Sony DSC-WX300/B 18.2 MP Digital Camera with 20x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3-Inch LCD (Black)
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Product Specifications
- Capture breathtaking images
- Image stabilization reduces blur
Black
Product Description
Color:Black Product Description Capture landscapes with one touch using Sweep Panorama, get that perfect portrait with Smile Shutter, snap wider scenes.
In The Box
Rechargeable Battery Pack NP-BX1 AC AdaptorAC-UB10 Micro USB cable Wrist Strap Instruction Manual From the Manufacturer
Bring the action ultra-close with a remarkable, 20x zoom ultra-compact camera. Plus, share pics and video easily to Facebook and more with wireless transfer to your smartphone or tablet. Easily shoot all day with battery to spare with up to 500 photos per charge. 20x optical zoom plus 40x Clear Image Digital Zoom 18.2MP images and high speed AF even in low-light WiFi sharing to upload photos and videos
Technology
Get close with 20x zoom Zoom in super close for great sports, travel, and wildlife photos. The WX300 boasts 20x optical zoom plus 40x Clear Image Digital Zoom technology to bring you near enough to capture distant details. A powerful processor reduces graininess for crisper, higher-quality close-ups.
Pixel Power With a 18.2-megapixel Exmor® R CMOS sensor, capture high-resolution images that take full advantage of the camera’s high quality Carl Zeiss® lens. Advanced processing technology reduces noise and graininess for incredibly crisp, clear images - even in challenging low-light conditions.
Share instantly with Wi-fi WiFi lets you quickly upload photos and videos to social media sites through your WiFi smartphone or tablet, back them up on a network-connected PC, or view them on your compatible large screen TV.
Crisp, beautiful HD videos Record crystal-clear movies in high-resolution with HD 1080/60i AVCHD™ video capture1. Stunning, fast motion video with reduced distortion looks great when played back on your HDTV2. Notice a perfect photo op while shooting video? With dual record of stills and movies, you can shoot both at the same time.
Big-time battery life Never miss the perfect shot due to a dead battery. The Cyber-shot WX300 camera features long-lasting, extended battery life so you can capture up to 500 photos on a single charge and shoot nearly all day without a worry. It’s perfect for traveling or shooting photos while you’re out and about.
Say goodbye to blur Sony’s Optical SteadyShot™ image stabilization with Active Mode gives you the freedom to shoot movies even while walking or running³. 2-way Active Mode corrects for both vertical and horizontal motion.
Product description and full feature list Explore the full range of features and options below.
Enhanced Superior Auto Enhanced Superior Auto supports scenes with dynamic motion to provide beautiful results even in dark situations. The result is clearer images with less blur.
Capture the decisive moment with up to 10fps Capture full 18.2 megapixel resolution images at up to 10 frames per second, helping to ensure that the decisive moment is captured such as the soccer ball flying into the goal. In addition, a mechanical shutter helps reduce distortion when continuously shooting moving subjects.
Creative shooting with Picture and Beauty effects Picture Effect adds a new level of expression to photos, making ordinary landscapes and portraits come to life by heightening mood and emphasizing certain attributes. Beauty Effects allows edits to skin tones, skin smoothing, shine removal, eye widening, and teeth whitening. Beauty Effects can be combined to further enhance the image.
Intelligent Sweep Panorama™ mode-up to 360° Intelligent Sweep Panorama mode takes our Sweep Panorama function to the next level with the addition of motion compensation. Even when subjects are moving in the foreground of your landscape, these cameras can detect faces and moving subjects, intelligently stitching different widths together to minimize distortion. Simply press the shutter button and sweep the camera in the desired direction and the camera continuously shoots at a high speed, then seamlessly stitches the images together with automatic position adjustment to create one stunning panoramic image. Available in wide and up to 360° full circle, the camera can take a variety of panoramic shots.
Records in 29 minute segments
Requires HDTV and HDMI cable sold separately
Combined with electronic stabilization
© 2013 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Sony, Cyber-shot, SteadyShot, Smile Shutter, Sweep Panorama, Exmor R and the Sony make.believe logo are trademarks of Sony. Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Vista are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Mac is a trademark of Apple, Inc. All other trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Features and specifications subject to change without notice.
Product Reviews
Packed with features, powerful and appealing for casual users
The Sony DSC-WX300/B 18 MP Digital Camera with 20x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3-Inch LCD is a strong entry from Sony against other cameras in this market segment and price point. It meets and beats several features of competitors, but also fails to be quite as much as it seems to be at first glance. Nevertheless, anyone considering what to take along for photo making on holiday should seriously consider the Sony DSC-WX300.First let me say that I am a long time fan of Sony digital cameras, and that I have owned many different CyberShot models in the past, and that I am an avid user of the Sony NEX cameras. Superficially, the Sony DSC-WX300 looks like a tiny NEX model. The controls are laid out using very much the same wheel and button system on the back to access the menus, and the styling is very similar. The all metal body conveys a feeling of quality and looks great.Aside from the controls and family resemblance, they Sony DSC-WX300 is at heart a CyberShot, the Sony line aimed squarely at point and shooters, not at serious amateurs (whatever that is; a good photographer who is not paid any money for his pictures, instead of a mediocre photographer who is?). It is packed with features appealing to sophisticated but casual users. But it is a JPEG image only camera. It does not output RAW image files. It also lacks multi exposure bracketing. Although it would be easy to assume that the Sony DSC-WX300 is a possible competitor to the Canon PowerShot S110 or the Panasonic LUMIX LX-7, the Canon and LUMIX cameras are both more “serious” point and shoot, “pocketable” cameras, with RAW output and more comprehensive PSAM modes.All that said, the Sony DSC-WX300 has some very interesting features that make it a serious camera for holiday, snapshot and webcentric photo making. The main selling point for the Sony DSC-WX300 are its very small size, it really is “pocketable”, combined with its rather amazing 20X optical zoom range, a mind boggling 40X zoom range using optical + digital. The image quality from the lens appears to be quite good. But in the end the image quality is both driven by and limited by the size and sophistication of the tiny thumbnail sized sensor and the electronics. This is the Achilles heel of all digital cameras, and very much the weak point of all pocket cameras. At the end of the day, especially with micro sized sensors used in pocket cameras, no matter how sophisticated, as ISO speed increases there’s just no way to not have image quality start to suffer as heavy noise corrections start to be applied to the image by the camera.Sure enough the Sony DSC-WX300 produces rather amazingly good looking shots up to about ISO 800. But, as with all pocket cameras, the image starts to soften after that. As is the case with almost all digital cameras these days, it’s hard to tell just what part the quality of the lens, the limitations of tiny sensors and the alchemy of digital lens and image correction in the camera play in making the final result.The Sony DSC-WX300 features excellent movie capture specs. But, as with most still cameras that also double as video cameras, the length of any one recording is limited not by storage but by the ambient temperature and other factors that impact how quickly the sensor will heat up while recording continuously. If it gets too hot it will shut down. The Sony DSC-WX300 is rated for video recording up to twenty-nine minutes. I made a ten minute test video without any problems. But, on a hot day, or if your hands have warmed the body already, or the camera starts out hot for any reason then the maximum recording time may be reduced quite a bit. It’s not a movie/video camera, it’s a still camera that you can capture video clips with. Still, in such a tiny size, the quality and video feature are pretty amazing.The menus are traditional Sony CyberShot: concise easy to navigate, and without too many options. The Wi-Fi connection worked well for transferring files to and from both a smartphone and a PC, although it requires installing the Sony PlayMemories app. Of course all the devices have to be networked together, a task that’s easy if you have little to no router or device security but which becomes an escalating pain as your standards for device security and interoperability increase. Still, it works.Battery life appeared to be as advertised: rather good. You plug the charger directly into the camera rather than removing the battery and charging it alone. As seems to be the norm for these kinds of cameras, there are a zillion “scene” modes. Why it’s assumed by camera makers that someone will have the presence of mind to parse, understand and select the correct scene mode but is assumed to not be organized enough to use PSAM modes is a mystery. The only thing lacking is a “two people being hit on head by coconut while standing in front of blast furnace mode” or maybe a “Batman in white cape snow boarding” mode. But, if you have time to investigate all the modes, and the memory to remember which one does which, it’s an asset.The camera has three different auto modes, but no easy direct PSAM control. About the 18MP sensor: mega-pixels alone are not a good guide to picture quality. An image from a 10MP APS-C sensor with a mediocre lens can easily look better than a picture from an 18MP micro sized sensor with an excellent lens. And let’s not forget that with digital images that a large part of what you see in the image has passed through numerous digital processing and correction stages in the camera. The skill of the programmers and the processing power of the camera play an important role.All that said, the Sony DSC-WX300 delivers some serious value, with a few compromises, and has a number of outstanding and well implemented features. It will easily beat the image quality from even the best smartphone cameras, it is almost as pocketable as a smartphone, it will produce full HD 1080P movie clips, it will network with social media picture sharing via Wi-Fi to your smartphone or tablet, and it has an extraordinary optical zoom range that should cover just about any picture situation.If you don’t need features like RAW file output, exposure bracketing and PSAM type controls that are offered by cameras like the Canon PowerShot S110 and Panasonic LUMIX LX-7, and are after a super portable high quality point and shoot for holiday and family snapshots, then the Sony DSC-WX300 is a serious contender and well worth buying. RECOMMENDED.
Great pictures. WiFi quirky and buggy
First the good news: as a camera, this is fantastic. It takes beautiful pictures, and the low light performance and image stabilization are incredible. I’ve taken pictures in dimly lit rooms at full 20x zoom without a tripod, and they come out crisp and flawless. The operation is simple and intuitive, and go from fully automatic, to automatic with “tweaks”, to scene selection and finer control.In addition to the incredible zoom, another extremely nice feature that was once unavailable at this price is a 10 shot burst mode, which can go at 2 or 10 frames per second. Very handy. [Update: I recently used the burst burst to photograph some break dancing street performers, and got some truly amazing shots].I could go on, but I honestly don’t think you’ll get better pictures from any point and click on the market in this price range.Now for the thing that cost them a star. Built-in WiFi is the “new thing” in cameras, and it was one of the things that sealed the deal for me on this camera. I’d guess in a couple of years they will have worked out all the bugs. Unfortunately, however, they’re not there yet. WiFi is so new in this camera that it’s not discussed in the manual. They have a special little instructional insert about it with extremely limited information.There are two ways to use WiFi. The first, and most useful, is to send pictures directly to a smart phone, to upload to FaceBook, email, etc. To do this, you go to playback mode, click “menu” and tell it to send pictures to the camera, then select the pictures to send. The camera then sets up its own hotspot, which you connect to with your phone and then use a special app to copy them.Here’s the problem, at least on an iPhone: because the hotspot is not a fully functioning WiFi server, the phone sees it as a limited function connection and will eventually switch over to another server if it’s available, which will interrupt the transfer. That means that if you try to use this feature with a known server nearby, you have to tell the iPhone to forget that server first, or the transfer will fail after a picture or two. If the server has a password, it will be kind of a pain to reconnect. Once I solved this problem (by trial and error), it worked fine and the pictures copy directly to the camera roll, from which you treat them just like pictures taken with the phone. I think this problem is ultimately due to the stovepiped architecture in iOS, so it might work better with Android.One additional warning: by default pictures are transferred at a lower resolution in this mode. You have to go into settings (on the phone, not the camera!) to enable full res. transfer.There’s a variation on this mode which allows you to control and view the camera with your phone. That might have a few niche uses (some of them rather unsavory!).The second way to use Wifi to send your pictures directly to your home computer, much like a wireless scanner does, but it appears to be undocumented. You go into the settings menu and connect to your local WiFi server. Then, the first time you connect you camera to the computer with a cable, one of the virtual “disks” which appears will lead you to software to download to configure that computer to receive images wirelessly from the camera. After that, when you’re on that wireless network, you can go to the menu and send all pictures to that computer. This works OK, but sometimes the app hangs at the end after the transfer is complete. Since I’ll be at home already, I’ll probably just use the cable. [Addendum: I’ve discovered that this mode is very unreliable. When transferring a large number of pictures, it will often fail part way through. I strictly use the cable connection now].Bottom line: fantastic camera, but if the Wifi functionality is important, consider waiting a year or so until they iron out the bugs.Ironically, if the camera hadn’t had WiFi, I probably would have bought it anyway and given it 5 stars.
works ok, but comes with Sony’s Play Memories, …
works ok, but comes with Sony’s Play Memories, which grabs all your computer files and sends them to a cloud.
Five Stars
Love this camera
Bad at night
Broke.
Get another brand
Worked for about a year. Then the pictures started degrading in quality. On second year there was a lot of noise in pics and they were blurry. Not a good camera value.
Four Stars
I love everything about this camera except it doesn’t take pictures well with moving objects.
Love it!
Love it! Good quality and features. Yes - I am a bit old fashion by believing in a separate device for making photos. And yes - it is an extra device to be dragged around.
Five Stars
Awesome camera all around.
Excellent camera! For $200 it is a great bargain
Excellent camera! For $200 it is a great bargain, and easily replaced my old Canon still-shot and Canon HD camcorder, and is smaller than both.
Two Stars
I have used pocket sized cameras that are way better in quality.
Very Good Camera to be so small.
comments powered by DisqusNice little pocket camera. Very good zoom. I had a Sony DSC-WX300B for 2 years. I drop it. The controls on top would not work. I miss haveing this little camera on me at all times.
