, first to meter the scene and second to actually take the picture all of this in a split second. Using the camera like this would allow one to use settings like f5.6, 1/100, ISO100 to take evening indoor photos in all serenity. One word of warning though: beware of the "red eye" syndrome the on-board flash is plagued with. It does create red eyes even if your subjects don't look directly at the lens in some situations and the red-eye reduction option will highly annoy everyone in the room (and that includes you). One can always set that flash on low I guess... I wonder why Sony didn't allow the "popping out" flash to pivot more, at predetermined angles so one could bounce it freely, as the use of an external bounced flash yields quite satisfying results. Finally, I took my 717 along on my last vacation to London and Paris and the following info will hopefully help anyone planing such a trip.

1. A spare battery pack is nice to have but not necessary. If recharged over night the battery will last throughout a day of shooting, with some spare juice left to review your photos on the trip back to the hotel. With moderate flash use (most museums won't allow flash photography, that is if they allow any shooting at all) and heavy zoom use I was usually able to take about 130-150 photos throughout the day (hey, I went there to see things and relax and not to take pictures of everything :-) ) and still have about 100 min battery time left.

2. Additional memory/storage is a must. In my experience an 128MB stick will hold anywhere from 52 to 68 hires, fine jpegs, depending on the subject of the photo (aka a white wall will compress better than say a Boticelli painting). Unfortunatelly if you're caught without aditional storage in Paris for instance, unloading a stick on CD at any lab will set you back at least 6 Euros (aprox US$ 6) regardless of the size of the module. That's right, the price is per module and NOT per CD. If you're a heavy shooter the cost could escalate VERY quickly.

3. Protect the camera as best as you can. The magnesium body resists well but the few plastic parts start showing signs of wear pretty quickly. For instance my 717's paint is gone already from the corners of the flash cover and this is after only a few weeks of having the camera around my neck and under my coat.

That's about all I can think off. My apologies for my quasi incoherent bumbling!

Robert Reis , July 12, 2003; 09:31 A.M.

I suggest that shooting in fine jpeg and immediate coverting the pictures to tiffs before manipulations is the optimun workflow for the 707/717. The detail in my images has been very satisfactory to 8 by 10. I recommend Qimage optimization for all printing. Cheers, Bob

Christian Roux , July 20, 2003; 11:03 A.M.

Hello, Just to say I use daily a F717 (and before it a F707 and a F505v) and use it with great pleasure. I appreciate the Quality and Luminosity of the zoom (from 38 to 190 without any lens to change), the compact size and weight, the poor energie to consume, and the abiltiy to oriente the viewfinder and LCD screen. I regret the delay for the autofocus to focus, the noise at 400-800 ISO and the poor wide angle. You can watch my galleries on www.pbase.com/christianswiss Christian Roux, Fribourg, Switzerland

Christopher Grant , July 26, 2003; 08:50 A.M.

I've noticed that the majority of information provided on photo.net is aimed at the more advanced or pro photographers. As a novice, I'd like to offer a few thoughts about this camera.

After reviewing various digital cameras in the 500 to 1500 dollar price range I decided to purchase the Sony DSC-F717. This is my first and only camera beyond my Point-and-Shoot digital camera (Casion QV-R4). While I've only owned the camera for less than a week I've been most happy with it.

If you want digital, and can only afford so much, I would suggest this as a smart buy. While in my opinion there could be more options when compared to other similarly priced digitals, this seems to be the only major fault of the camera. The lense pretty much rocks when compared to many others, and is also very nice to hold with two hands. The only minor fault I found is should you want additional attachments, they are expensive.

That's about it for my simple-photo-guy's review. Hope this is helpful!

Shannon Davis , August 07, 2003; 11:59 P.M.

I purchased the DSC-F717 October 2000 while it was "on sale" at Sears for $999. That's really expensive for my budget, but having owned the Fuji Finepix 2800, an Epson and an Olympus, I thought to try my luck with something a bit more "top of the line". I have found the features to be interesting to say the least, but the pictures are out of this world! Even in extremely low lighting conditions, I have been able to capture true colors and unbelievable clarity of detail. The rotating angle lens is quite useful, believe it or not, and in my business comes in handy! Check out my website at www.hotspringsweddings.com for some photographic examples...

Heath Stewart , December 21, 2003; 05:03 P.M.

I haven't had much experience with the F717 but I have owned a DSC-S50 for several years and have one major complaint about the flash memory, Sony Memory Sticks. Being a long-time computer geek, filesystems are something I know quite well.

The filesystem on the memory sticks seem to be about 512 KB blocks. A file can occupy multiple blocks, but a block can only contain one file (or part of a file). With the S50, photos with average contrast were about 700 KB, meaning that one block plus a tiny bit of another block were used, wasting nearly 324 KB on average (a 31% waste per picture). One couldn't fit very many pictures on a memory stick, at which the author hinted.

Mike North , March 04, 2004; 01:41 P.M.

I purchased the DSCF717 from Best Buy about a year ago and have been using it for my semi-professional photography business since. This was the first foray for me into the digital world and I liked the look and feel of the Sony as well as the price. Had I done better research, I would have saved about $300 if I'd have purchased it online. Overall it performs well but the accessories available are severely limited compared to similar cameras from Canon. My next camera will most likely be the EOS 10D or the Kodak 14N.

Yinghao Lin , August 22, 2004; 12:47 P.M.

sample f828

Yinghao Lin , August 22, 2004; 12:49 P.M.

F717 is not bad, especially for macro shot, it does excellent job but F828, bulky and heavy. compelet junk.


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