14 DAY TRIAL // The Japanese company Sony has come up with a truckload of novelties at this year's IFA show in Berlin, most of them related to the A/V market segment. Beside its advanced, ultra-thin LCDs, the company has also unveiled a device that will allow users to take full advantage of the respective HDTVs' features, since the new Cyber-shot T500 is actually capable of recording video clips at a 1280 x 720 pixel resolution (more commonly known as 720p) and then displaying them directly on a TV screen.
Before going any deeper into the movie recording capabilities of the device, we'll first take a look at what's inside the T500. The Cyber-shot digital camera has been equipped with a 10.1-megapixel 1/2.3 type Super HAD CCD sensor, as well as a Carl Zeiss 5x optical zoom lens. Additionally, in order to ensure that the images or video clips have a good level of clarity, the device even sports an image stabilization system, Double Anti-Blur with Optical SteadyShot, complemented by Clear RAW Noise Reduction, for good quality photos even in low-light conditions.
Now, for the movie mode. The T500 allows users to record movies with lengths of up to 10 minutes at a time, in the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 format, at 30 frames per second, the result being more or less similar (if not even superior) to that delivered by entry-level dedicated camcorders.
Like most modern compact cameras, Sony's new T500 sports a Face Detection system, which ensures that people’s faces in the scene are in sharp focus and have the exactly right level of exposure. Up to eight faces can be tracked at a time, users being able to select the respective faces by simply touching them on the 3.5-inch wide Clear Photo LCD Plus with touchscreen.
As mentioned right from the start, users will be able to play back the movie clips recorded in the camera's memory directly on their HDTVs. That's possible because, following an increasingly popular trend among most digital camera manufacturers, the T500 has also been equipped with an HDMI interface, which, besides allowing users to access the photos and videos, enables them to control its playback functions directly from the TV's remote control (via BRAVIA Sync).
As usual, no pricing details are available for the time being, but we're likely to find out more about it when it arrives in stores, at some point in October.
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