Sony Upgrades Thin Cameras

The new DSC-T200 digital camera does away with buttons for a touchpanel screen on the rear.

Sony Corp. is upgrading its thin T-series digital still camera line with a new model that packs a larger display with touchscreen.

The DSC-T200 hasn't been officially announced by Sony yet but details of the camera were posted to its Sony Canada online shop over the weekend.

The overall stylings of the camera aren't much changed from the current T100 model so on first glance it looks similar but a closer look at the rear will reveal some changes. The buttons present along the right-hand side of the 3-inch display on the current T100 are gone and in their place a larger 3.5-inch widescreen display takes up the entire back face of the camera.

So how to navigate the menus with no buttons? Sony has fitted a touchscreen on the 3.5-inch display that means the backpanel is clear of everything else.

A 3.5-inch display with touchscreen matches Apple's iPhone but a lot of the tasks and functions that can be carried out are very different. Sony's screen doesn't appear to support two-fingered touch -- the one trick that makes the iPhone's touchscreen so special -- but can be used to work a variety of functions. For example, in "touch-it shooting" a tap of an object on the screen will focus the camera on that object while when viewing pictures the screen is used to navigate and even paint on photos taken earlier.

Other functions include a "smile shutter" that goes a step beyond the face detection modes common on cameras today. The DSC-T200 won't just find faces in the image and focus on them but in this mode it won't take a picture until it sees all smiles.

Major specifications are similar between the T200 and T100. Both have an 8.1-megapixel image sensor capable of taking pictures up to 3,264 pixels by 2,448 pixels and in front of the sensor sits a 5X optical zoom lens. It has the same Bionz processing engine.

The camera measures 2.33 inches high by 3.68 inches wide by .8 inches deep and weighs 5.6 ounces.

There's no word on when it will be available or the price. The current T100 that it seems destined to replace costs about $400.

Tags: Cyber-shot, Sony, Camera